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4Car Care '91The Daily Tar HeelTuesday, November 19, 1991 Car troubles from By Amy Seeley Stiff Writer My experiences with cars have not been among the happiest memories of my adolescence. Maybe the fact that I didn't even get my license until I was almost 18 caused me to develop some kind of car curse. Or maybe the car trouble that seems to follow me every where is genetic. I am from New Jersey, so I was really only one year late learning to drive, not two. I have an excuse, too. As all things are when you're a teenager, my not learning to drive was my parents' fault. They just didn't want to teach me, which would be understandable if they knew about the car curse. When they finally did get around to teaching me, I passed the driving test on the first try. I did fail turning, but you are allowed to fail one part of the test. Yes, I know turning can be pretty important when you are driving, but at least I passed parallel parking, which is of somewhat more importance here in Chapel Hill. Five days after I received that ugly-but-precious laminated card, I decided to go to the mall before work. As I was driving home from the mall, a police officer pulled me over. I didn't think I had been speeding because it was a dink-y road and because I still was prac ticing my driving skills, but I was scared. Would you want to get a ticket after you've finally convinced your mother you do know how to drive and can go places on your own? Yeah, me neither. Mr.Policemancameuptothecarand asked me if I knew that my inspection sticker had expired. Well, of course I knew, but do you think I would tell Mr. Policeman that? Nope. I quickly breathed a sigh of relief and looked up at him innocently. (For all of you who don't know me, I look about 13 years old, and I have these sad-looking blue eyes when I want to.) So I pouted at Mr. Policeman and said, no, I didn't know my inspection sticker was expired my mom had forgotten to tell me that when she said I could drive her car. He let me go with a warning. See, even an unexperienced driver can con professionally. Later that day I did not fare so well. Not that the accident was my fault. I want to make that clear before I even tell the story because my mother still blames me, and the last thing I need is more people out there bugging me. I was sitting at a stop sign, waiting to turn right onto a very busy highway perpendicular to my car. Next to me was a rather tall jeep-type vehicle trying to turn left onto the highway, and behind me was a huge pickup truck. I pulled out further so I could see around the other vehicle and felt a huge thud in the back of my car. The entire back windshield shattered and fell into the car. I was pushed out onto the high way, but fortunately my wheel already was turned, so I stayed on the shoulder. My car had turned itself off after the impact, so I just climbed out and pre pared to meet the idiot who hit me. The people in the huge pickup truck climbed out two large, scraggly construction workers, one of whom was not even wearing a shirt. I decided it might be a good idea to write down the license plate number right away. They turned out to be very nice, but I was not exactly in my generous mood after seeing the back of my mom's Honda. It looked likean accordion some one had trampled. Not pretty. The driver kept telling me not to worry, that everything was going to turn out OK. Of course, I knew why he could say that he didn't know my mom. He also said he just couldn't under stand how the car had been so bashed in. He said he was at a standstill when he saw me moving forward and thought I was going because he could see over the other car that no traffic was coming. I knew the answer to that, too. He had a huge pickup truck, and I had a little Honda hatchback. Which one would you bet on in a resilience test? His truck had a 3-inch-long dent in its bumper. Well, I think you've heard enough about my first accident. I will sum up, like they do at the end of the movies: One year later, the Honda suppos edly is fixed by our expert mechanic and is sitting unused on the street. It will not start without help from another car's battery. The husky construction worker's insurance company still has not paid our insurance company to fix the car. My mom really has not forgiven me, but at least she pretty much has forgotten about the whole thing. My trip down to UNC freshman year also was exciting, thanks to a car. Actu ally, it was a Blazer, which I stuffed with as many of my possessions as would fit. We were somewhere in Delaware when my mom told my dad that the truck was making odd noises when he had it in fifth gear. But as dads often do, he said everything was fine and kept going. Somewhere near Dover we found out how wrong he was. The truck made this huge clunk, and we were forced to pull over. Since my dad couldn't figure out what had happened except that there was something wrong with the clutch, he tried to start it again so he could drive to a service station. No go. We were stuck on the side of the road with a truck full of my stuff. And it was my birthday. My dad walked to a nearby (two miles away) service station, and about 1 12 hours later, the tow truck showed up. Meanwhile, thousands of people whizzed by in their cars, not one of them stopping to see if he could help us. Kinder, gentler nation yeah, right. Even several state police cars passed us before one stopped. The mechanics at the service station discovered the car had no transmission fluid and had chewed up its gears clearly a plot to keep me from getting out of my house and going to college. We ended up renting a car from the local rental agency because the Blazer needed more work than we could wait for. Of course the only car they had available was one of those little Sun birds. You know, the ones that just barely fit four people and we had to fit three people and all my stuff. Ha. I was convinced we would end up shipping half my stuff down in boxes, but somehow my dad managed to get everything in the Sunbird. I don't know how and probably never will, but he did. Four hours after pulling over on In terstate 95, we were on our way again. This past summer, I did not have the best of luck with cars. My mother gra ciously allowed metodrive her Karmann Ghia, a car she bought as a "toy." The Karmann Ghia was made in the late '60s and looked like a cross be tween a Volkswagen Beetle and a Porsche, but not as sleek. Sort of. I drove the Ghia back and forth to work every day, dutifully avoiding the corner where my accident had occurred the previous summer. (My mom is super stitious, too.) The Ghia was fun to drive. It was one of those semiautomatic cars that has a stick but noclutch. Of course, if I forgot to take my foot off the gas while I was shifting, it made a really horrible grind ing sound. I figured that out pretty fast. Another exciting feature was the driver's door, which swung open every time I went around a right turn at a speed faster than 1 5 mph. It had its advantages I got very good at turning the steering wheel with just my right hand. The Ghia's gas gauge didn't work either, so I had to watch the mileage and stop for gas every ISO miles. (It had a small tank.) Watching the mileage worked most of the time I only ran out of gas twice. By this time I guess you might be thinking that I am pretty unusual in my car experiences. But I knew I wasn't, so I searched the campus for more people with the car curse. Here are their stories: In my travels across campus, I found someone who might understand my freshman-year clutch and transmis sion woes. Tammy Lee, a junior from Oak man, Ala., said she had a similar prob lem while couch shopping with her husband in High Point. "We got there, and we were looking around, and we started having trouble with the clutch," she said. "So we thought that it was the clutch going bad." Lee and her husband stopped at a service station, where the mechanics agreed the problem was the clutch and fixed it. Of course, the couple later discovered that something else was wrong with the truck. Hmm. Do you ever wonder what kind of cert i f cat ion you need to be a mechanic? "We were headed back to Raleigh because we had seen (a couch) there that we wanted, and we got to Efland, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, and we started up this hill, and it completely went out," she said. "We were just stranded there, and this was 8:30 at night." Another question for all you readers out there: How do cars always seem to know the worst time and place to die? Actually, Lee was lucky because a service station was at the bottom of the hill. And as usual with mechanics, the station's proprietors were glad to charge them a huge fee to tow the car less than a mile. These mechanics, unfortunately, seemed as intelligent as the last ones Lee had found. "When the guy went to tow it, he got in the wrong lane," she said. "He was going down Highway 40 the wrong way. I thought, 'Oh my God, we're fixing to die.'" But Lee and her husband did make it home safely. At 10:30 p.m. "We were glad we didn't get a couch because they would have had it on the back of the truck, too." Another of our fellow students described the tactic used by his brother to get a new car from their father. Geoff Smith, a junior from Winston-Salem, said his brother Steve ne glected to replace the oil in his Volkswagen Rabbit for more than a year. "He knew my dad wouldn't buy him another car, so he didn't change the oil on purpose," Smith said. See, not only do cars conspire against us, but they bring us down to their level. We depend so much on these terrible machines that we are willing to connive to get one. It's terrible but that's America. "We were driving down the road, and the piston blew out," he said. "It just kind of bounced upand down underneath the car and then finally shot out the back.... The radiator blew up, and the engine iust kind of died." Marcy Mephens, a sophomore from Raleigh, told the story of a "peaceful day at the beach" gone awry. Stephens, six family members and the large family dog were loaded into an "extra, extra long" van for the trip home to Raleigh when the van decided to give them a hard time. "On the way home, our car started making obnoxious noises," Stephens said. "We stopped in Warsaw." Yep, another of those little N.C. towns in the middle of nowhere. Not surprised, are you? Stephens and her family left the car at one of the two mechanic shops in the town and waited for her sister to drive from Raleigh to pick them up two hours later. "It was late Saturday night, and a lot of scary people were out, actually," Stephens said. "Once my sister got there, we all got in it was seven of us plus a Labrador retriever in a Honda Civic." Here's where we get to hear about her sister's amazing driving capabilities. Once again I am reminded of Evel Knievel. "The first thing my sister does is drive off a curb because she didn't see it," Stephens said. "It wasn't marked. So we almost broke the other car." And can you imagine the drive after that? My family trips were always bad enough with just my brother in the back seat with me, but I can't imagine having three or four people and a dog back there. Car Care '91The Daily Tar HeelTuesday, November 19, 19915 Torch flies the friendly skies All too frequently in our society we are quick to condemn auto wrecks as horrible occurrences, completely de void of any valor. It seems as though we simply cannot see the inherent glory of such an occurrence through the twisted, smoldering wreckage, the mangled limbs, the sickly-sweet stench of roast ing human flesh, the roar of the crowd, the sad screeching of the baboons, the crunching of the combat boots on the cobblestone road ... oh. I'm sorry. I must have blacked out or something. Do excuse me. This is not the space in which I normally write, and, well, it chafes. Jason Torchinsky Staff Columnist I also talked to Garth Saunders, a freshman from Mebane, for whom I do not have quite as much sympathy. He had one of those incidents caused by good old-fashioned horsing around. It seems that he and his friends were at Kerr Lake, when they decided to rename it Car Lake. (That's how all you North Carolinians pronounce it, anyway.) "We took my friend's car and ran it down a boat ramp to get its tires wet," he began. Saunders couldn't tell me why they wanted to get the '73 Maverick's tires wet, but he did assure me no illegal substances were involved. "But it kept going, and it got too far," he said. "It cut off, and it rolled, and the car started filling up. (My friend's) brother and I had to go get the park ranger." I bet you're wondering how he explained all of this to that poor ranger. Me, too. "We were just foolin' around," Saunders said. "She said it was the stupidest thing she'd ever seen in all her years at the park." I should hope so. "It took a huge truck and chain to pull it out, and then we had to bail out water for about an hour because the whole bottom had filled up with water." So let that be a lesson to all of you: Don't ever try to get the tires of your car wet, or you'll be called stupid by a person who watches trees and squirrels for a living. And then you'll have to spend an hour bailing water out of the car. Not to mention the smell of mildew that probably accompanied them on every car trip for the next two or three weeks. Shannon Lawing, a freshman from Charlotte, seemed to have the largest portfolio of car stories of anyone I met. The incident she said she remembered most vividly hap pened during her junior year in high school. "I was on my way to my church to meet people to go to my boyfriend's basketball game," she said. Lawing said she had moved into the right lane in order to turn when she was hit from behind. Ahh. A familiar scenario. I wonder if it was a husky construction worker? "As I was turning, this car hit me from the back, and my car went up on two wheels." Ooh. Just like Evel Knievel. Or maybe like those monster trucks that run over 20 cars at once. What's the purpose of that, anyway? I guess you could take out your frustrations on al I the cars that have done you wrong. OK, back to the story. "And then we came back down, and my car was shaking," she said. "I just remember screaming. My best friend was in the car with me, and I just kept screaming her name." You'll be happy to know no one was hurt, and Lawing drove home. But, as she said, "It scared me half to death. "(The other driver) said that when I moved over I didn 't see him in my blind spot ... and I didn't give him enough time." Another lessoru Watch out for those blind spots. This story is just a sample of the many Lawing shared with me. I decided not to write about all of her car troubles, so as not to take up the entire rest of this page. I will however, tell you about Lawing's friend, who ignored the obvious fact that Lawing was bad luck with cars and gave her a ride home for Fall Break. The car was totally packed with microwave carts, a night table, clothes everything was in there," said Kelli Price, a sophomore from Charlotte. I'm beginning to think car problems are like those cheap romance novels everybody keeps on the radiator in the bath room. You know, the ones that all have basically the same plot and only change the characters and the setting. It seems these cars always are conspiring to break down in the middle of the night or when you're loaded with all your possessions. But once again, I am going off on a tangent My apologies. "We were coming through Pittsboro when we heard this noise, this terrible noise,"Price said. "I was going to try to keep on going, but there was this grinding noise." Price and Lawing pulled over and walked to a nearby service station. Why are these service stations so convenient in all of these stories? I thought inconvenience was another rule of car troubles. Maybe only when they're my car troubles. They couldn't help us, so we called (the American Auto mobile Association), and (our call) got transferred to Florida somehow." Now that's more like it. Those are the stations we all know and love. And AAA is always really helpful, too. Of course, this incident might shed some light on why it always takes those AAA tow trucks three hours to get to you: They have to come from other states. But no. Price was transferred back to a Chapel Hill office. "The man who came to get us couldn't read, so 1 had to write everything, and he couldn't tell me how to fill out the forms because he couldn't read them," she said. Price and Lawing did make it back to Chapel Hill. So did their clothes, the night table and everything else no thanks to Lawing's car curse. Anyway, that's the end of the car-trouble stories. I hope you enjoyed them as you learned. And for all of you out there who have been laughing at our misfortunes, saying, "Ha, that will never happen to me," guess again. If you have a car, you will have car trouble. It's a law. Anyway, my purpose here is to in form you of an automobile wreck, nay, event, I was involved in. The story be gins, as I have found all good stories do, with a Volkswagen Beetle. Before I relate the story of the wreck, a little background. Something like a nice pastoral scene. That's nice. More trees over to the left. Good. Okay. Now I can tell you a bit of history. This Bug was my car during high school, one I held great affection for. A pale yellow 1971 Super Beetle with a 1968 engine. Now, throughout most of high school my beloved Bug was not in the best of physical shape I simply hadn't the money to fix some of my car's minor cosmetic faults, such as three dented fenders and no windshield. Boy, did I go through Visine that year! By the time I graduated from high school, however, I decided it was time to splurge. Thanks toa small sum granted to me by my parents on the condition that I would go away, I was able to have my little Beetle restored to its original glory. So here's where my wreck story begins. About one week after I spent a toddler's weight in cash to restore my Bug, I go out fora drive with my friends Charles and Jeremy, who, for the sake of this article, we'll call Captain Freelove and Mr. Depesto. We're driving. I pull onto a big, windy road, still undergoing surface construc tion. It was mostly gravel al this point, See TORCH, page 6 IcFariing's BHHHMPIMHMIHnHMiaMpi SemngChspel Hill For Over 20 Years. FOREIGN & DOMESTIC We Sell Quality Pre-Owned Automobiles That We Stand Behind. mm ill We Specialize ri Customizing,. sunroofs ground effects graphics auto & truck accessories custom seats interior & exterior Discount1 Aufo Parts low, Low Tiro & Battery Prices Dependable Auto Service Open 7 days a week 245 S. Elliott Rd. Village Plaza SS.967-2744 KMi mm Imms Wilson's Honda & Volvo Service Center Computerized 4-wheel alignment Tune-ups Computerized tire balancing Winterizing Air conditioner recharging Oil change Lubrication Brake work Winterizing Special Power Flush 1 Gallon Antifreeze $3995 jgi KJrzrrrr-tt J 1413 Avondale Dr. lighting 842-3055 682-5257 murrmnsnsiwia 126 W.Franklin St. 928 Harvest St. Durham 919-688-5014
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Nov. 19, 1991, edition 1
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