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racing girl
Jedi Knight
Offline
Came to me from another list... a mother in Texas desperately trying to get rid of the sports car she bought for her teenage daughter.... so she advertised it on Ebay, in a rather eloquent style!
My daughter badgered me into helping her to buy her first car about a year ago. I did want to help her get "on the road," if nothing else because I correctly predicted that it would stop her from guilt-tripping me to give her rides
hither and yon at the drop of a hat.
I'm afraid I didn't anticipate that the car was in fact her personal choice of voodoo instrument, a parental torture machine of laser-like precision, selected for maximum sleepless night and extortion potential. And how could I
have known that it was also a magic chariot that could instantly whisk her to the nearest night-club, far away from all those nasty rules like making the payments on time. What-everrr!
Of course, she picked the most expensive car she could pressure me into financing and made all sorts of promises of reliability, steady work, not stealing from the change jar ever again, not touching so much as a droplet of the
"demon brew" or the teeniest whiff of the "evil weed," never ever ever chewing gum and sticking it down the side of the sofa, being a super responsible driver unlike that ditz last year who reversed her brand new Lincoln Navigator into a cop car in the school parking lot because she was too small to see out the back window, not eating all the ice cream before anyone else gets any, never cussing out her stepdad and calling him a "butt," resisting forever the urge to torment the cat, not giving adults-in-authority the finger behind their backs, making every payment early without fail, and being eternally grateful to such a
wonderful, generous, and easily conned mother. All this, I thought, AND she'll feed me applesauce and push my wheelchair about when I'm senile and dotty! What a deal!
The only non-senile, non-dotty thing I did was insist that it belonged to me until she had made all the payments. I'm patting myself on the back now, I can tell you.
In the year she's had the car, she's had at least five tickets, one warrant, one (minor) accident, and finally a DUI that landed her in county jail because I wouldn't bail her out. She drove for the entire year on an out of date
registration because her boyfriend lost the new sticker I paid for, lost her insurance card, and ruined two of the four new tires I gave her for her birthday, three weeks after the aforementioned accident threw her wheels out of
alignment and scrubbed them. She just couldn't resist the lure of the open road, and youth and freedom from reality are such tragically ephemeral states of being. Of course, I paid for the repairs once I caught up with her (I think it was somewhere near the border...) and she somehow induced a lank-haired mechanic friend of hers to "procure" replacement tires. I decided not to open Pandora's box
by requesting details of either inducement or procurement on the grounds that there are "Things A Mother Is Not Meant to Know."
The first thing she said when I got to the jail to retrieve keys and car was "get me out of here!" and the second was "please, please don't take my car!" Denied the sweet smell of remorse, I made excuses and left, keys in hand.
So please buy this sporty little runabout so that I can close the chapter on the stupidest blunder of my parental life and suck up to the bank manager by paying off the loan early! The glow of relief lighting up a Texas sunset alone
would make it worth your while, but this is a rather nice little shiny kind of bling-bling Barbie-gal car, and it's in pretty good shape because I maintained it, and as my daughter has told me, I am a power-crazy control freak nazi
with no life. If you buy the car, I'll throw in a good old-fashioned ego-shattering lecture for free and you can have the original sign I stuck in the window to warn any scuzzy boyfriends of hers not to recommission it because I would
consider it stolen. I'll even spritz it with a little of my special expensive air freshener - essence de supreme moral satisfaction.
All in all, an appealing nugget of modern dysfunctional family history and a great talking point.
RG /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/england.gif
My daughter badgered me into helping her to buy her first car about a year ago. I did want to help her get "on the road," if nothing else because I correctly predicted that it would stop her from guilt-tripping me to give her rides
hither and yon at the drop of a hat.
I'm afraid I didn't anticipate that the car was in fact her personal choice of voodoo instrument, a parental torture machine of laser-like precision, selected for maximum sleepless night and extortion potential. And how could I
have known that it was also a magic chariot that could instantly whisk her to the nearest night-club, far away from all those nasty rules like making the payments on time. What-everrr!
Of course, she picked the most expensive car she could pressure me into financing and made all sorts of promises of reliability, steady work, not stealing from the change jar ever again, not touching so much as a droplet of the
"demon brew" or the teeniest whiff of the "evil weed," never ever ever chewing gum and sticking it down the side of the sofa, being a super responsible driver unlike that ditz last year who reversed her brand new Lincoln Navigator into a cop car in the school parking lot because she was too small to see out the back window, not eating all the ice cream before anyone else gets any, never cussing out her stepdad and calling him a "butt," resisting forever the urge to torment the cat, not giving adults-in-authority the finger behind their backs, making every payment early without fail, and being eternally grateful to such a
wonderful, generous, and easily conned mother. All this, I thought, AND she'll feed me applesauce and push my wheelchair about when I'm senile and dotty! What a deal!
The only non-senile, non-dotty thing I did was insist that it belonged to me until she had made all the payments. I'm patting myself on the back now, I can tell you.
In the year she's had the car, she's had at least five tickets, one warrant, one (minor) accident, and finally a DUI that landed her in county jail because I wouldn't bail her out. She drove for the entire year on an out of date
registration because her boyfriend lost the new sticker I paid for, lost her insurance card, and ruined two of the four new tires I gave her for her birthday, three weeks after the aforementioned accident threw her wheels out of
alignment and scrubbed them. She just couldn't resist the lure of the open road, and youth and freedom from reality are such tragically ephemeral states of being. Of course, I paid for the repairs once I caught up with her (I think it was somewhere near the border...) and she somehow induced a lank-haired mechanic friend of hers to "procure" replacement tires. I decided not to open Pandora's box
by requesting details of either inducement or procurement on the grounds that there are "Things A Mother Is Not Meant to Know."
The first thing she said when I got to the jail to retrieve keys and car was "get me out of here!" and the second was "please, please don't take my car!" Denied the sweet smell of remorse, I made excuses and left, keys in hand.
So please buy this sporty little runabout so that I can close the chapter on the stupidest blunder of my parental life and suck up to the bank manager by paying off the loan early! The glow of relief lighting up a Texas sunset alone
would make it worth your while, but this is a rather nice little shiny kind of bling-bling Barbie-gal car, and it's in pretty good shape because I maintained it, and as my daughter has told me, I am a power-crazy control freak nazi
with no life. If you buy the car, I'll throw in a good old-fashioned ego-shattering lecture for free and you can have the original sign I stuck in the window to warn any scuzzy boyfriends of hers not to recommission it because I would
consider it stolen. I'll even spritz it with a little of my special expensive air freshener - essence de supreme moral satisfaction.
All in all, an appealing nugget of modern dysfunctional family history and a great talking point.
RG /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/england.gif
