Jul
13
RIP, Carly Car.
July 13, 2008 | |
This morning, I donated my car to charity. I’d been thinking of doing it for months. The 15-year-old Mazda was becoming a bitch to maintain, and I resented every dollar I had to pay my mechanic to not fix it.
I decided to give a half-ass try at selling it — just to see if I could. In all honesty, I was ambivalent about handing it off to some poor sucker who didn’t anything about cars, and to that end, I discouraged two potential buyers from taking it off my hands. A third buyer would have been dumb enough to take it, but she was friends with a rude little thug/mechanic who wisely advised her to leave it alone.
So, less than a week into the two weeks I gave Carly to sell herself were up, I put in a call to one of the many donate-your-car type charities I’ve been hearing about on the radio for the past year or so. The people on the other end were cold and they made the transaction rather complicated. "Fill out our on-line form. We assess your donation and get back to you in a couple of weeks about whether we’ll take it. If we do, we’ll arrange pick a few weeks after that."
A second charity was slightly more accommodating.
I decided not to go with either one of those. I really wanted to donated to a particular group, in any case. I don’t know why I chose them — possibly they were the first I’d ever heard of. But it didn’t seem as if it was going to matter why I wanted to give to them because a week went by without me hearing their radio ad.
In that funny way that usually only happens in books or movies, I’d actually picked up my phone to call on of the first two charities when a familiar sound drifted out of the radio. I recognized the of the L’chaim commercial’s announcer encouraging all to get rid of their unwanted vehicles in the name of a good cause.
I was so excited, I nearly dropped the phone.
I held my breath as waited for her to give the number to call.
And then I dialed before the commercial was over.
The woman at the other end of the phone line sounded like she knew her business, while still managing to come off as warm and friendly. She answered all of my questions and came up with suggestions for me to prepare for the hand-off.
Her next words had me dancing the happy dance: "Can we pick it up tomorrow morning?"
(They couldn’t because I was going to be at work before their driver could make it, but still!)
That was Monday. Tomorrow, July 14, was my long-time deadline for getting rid of the car.
I thought I might be a little sad about it all. We Americans, after all, tend to get attached to our cars. If nothing else, I thought I’d be disappointed about not getting anything for all the cash I had poured into Carly.
In real life, I stayed outside watching, long after the charity rep told me I was free to go. I watched until he loaded Carly up onto a flatbed tow-truck and didn’t go back to my apartment until he was long out of site.
The whole time I was thinking, She’s your baby now! Better not come to me when she’s giving you a hard time.
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