Show Me.
A couple months ago here in Missouri we had an ice storm which covered everything outside, including my car, in about a half inch of ice. I went outside to scrape it all off, only to realize that my ice scraper was in the back of the car. The tailgate was, of course, frozen shut, which would have meant crawling over the back seat. It was five am, however, and I was in no mood to do any such thing, so I just started kicking the car to shatter the ice.
In retrospect, this was a bad strategy, as when I came to the taillight on the back of the car, my shoe went right through it, shattering it into about a thousand tiny pieces. I should have seen this coming, but as I said it was five am. That is my only excuse.
Anyway, I finally did get my car cleaned off and after ascertaining that there is no dealership within a three hour drive of where I am, I decided to just order the part and install it myself – something that any child of five could do as it’s only held in by three screws. I went over to O’Reilly’s Auto Parts in St. Robert MO and described the part that I needed, even taking the clerk outside to visually see exactly what it looked like and showing him, in the manual, the manufacturer’s nomenclature for the thing. He said great, that’ll be $200, we’ll have it for you in a week. So far so good, I thought.
Eight weeks later, of course, I still don’t have the part. To make a long story short, they delivered the wrong thing a couple times, and then just forgot about it, keeping no record of the sale or anything. So I’m out a couple hundred bucks, which is not so big a deal compared to the hassle of still not having my car fixed.
My biggest mistake, apart from the aforementioned act of kicking out my own taillight, was to trust someone from Missouri to find the part for me. This is because people from Missouri are a bunch of morons: for example, John Ashcroft, Rush Limbaugh, and Sheryl Crow. If you ever want to feel good about yourself, just hang out at a Wal-Mart in Missouri for a couple hours and you’ll leave with the impression that, because you have a chin, eight great-grandparents, and weigh less than 600 lbs, you are in the top 1% of humanity. That impression will be false, of course: you’ll merely be in the top 1% of people in Missouri.
This point was driven home just today when, finished for the time being with 80-hour workweeks, I took the time to see if I could find the part online. I looked through a bunch of auto parts websites before finding the part on – wait for it – the manufacturer’s own website, for a little over half what the place charged me. I should have done the same thing in the first place, but really couldn’t be bothered, and didn’t think it would be a big problem. What I’m getting at is that if they’d wanted to, these idiots could have gone online and bought the part in about a half hour, then charged me double. They couldn’t even find the thing at full price, which is their job.
The conclusions from this little tale are threefold:
1. Never kick your car’s taillights to get the ice off.
2. If you want something done right, get someone not from Missouri to do it.
3. Never go to Missouri under any circumstances.