Truck a trifle rich for my blood
by Robert LaFrance
On Tuesday morning I went into the
pickup truck dealer and asked how much he wanted for that big red Dodge Ram
over by the waving flags.
“I’ll take
$71,430 plus tax right today,” he said with a big grin, a totally unjustified
big grin because he must have noticed that I had fainted and was lying on the
ground.
I arose from that
icy ground. “Excuse me, I didn’t make myself clear; I was referring to that
truck only, not to your entire stock.” He guffawed (I always wondered what that
word meant). “Haw haw! Don’t forget, we have rebates on all our vehicles, cash
rebates - ”
Always a stickler
for details, I asked just how much lucre we were talking about. “Forty-five
hundred dollars,” he said with yet another guffaw. I was getting a little tired
of his guffaw. What’s wrong with a lop-sided grin, chortle, giggle, titter,
chuckle or snicker?
“So let me get
this straight,” I pressed. “I give you $71,430--”
“Plus tax,” he
interrupted.
“Okay, I give you
$71,430, plus tax, and you immediately hand me back $4500 in cash…Why don’t you
just drop the price $4500 in the first place? Then I’d only have to pay sales
on $66,930, am I right?”
I can only use
the word ‘shocked’ to describe his expression at this point. “But-but-but what
about amortization, calculated recompense, defrayal and outlay premium?” I was
getting a bit shocked myself. And then he went on to shock me even more when he
said this: “You will receive your $4500 cheque within two days of your
purchase.”
“What do you mean
CHEQUE?” I roared. “It says right there on your own sign CASH rebate!”
Skipping to the
bottom of this narrative, I am reporting that the conversation went downhill
from there, which wasn’t easy. I went home in my 1989 Gremlin as a wiser man
and decided I shouldn’t be so upset just because the world had clearly been
re-designed by somebody (I blame the Irish) so that I could never again own a
pickup truck. Gremlin it is.
Reminiscing now,
I will mention that the last pickup truck – a real pickup truck and not one of
today’s tanks that guys keep buying – that I owned was about 1981 when I bought
a 1974 GMC halfton (as they were called then) from Jim Dixon who gave me a
30-30 warranty, thirty minutes or thirty feet from his driveway. Contrary to
his expectations and mine, the truck lasted for eight years and was still
running when I gave it to my brother, who used it to haul stovewood from a
woodlot near his house.
That GMC was the
last vehicle on which I could make my own repairs. One Sunday morning the
starter wouldn’t start the beast and I removed it, got a friend to take me and
it down to Walter Hurley’s garage in Perth-Andover where Walter worked on it
for half an hour rewinding something-or-other. Then I took the starter back
home, installed it, and spun off down the road from Birch Ridge, where I was
living at the time, to Tilley, where my cabin still stood. After that day the
most mechanical work I ever did on that truck was changing the oil, and after a
while I even quit doing that because I kept spilling oil on my tuxedo.
That pickup truck
was pretty much a legend in its own time. In those days Ford halftons and other
Ford vehicles tended to fall apart because of rust to the point where there was
formed an organization called The Rusty Ford Association, but I had a General
Motors product, so it wasn’t supposed to rust, right?
Wrong. First, the
box rusted so badly it was in danger off falling off, so I did take it off and
built a wooden box. Then the right front door looked like Swiss cheese, so I
replaced that with a light coloured green door I had bought from my friend,
cousin and former neighbour Murray Paris. Since my truck was red, or had been,
it looked a little odd. Then the driver’s side door had to be replaced with a
white one, and a few months later the floorboards themselves. I was just
starting to date my future and long-suffering wife at that time and she
complained that when sitting in the truck she could see the road passing under
her feet. Women do tend to complain about minor items, don’t they?
Back to the original subject, that
$71,430 Dodge Ram. The reason I am writing this is that I just heard of an
Internet site called Crowdfunding, where one may ask for money for a project.
So…here I am, asking.-end-
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