I’ve come to realize that one of the quickest ways to get work is to try to do something productive. So, for now, I’m going to write until I either get a run or get super bored from writing nonsense. Since you’ve read my previous posts, you can probably safely assume which will happen first.
I’ll start by telling you what happened to me recently. I started the new year on a high note. I had an event to tear down because I do event work. For a couple of days at the end of the year, I was called to assist with the set up of the hotel lounge spaces for the two Peach Bowl teams. It was some pretty alright work. Two short-ish days spent in two different hotels sweating my face off setting up furniture and curtains and generally just moving things about. On New Years Day, a Friday, we were all called back to tear down both setups. They paid us extra, which was nice. I have a friend working this job with me now, so it was like hanging out and getting paid for it. Plus a whole bunch of hard labor thrown into the mix, but the money was really good. It meant that my New Years Eve ended at about 10pm, but I’m an adult in his 30s, so who really cares about hard partying, eh?
So, I made a lot of money right off the bat, which was pretty nice because I didn’t expect many people to want food delivered in the first week of the new year, which was mostly correct. Things were going well, but then my car started making some godawful noises on top of the other godawful noises it had already been making. This happened a lot with my car, so I decided to take it into the shop at my earliest convenience. With it being an incremental couple of weeks, that convenience wasn’t convenient enough, it seems.
Wednesday night on the 6th, my car started making a loud grinding noise. Well, shit. I guess the brakes have gone. I really hope that they haven’t taken the rotors with them again! I had to go to court on Thursday morning to fight a bogus ticket – another story entirely – but aside from that, I wasn’t planning on driving that day. The ticket was thrown out because the officer didn’t show – this was the trial date because the arraignment had happened early the previous month – and I called to make an appointment with the shop on my way home. The earliest I could get in was Monday morning. Okay, cool. I can deal with that.
Friday morning, I started driving and realized that everything is wrong. The grinding was so loud, and the brakes were so sluggish, that for the sake of safety, I couldn’t drive that day. I ended up borrowing my roommate’s car on Saturday to drive to the event I was setting up, and I ended up having to borrow her car again on Sunday in order to work my driving job. This was not the way I wanted my year to start, but at least things could get worse. Things can ALWAYS get worse.
It’s Monday morning, and I take my car to the shop. I’m waiting for close to two hours before they give me a loaner vehicle, and since my appointment was so early in the morning, I went without showering. But, I hadn’t showered the previous day, either, so I really needed a scrub down. Getting ready for work, I get a phone call from the dealership, and that’s when the bad news truly hits. To paraphrase: “Your transmission is busted, your head gaskets have blown, your axle has broken because your tires are mismatched, your brakes are gone and have taken the rotors with them, and that pesky sensor that you’ve been avoiding replacing because it’s mostly pointless and costs over $400 to repair is still broken. All in all, it’s going to cost you $9,000 to repair.” Mario Speedwagon has officially outlived his usefulness, so I now I have to scramble to get a new car.
I do some looking online at the dealership because I doubt they can legally allow me to drive away without being liable for my safety, and I find a car. The exact car I’ve been looking for! It’s a 2010 red Honda Fit Sport model with 95,000 miles on it, which is pretty high for a 2010, but it’s alright because I’m in a bind, and Hondas last forever. Probably good for another 200,000 miles, at least. The car costs roughly $10,500, which translates to about $13,000 after taxes and other expenses, but at a base price of $10.5k, and repairs at OVER 9000!!!!!! I don’t have much of a choice. And, it’s what I want, so I drive the loaner back to the dealership to discuss my options with a salesman.
I’ve calculated that I’ll be making about $38k this year, if things go well, and that qualifies me for a pretty nice loan. I have enough money in the bank to drop 2 grand thanks to cashing out my IRA and paying off all my debts, so that means I’m only financing about $9,000, which is less than I would’ve had to put on my credit card to repair my old car only to watch it break again in about a month. (As an aside, if you own a Subaru, get rid of it at about 100,000 miles, or you’ll have some bad times.) Also, my credit score is one of the best I’ve ever heard of at 836, so I could basically get anything I could possibly want, but I need good gas mileage from a car that will last. And, the Fit is tiny with a good amount of storage space, and it’s fury red. In fact, I’ve named him Fury on account of an excess of rage in my system.
Here’s where the difficulty started. I’ve been living in Atlanta for just shy of five years now: the result of a miscalculation in a tractor trailer that stranded me in the city. Instead of moving back to my dad’s house, again, I decided to stay, but thanks to that pesky sensor, I couldn’t pass emissions in this city, so I never updated my address to Atlanta or Georgia, so I would have been subject to Tennessee taxes. As Tennessee has a 9% sales tax rate versus Georgia’s 7%, making this one little change will save me over 2 thousand dollars in the long run which made that decision a no-brainier. I had to go to the Department of Driver Services the following morning to get a new license and then head back afterwards to actually buy the car. After waiting in line at the DDS for two hours, I had my fancy paper license and went to buy my car. It’s the first time I’ve had to do that in roughly 10 years, so I was naturally a little nervous. Everything went off without a hitch, and I drove away with a new-ish car and immediately started working.
Flash forward a week. It’s a Thursday, the weather is terrible, and I’m driving. My roommate is sick at home and finds a letter for me from the state of Georgia that says my license will be cancelled on February 2 because my Tennessee license had been cancelled/expired/suspended, a statement that was patently untrue. Being in the car and driving around the city, I was unable to call about it immediately. I tried calling the next morning but was notified that Tennessee had close due to wintry conditions, so I called Georgia to find out what the actual problem with my license was. After putting it out of my mind for a weekend, I called Tennessee again this past Monday to get my license issue taken care of, and after over half-an-hour on hold, I was able to explain my problem and get my difficulty taken care of almost immediately.
Since I started writing this several hours ago and didn’t pick up the telling until I got home from work, I’ve absolutely lost the flow of the narrative. That’s alright, I’m hoping, because you all know me and have plenty of examples of what I do and don’t do with letters and a keyboard, so I’ll just sum up really quickly because it’s late, and I’m tired. In short, I have a Georgia drivers license, which means that just shy of five years after I found myself living in Georgia, I have officially moved here. After driving it for 140,000 miles, my old car finally died, so I replaced it. I’m making as much money now as I did when I worked as a computer professional, but my job is much less difficult, albeit infinitely more life-threatening. Things are going well, I’m going to owe a helluva lot of money in taxes, and I’m typing this on an iPad Pro like some kind of proud hipster. And that’s really all there is to it.
Sorry the ending sucked so much, but you’ll get over it. You always do.