Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Forget Murphy, welcome to Sean's law

In January I wrote about Sean's run with some bad luck (and the results of bad decision making). It seems that Sean's bad luck (which is based on his bad decision making) is here to stay.

A couple of months ago Sean was in an accident with his POS car. Sean was initially cited for the accident and his mother finally had enough. She had the shitty car towed to the dump (in her defense, that car was well overdue for a date with the auto shredder, in my opinion).

After an investigation into the accident, the police reversed themselves and decided that nobody was at fault.

So Sean was in the clear ... but he had no car through no fault of his own.

Since then, he and his mom have been saving money for Sean to buy yet another car (this would be number three and the kid hadn't even turned 18 yet).

While we were on vacation, Sean called to see if we'd consider selling him our 1988 Pathfinder.

We bought this car a couple of years ago from our friends who walk every where. Their cars are more monuments than transportation, it seems. So the car had very few miles on it (I think the odometer read 87,000 — fer reals). Bill used it as his car until he inherited my mom's old car this spring.

I wanted to keep the car as a backup. Just in case something happened to Bill's car, we could just throw it away and he could go back to the Pathfinder (What? Cars are disposable, no?).

But Bill pressured me to consider selling it to Sean.

I said no and then thought about it some.

We didn't need a third car and Sean's been doing well lately and not getting into trouble so I decided that he could BUY the car from us.

We bought the car for $2,500. I told Bill that we'd sell it to Sean for $1,750 and not a penny less.

$1,750? That's an odd price, eh? I decided that I'd be happy with half the price we paid which is $1,750, right?

No, stupid rivetergirl. $1,250 is half.

Poor Sean, he had to pay $500 more because his stupid, evil stepmom can't do math. Plus I'm not one to admit my stupidity so I stuck with my $1,750 price to which he agreed.

Friday, he bought the Pathfinder for $1,750.

Monday the car started on fire while he was driving to work.

Really. On fire.

See, while our friends still had the car they had a gray squirrel stow away from a camping trip. The squirrel ate every single wire under the hood and made a nest in the air conditioning ducts.

Our friends had the all the wiring replaced, but they didn't notice the nest until they went to use the air conditioning and it started to smoke. By then they were over that car and just worked around the nest.

We could still use the heating and cooling only we had to turn it all the way on or all the way off. Any of the other settings would create a formidable campfire smell inside the car.

We told Sean about the nest and how to avoid starting the car on fire. But he's almost 18 and knows better than we do, so he drove to work with the a/c on low.

And it started on fire.

Luckily he was able to cut a hole in the plastic, put out the fire and remove the remaining squirrel's nest from his new-to-him car.

Lucky kid, huh?

No comments: