Nonsequitur Life

Do you own a car?

Did you finance it?

Is it paid off?

Make sure you have both your title AND your lien release and put them in a safe place that’s easy to find when it comes time to relinquish said car.

Anyway.

Here’s a disastrous wall of text…

I got my driver’s license roughly two months shy of my 23rd birthday. I had my license for a month when I bought my very first car. I signed my life away for a brand new, reflex silver with black interior, 2003 Volkswagen Jetta. It had fancy purple back lighting on the dash, a tape deck AND a CD player, heated seats and side mirrors, and the cup holders were retractable and blocked said CD player when they were in use. I had my heart set on a Jetta and I was convinced that as soon as I sat behind the wheel of one, I was going to absolutely hate it. But when I did get in one to test drive, I knew I had found my car. It was rated really high for safety and gas mileage and all the buzz words Consumer Reports uses to help sell cars. The very next year, my beloved Jetta was on the USED CARS TO AVOID list. And I had no idea how much that would come back to bite me over the next two decades.

On October 8, 2002 I got the keys in my hand for my brand new car.

On October 3, 2022, I turned them over to someone else when we sold him for a fraction of what I spent on his down payment.

Five days shy of twenty years.

We probably could have set up the transaction to happen on the 8th, but by the time we finally had a deal worked out, we were ready to just be DONE with it all. And I probably would have had a much harder time handing over the keys and I was emotional enough as it was.

I took these pictures on 35mm film.

I don’t remember when exactly I finally named my car Joel. It was sometime after I met Bob and he turned me on to Rooster Teeth and all its varied inanity and suddenly I had inspiration for a rather fitting moniker. In hindsight, giving the damn thing such a strong personality was probably a mistake because I think it made it that much harder to let go when the time came.

Goddammit Joel.

Anyway.

Joel the Obstinate and Cursed Jetta (TM) by the numbers…

… four collisions…
● rear-ended twice – once on the way to work, once on the way home from our Colorado trip
● side-swiped and spun into a ditch during a Christmas Eve snow storm
● backed into when parked in the street outside the last rental we lived in before buying our house

… three new bumpers
● two front
● one rear
(see: multiple collisions)

… five new tires

… one new windshield

… two new alternators

… 6 or 7 new batteries (honestly, I’ve lost count at this point)

… three brake light switch replacements (the third was finally on a recall)

… stuck in park and towed to the dealership (see: faulty brake light switch)

… two road trips
● Colorado 2012 (South Dakota > Wyoming > Colorado > Nebraska > Iowa > Home) to see Train (and Andy Grammer and Mat Kearney) play at Red Rocks on our 3rd wedding anniversary
● Bemidji 2015 to see O.A.R. in concert

… one broken speedometer (halfway through South Dakota we realized the speedometer wouldn’t go over 40mph while the GPS told us we were doing 75 on I-90. Our entire CO trip was spent with the passenger monitoring the GPS to make sure we weren’t speeding around town)

… four different license plates

… one major A/C repair

… five or six A/C recharges (again, I’ve lost count at this point)

… two leaks discovered in A/C that would cost more than he was worth to repair leading to his retirement

… 115 days living in the driveway from the time we bought our new vehicle to the time we sold the codgy old bastard because of a missing lien release (see: foreshadowing at the top of the post)

… 78,333 miles on the odometer before we drove the last four miles to say goodbye. (My twenty-year-old car had less than 80,000 miles on it.)

We discovered too late that we had the title, but not the lien release. And I believe I never received it in the first place because every other important document for that car was in a folder in my mom’s file cabinet. I was still living with my parents when I paid the car off and even if it showed up after I moved out, it would have been sent to that address and gotten filed away with everything else. So I had to track down a copy from a bank that no longer exists—or was bought out by a bigger bank some years ago. First we went to a branch to talk to a person and were told a fifteen-year-old loan was too old to look up. So I called their consumer lending number, but couldn’t get a person because I didn’t have an active loan number to enter. Then I called their main phone line and after 45 minutes on hold I spoke to someone and explained what I needed. It was a good 30 to 45 minutes of back and forth and he finally said it would be in the mail within two business days and I should get it within the week.

And then the fucking post office lost it.

And I know this because I use their “Informed Delivery” service, where they send me an email with scanned images of the mail I’m supposed to receive on a given day. I saw the scanned image of the envelope from the bank with my maiden name and I was excited to get that missing document, only it never showed up. There was a second piece of mail that was supposed to arrive on the same day that finally showed up a week later filthy and mangled, but the lien release never arrived.

Four weeks nearly to the day I called the bank again. After 90 minutes on hold, I explained that I had called and requested the document and they sent it and I never received it. He told me that since it was so old, he had to transfer me to a different bank and when he did, THEY told me that they were the wrong fucking bank. After many expletives and rude gestures, I called again (a week later, because fuck phone calls) and explained everything AGAIN to yet another phone bank operator and she saw record of them sending out the document that never arrived, apologized for the issues, and put a rush on the new copy and IT FINALLY ARRIVED.

Sidebar:
Everything for this car is in my maiden name because I was years away from even meeting Bob when I bought it, and I was told by someone at the DMV that it wasn’t necessary to change my name on the title, et al. So when I had to make my calls to the bank to get a copy of the lien release, I had to make sure to give them my maiden name and my easily amused brain had to make a deliberate effort not to say Beandercamen every single time.

*ahem*

After we finally had that flimsy, critical piece of paper in hand, we had to make a decision on which farm we were going to send Old Man Joel off to. The dealership we bought the new car from had offered us a very low number, so Bob wanted to shop around some of the local used dealerships because right now is an absolute HORSESHIT time to buy a car and there is no inventory new or used. But then it was 1,000 degrees outside for weeks on end and Joel’s A/C was not working and so he sat in the driveway, getting shuffled from one side to the other depending on which one of us needed to leave the house (because neither one of us wanted to drive a 1,000 degree black interior car with no A/C) until one day he didn’t start. We jumped him, got him running and took him out for a drive to get some charge back in the battery and in less than a week the battery was completely dead.

God. Dammit. Joel.

So The Bobs (TM) learned how to change a car battery by ourselves. Or rather, Bob learned how to do it and I held cables out of the way and handed him tools and gave him a high five when he was done. The engine roared to life once more.

Bob ended up getting a rough price quote from the Kelley Blue Book website and was almost instantly contacted (via e-mail) by a local dealership offering to buy the car. He took it in for an inspection, the salesman gave him a quote (more than the other dealership, less than KBB—which was already a low-ball number) that took into account the known repairs needed, and we decided to take the offer because we were both ready to be DONE with it all. (Yes, I know we could have gotten more money from a private sale, but we had our reasons.) We set up a meeting date and I drove my beloved, crotchety old bastard of a car one last time to drop him off at his retirement home. It was a very quick transaction because the salesman was in the middle of three different transactions at the same time, so I didn’t have too much time to fester on it before I signed the paperwork and handed over the keys.

It was a bittersweet moment. I am relieved to finally be done with that damn car, but I fucking loved that stupid thing. I feel guilty for getting rid of it even though I shouldn’t. It’s not like we took a perfectly functional car and dumped it at the junk yard. It will get fixed up and sold to someone looking for a cheap set of wheels to get from point A to B. I got twenty years of out it. I took a bunch of shoddy pictures to keep. And I have a tiny scale model of it that I bought way back sometime in the early days of ownership when VW had an online store of branded gear. (I also have a hoodie and a couple of key chains and a pair of R/C Beetles because I am very good at wasting money.)

Fittingly it’s missing the passenger side, side mirror. (It wouldn’t be Joel without some random damage.) I’m assuming one of the kids got a hold of it at some point when they were little and broke it, but I don’t remember that happening. I should ask my mom. She might remember.

And now I have a shiny new vehicle to tool around in.

But that’s another post.

Soon. (TM)

—

Your Best Friend Michael J. Caboose