dumbfounded

I went with my mother to buy her a car last night. We went to a luxury car dealership in the Northern Virginia, where everything was shiny and all the people were smiley and for a few moments I was shiny and smiley too. A stubborn, stubborn woman, I am not good at negotiation, but I am good at research. I was armed with numbers and quotes and a brain.

Let the record show that I do not fare condescension well, and I am not a woman who likes to be manipulated, save in situations of mutual adult consent. Within minutes, I wanted to stab the sales guy in the eye with a white hot poker. If not a white hot poker, maybe a pair of those tweezers used in the Operation game. A pair that were whittled in the Stone Age, passed down by generations of females, used with such frequency to remove the genitalia of arrogant men that they were little more than blunt stubs.

I stated that we did not want a car with the extras the floor model had.

“There are no extras on that car. Tell me which ones are extras,” he challenged. “Show me.”

Surely he couldn’t be serious. They were printed on the dealer sticker we just reviewed. I was completely caught off guard.

“Oh, that’s the only way that model is made,” he stated.

Really? Seriously. Because the web site for your brand mothership begs to differ. And I’m pretty sure they call certain features “options” because they don’t come standard. As in THEY ARE OPTIONAL.

He told us they did make the cars we wanted in other far off lands, places like Whoville and Double Crossia, “but that’s the only way that model is made for this area. Those are the only cars the manufacturer sends us.” And we’d have to wait ‘til the new millennium to get a car built without those options, because those special vehicles are made by students at Hogwarts, and, as you well know, sometimes making cars takes a backseat to making beetle dung levitate.

Well if that’s the case, I said, then you can take off the accoutrements like those Ginsu knives and the Maxim subscription and the trunk mat and cargo net, because we don’t want them.

“Tell me why you don’t want them.”

I’m sorry? I need to tell YOU why we don’t want a fucking ferret hammock in the trunk?

He proceeded to open the trunk of the floor model to extol the virtues of the mat and cargo net. “If you spill anything it will get on the mat and not the trunk floor.” Genius, I tell you. “And the cargo net holds things,” he said, actually putting his hand in the netting to simulate it holding stuff and objects and materials. “It keeps things from rolling around in your trunk.”

Really? Like groceries and stuff our working businessman husband brings home for us to cook? That’s funny, because I always assumed they were for holding our newborns as we carpooled to Tupperware parties.

At one point during our floor model inspection he actually put his arm around me and said something about how I clearly tell my mom how to make her decisions. I wanted so badly to hurl him over my head like one of Charlie’s Angels might do, to the applause of all the shiny and smiley car saleswomen in the dealership. And I would have done it if I had any upper body strength and any clue as to how one hurls another over her head.

Finally, we tried to negotiate on price, armed with aforementioned market values and Edmunds info galore, and at one point he chuckled at me. “Tell me where you got this information,” he said as if I had just gotten my multiplication tables wrong. “There seems to be some misunderstanding about your research.” My mother placed her hand on my leg, the button that tells me she knows I want to impale him on his own knowledge erection, but that prison pinstripes do nothing for a Likey woman’s figure.

We didn’t buy the car.

Thank God Opening Day is Sunday. Maybe someone can explain to me that baseballs are hit with bats.