Smithology

I was reminded today of some time I spent in India whilst working my first engineering job. The reminder came as I was cruising along Ridge St up the back of Greenslopes doing about 60 when I see some men of Indian ethnicity walking across the road. As there were no cars behind me, I assumed they would stop on the white line and then go behind me but as I got closer, I realised they were going to keep walking right in front of my car. As I slammed the brakes, they thankfully realised that I wasn’t going to stop in time and jumped back out of the way. “Fuck a duck” thought I as I breathed a sigh of relief and gingerly continued on my way (as you can see, my self talk is heavily influenced by the high-brow language of engineers and I face a long uphill battle trying to curb my language around the impressionable 4yrold)

So all this reminded me of the way to cross a road in India. In the towns in India, (at least in Bharuch where I was hanging out) the traffic is usually pretty constant without breaks between cars. Furthermore, the concept of pedestrian crossings hasn’t taken off so the only way to cross the road is just to walk very slowly out into the stream of cars and most of the time, the cars will veer around you (usually the cars are doing between 20 and 40 kph). It’s kind of like parting the red sea and the whole time I was there, I was convinced I was going to die every time we had to do it.

Sometimes we got the policeman to stop the traffic for us. That was funny too. In peak hour, a policeman would stand at the intersection outside our hotel and blow his whistle and gesticulate while cars drove on the wrong side of the road, made illegal turns across traffic and generally caused mayhem. We used to really feel sorry for that poor cop who did occasionally manage to get a car to stop so he could write a ticket.

Pictures here are of a family on a moped (that’s a boy, his dad and mum with the baby) and a bus seen doing about 100kph with a guy hanging out of the door (maybe he didn’t pay for his ticket)
[caption id=”attachment_227” align=”alignnone” width=”300” caption=”Crowded bus with passenger hanging out of the door”][/caption]

Uncategorized cars, india, travel

I catch up to the bottleneck on the Ipswich Motorway on my way to work, settling in behind the bulk of a white Nissan Pathfinder. Beside me a bright yellow van declares its contents as fresh flowers and behind it, also bright yellow I see a large bill-board: “Want Longer Lasting Sex?”. The bill-board is installed on the corner of a junkyard where the rusting corpses of a thousand cars are stacked four deep. Behind me, a Daihatsu Charade circa 1989 catches up. I can see the driver in the rear view mirror: flanny shirt, matrix style sunglasses and a flowing mullet. He is rocking out to something. I’m listening impassively to Nirvana: Never Mind and I hear Kurt Cobain informing me that he doesn’t have a God. I wonder what music other people are listening to in the cars around me, sometimes I catch fragments of music from other cars that have the same iPod radio adapter that I have: usually mainstream rock/pop, sometimes stock market commentary. Sometimes I can figure out which car I’m jamming with and I wonder if they can hear me too. But we all keep our eyes straight ahead. The traffic starts moving again.

Uncategorized cars, contemplation

I really like the new Mazda3 we bought the other day despite advice that buying a new car is like buying $2k of depreciation as soon as you drive it out the dealership door. Sometimes, however, you realise that you only live once and maybe you just want to experience rolling down the street in your own brand spanking new shining silver rocket with cylon interior. Yeah the car has pulsing cylon lights on the stereo when you turn it on and all red backlighting with a bit of blue so that you feel like you’re in an episode of BSG when driving it.

Of course there is also the fear that you might be driving along Sir Fred Schonell Drive when suddenly out of the blue the back of the car is struck by a large object – say a truck – which causes a bit of fishtailing and crazed braking as you try not to go into the oncoming traffic moments before the the truck slams into the driver side door and rolls you half up on it’s bumper bar. Actually I’m surprised that Steph is driving so well after that really did happen to her (which is why we needed a new car in the first place)

On surveying the accident scene I was pretty amazed (and relieved) that Steph got out of the car without a scratch and actually reports that her neck and back feel looser than they ever have (maybe the accident was chiropractic somehow) and the doctor gave her a clean bill of health too (after a little joy ride in the ambulance).

Having a car accident launches you on a little journey – a bit like a quest where you meet some strange characters and find yourself in unfamiliar surroundings. After telling our story to some slightly disinterested police officers we embarked on our mission to get a new car. Steph trolled some car selling sites on the internetz for a night or two whilst I went to see the dragon, er, I mean bank who were doing their best to put the ‘W’ into banker.

You gotta hand it to our bank. I ring up to ask about a car loan and they tell me my home loan is in the red. So I get through to their debt collection people who tell me I missed a payment. So I get off the phone and go through all my statements looking for the payment. Ring them back and put the challenge to them. Actually it turns out I didn’t miss a payment, they just pressed the wrong button and turned my loan into a different type and then tried to tell me that I didn’t know what my own loan was supposed to be about. A quick consultation with the actual loan contract set things back on track but they still couldn’t give me a car loan because the computer wouldn’t let them. I had another loan approved over the phone in about five minutes flat so I guess it’s their loss.

We were also less than impressed with the lady at the car yard who’s job was to sell us the paint/rust/fabric protection and window tinting etc… She put the hard sell on us and I got confused and accidentally bought something off her. She told us that the paint on our car was going to turn into a pile of crap if we didn’t get this protection put on. I was pretty sceptical but hadn’t come prepared for this kind of assault and I should have just told her that I didn’t want to be pushed into buying anything. Instead we got suckered with the paint protection which is probably not terrible but I truly doubt that new car paint is so cheap and nasty that it needs this special magic coating.

For future reference: the best way to get a pushy salesperson off your back is to critique their sales technique: tell them you feel like they are pushing you into it, or you can also say that you don’t feel you can trust them because you feel manipulated. They are then either forced to defend themselves and deny that they are pushing you into it (thus backing off) or admit that they are being pushy in which case you can tell them that you don’t appreciate it.

Anyway, that’s most of the story of the new car (which is silver and has cylon lights on the stereo). I’ll leave it there as my new version of WordPress is hassling me with a real-time word count and 760 words is probably a bit long for a blog post.

Uncategorized banks, cars, life, salespeople