Szkoda!

A week ago today, Shannon and I were still trying to sell our car. It had been on craigslist for a week and we hadn't had any calls about it. We thought it was a really good deal because it had low mileage and was still in really good condition. The catch: it had been rebuilt. I bought the car for $1000 back in early 2006. It was a rental car that had been wrecked: someone hit a moose. So, the front end was damaged. A friend of mine rebuilt the car for me and didn't charge me for any labor but just for the parts. It's been a great car and I've never had any problems with it, so I was really shocked when we didn't receive any calls, but I guess the fact that it had been rebuilt was holding people up.


Our faithful Ford Focus. May you be as good of a car for Alfonso as you have for us.

So, when we finally received a call about the car we were ecstatic. The only problem: he was offering us $800 less than we had posted the car for, and we'd already dropped the price $800 off of the Kelley Blue Book value. So, after many phone calls between us and Alfonso, our prospective buyer, we finally agreed on a middle ground. Now the only catch was that Alfonso works every day until 6:00 and lives in Durham, so he wanted to finalize the sale on Saturday. Saturday wouldn't work for us because we were flying out that day. And in North Carolina when you sell a car you have to have a notary public notarize the deed. So, we were going to need a notary to notarize the deed after 8 p.m. We started making phone calls to see if any notary publics worked that late. Finally we found a notary named Matt who agreed to meet us after hours. He met us at a McDonalds at 9:30 at night and let us buy him a sundae for payment. Alfonso and his crew showed up, we made the exchange, and Matt notarized the deed and bill of sale. It was unbelievable the amount of insanity and craziness that ensued that day in order for our car to be sold 8 hours after we got the initial phone call.

The saddest part of the car sale for me was that when I bought the car I ordered a specialty license plate for it: SZKODA. It means "bummer" or "what a pity" in Polish and is one of my favorite Polish words. Well, I no longer have a car to put the plate on. So Lane and I got our photo taken with it for remembrance:


Lane's face is a perfect "szkoda" face!