Necessary Transportation

My car tells me when it needs to be serviced. It is very irritating. It won't be ignored and it does a countown every single day. It even tells me what it would like done. I know that when I bring it to the dealer, they are going to find some bolt that will cost an additional $500 on top of the already astronomical fee so my husband looked up what Service A entailed.

I looked at the list and it is a mile long. It is actually more than I get on an annual medical check-up. However I am thinking, preventive measures will probably end up cheaper in the long run. So we drop my car off early in the morning with the expectation of picking it up on the same day. A couple of hours later, Henry's cell phone rings. The brake pads need to be replaced. They had seemed perfectly fine to me. Sigh. Refer to first paragraph. I guess working brakes are a necessity.

A couple more hours later, the phone rings again, this time they did find that bolt that needed replacing. The good news is that it was still under warranty. The bad news was they had to order the said part and my car would not be ready until a couple of days later. That left us with one vehicle on a weekday, on a workday, on a schoolday.

Until I moved to the United States, I had not realized how convenient and important public transportation is. Growing up in Cebu, I could walk to school, to church, to the movies. I could always hail a jeepney, or a taxi if no one was available to drop me off. When I moved to Hongkong, the cost of maintaining a parking spot was the same as the cost of renting a flat so a car was out of the question. I loved the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) and the many other alternative modes of transportation. There is a reason why everyone who is of driving age, has a car in California.

Jason gets to drive in a year and a half. We are going to need to get him his own car. While I am not looking forward to letting go of the one excuse that still enables me to spend some time with him and his friends, ferrying him around does get kinda old. One thing for sure though, we are not getting him a car that needs Service A.