Car care

Upon leaving my teaching job one night years ago I found a young woman, one of my students, standing in the cold in front of the school. We struck up a conversation as she was waiting for her ride, and she mentioned that she almost had saved enough money for a good used car. "My Aunt actually offered me her two year old car for free rather than trading it in," she told me. "But as nice as that was of her I didn't take it. I don't want to have to care about a car." Her emphasis was on care.

I get that. Nice and shiny and new is, well, nice. So nice in fact that you have to care about it. I understand of course that you have to care about it enough to keep it in good running shape: change the oil, have good tires, fix a cracked windshield perhaps. But this young woman's point was more that, when something is in really great shape, you care about everything. A little ding or scratch becomes a catastrophe, because it ruins nice and new. A ding or scratch on something already dinged and scratched means nothing. Especially with something like cars, whose only purpose is getting you from point A to point B, why worry over minutiae?

That's part of why I always buy used cars. Perhaps I take it to extremes (quiet Ron) but I've never cared about an extra ding or a new scratch. It's only a car. Nothing more.