Wheeling and Dealing

It has been a long and tiring week, but Friday has arrived at last!

I don't have the kids this weekend (although teenage daughter just called to bum a ride to and from a party tomorrow, which Southern Man will gladly provide) and the Saturday tax class is over (the corresponding job interview is tomorrow morning) so the search is on for some weekend entertainment. Tonight's target: car dealerships.

Y'see, it has come to Southern Man's attention that gazillions of simoleans are spent each day on new and used car advertising. You may have even seen or heard this kind of advertising yourself. Southern Man thinks it's high time they spent some of that dough on him so he's been on the looking for test drive perks and has several stacked up. One was delivered just the other day by a uniformed representative of the U.S. Government and promised a four-piece luggage set merely for setting foot on the lot, so Southern Man bribed an unwitting accomplice with the promise of a home-cooked meal and away we went.

Southern Man is kind of fascinated by the whole new and used car dealer phenomena and has read quite a bit on how to (and how not to) buy a new or used car, so he pretty much knew what to expect and played it cool. The dealership was decked out in the manner typical of all these dealership special sales - streamers and balloons, candy and hot dogs for the kiddies, lots of bright lights and shiny objects, all designed to confuse you into forking over a sum equivalent to the cost of your first house for some auction-house reject that didn't sell at the first few dealerships either. Now, Southern Man's current ride has about a quarter million miles on it and he is in the market for a truck so he had the poor unsuspecting salesman ('Wil' with one 'l') show him a nice used truck, one that Southern Man would probably be happy to own. It was "too dark" to copy the VIN, though - at least it was according to Wil - so we then went back inside, talked payments for a bit (can you imagine $4000 down and $400 a month for sixty months for a plain old four-year-old F150?) and then said we might "be back tomorrow." You could just see his face fall. But Southern Man got his free four piece luggage set. It's just cheap crap but he's kind of a junkie for stuff like that. Southern Man and free t-shirts or luggage is kind of like waving a red flag in front of a bull - he'll do just about anything to get it.

Then we headed back to casa Southern Man for a huge dinner of spaghetti and salad. Guys, this is such an easy meal to prepare and it feeds a small army. Just dump a jar of cheap pasta sauce into a pound of browned hamburger meat for a pretty darn good meat sauce. Add garlic bread and salad and beer and no one will leave hungry.

Tomorrow morning the only thing on Southern Man's agenda is that job interview and ferrying his teenage daughter to and from her party - and to hit the next automobile dealership on his list. This time the incentive is a fifty-dollar gift card...