Vehicular Homicide

What a weekend.

After a quick round of early morning golf with the boys on Saturday, in temperatures approaching records not even seen on the planet Mercury, I raced home to pick up S so we could knock off a couple wedding related errands, such as getting our international driver’s licenses and meeting with the DJ to iron out our all important ‘Do Not Play’ list.

(Macarena, YMCA, the chicken dance and the entire works of John Denver)

We weren’t in the car five minutes when the radio starts to cut out on us and S notices that the power windows were really sluggish. At this point a strange tone starts to creep into her voice and she starts giving me ‘the look’.

We bought a new used car about 9 months ago. It wasn’t even five years old at the time, didn’t have a ridiculous amount of mileage on it and was thoroughly vetted by S’s Cuz, who just happens to be a mechanic. Despite all of these elements working in the car’s favour, S has a nasty habit of hearing phantom noises and thinking that the car is on the verge of some sort of massive mechanical failure. An idea that I’ve done my level best to assure her could never happen.

Except now it’s actually happening and all bets are off.

“What did you do the car?” says S, instantly discarding my weak and feeble protestations of “nothing”.

“You were the last person to drive it,” she reminds me. “You must have noticed something.”

At this point in time the radio dies on us completely and on the advice of her cousin, hastily reached via his cell, we decide to get off the road and take ourselves to the nearest Crappy Tire before the car calls it a day. Cuz tells us the alternator is most likely shot, but the upside is it’s an easy fix and most likely we can be back on the road the same day.

The Canadian Tire mechanic is thoroughly unimpressed with the fact that Cuz is quarterbacking us through the entire process. As some mechanics are wont to do they try to hit us up for unnecessary parts and excessive labour costs and seem a little peeved that we have a better-than-average understanding of what is going on.

Rule number one. You don’t screw with S. She deals with blood and death and hysterics for a living so it takes a lot to throw her off her game. Trying to bulldoze her into thinking a one hour job takes twice as long as Cuz says it will is only going to guarantee your very public and very humiliating verbal disembowelment.

My job in this little comedy of errors is to preach moderation and to remind S that if we dig our heels in too much, we may get the alternator fixed but they might also take three weeks to do it and when they finally do give the car back to us we’ll end up dead in a ditch somewhere because they’ve cut our brake lines.

Yes I know its inherently wrong to suggest rolling over like this. But we’ve got less than a month before we get married and in that time we need to be mobile. So we can’t afford to be without wheels for an hour, much less a couple days. If we had an infinite amount of time and money I’d be standing right next to S, handing her the sharpened knife as she slowly filets the mechanic for his condescending attitude. But we don’t. So I try to be a moderating influence, settle for only being screwed a little bit (just the tip) and ensure that no one leaves this little transaction happy.

In the end, we missed our appointment with the DJ, somehow managed to get our international driver’s license, depleted our wedding fund to pay for the repairs and then collapsed at home on the couch in an impromptu nap session, thoroughly exhausted by the trials of the day.

And all this before bachelorette party began.

More on that later.