“The Skull” is my much beloved 1999 VW Beetle. She has taken me to most of my college classes, endured many renditions of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You”, slipped into the tiniest of parking spaces, and fearlessly lead my mom and I cross-country. She is always out there in the driveway ready to roll with her signature grin - that was until “Grimace” arrived. Grimace is our 1999 VW Eurovan and as soon as he arrived in the driveway I could see the Skull’s smile begin to fade, and she realized her fate.

Let us now introduce another character in this automotive soap opera. “The Toaster” is my roommate’s 1986ish VW Bus and, to put it nicely, it is a hunk of junk. The Skull and the Toaster for the most part remained indifferent to one another up until about two months ago when on my way to work I noticed that the hood on the Skull was ajar. After making sure there was no electrical or structural issue that could have caused the hood to mysteriously open on its own free will I consulted with Butterfinger. He recollected our roommate Mounds asking for a jump because the battery in the Toaster was dead. Mystery solved!

Even though the mystery was solved I still continued to notice the hood popped about once or twice a week on my way out the door. I would start to wonder at this point why Mounds has not bought a battery, but why would he dare to do such a thing if he has an easily accessible and free alternative sitting in the driveway at his disposal? Thus, the Skull became a slave to the Toaster, providing him with the power he lacked and not even receiving so much as a 5 minute long idling session in return.

We have been trying to sell the Skull for 2 months now. Most of the people that contact us either offer about $1000 or more less than our asking price or find out that the car is a manual transmission and are no longer interested. Today I finally got a call from an extremely nice girl looking for an eco-friendly car for her and her fiance. She did not have transportation to our house so Butterfinger and I offered to drive up and show her the car. I was excited all afternoon for this meeting, finally, someone who is really interested that I may actually consider selling my love bug to!

I was pretty excited to take the Skull for a ride to the coast, it had been a couple weeks since I had taken her out and I needed to start saying my good-byes. The automatic door locks not working were a bad sign and I knew the car was not going to start the instant the unlock button produced no results. The Skull grew tired of the Toaster’s mistreatment over the past two months, and she literally had the life sucked out of her. I froze. Lucky for me Butterfinger came to the rescue, took the reigns, and jumped into action. It took 3 tries, the first with Grimace and two with Jolene (Butterfinger’s GTI), but we got the Skull going again and we even got her to be able to recharge her own battery:) We arrived at our destination about an hour after we had planned to meet up with the potential buyer, but dogs provide an excellent excuse for tardiness.

What kind of nimrod jump starts their car with someone else’s for months on end? More importantly, what kind of short-bus-rider leaves the lights on after using someone’s car as their own personal battery charger?! Wonder no further, I live with him. I can deal with mistakes, yeah I am probably going to bust your balls a little bit for making a goofy one, but I can forget about it. I do on the other hand have a problem with someone making the same mistakes over and over again (i.e. leaving my hood open) and not apologizing when their shortcomings have caused a major inconvenience to your life (i.e. a ‘yeah dude I am sorry I totally annihilated your car battery’ would have been nice). You Mounds truly are the worst candy bar.

July 19th, 2007 | Planes Trains & Automobiles, Roommates