Award Tour Vol. 1: A Fair Trade

Back in the summer of 2001, me and my older brother drove across the U.S. on a sight seeing extravaganza and I chronicled every moment of the trip like a roving reporter. These chronicles (which I eventually named the Award Tour Series - after the song made famous by Tribe Called Quest) were in 14 separate installments forwarded to my friends in the form of e-mails. I'm revising them and reproducing them here. Names have been changed to protect the guilty the innocent.

June 18, 2001. The saga begins. It's been 2 weeks since I began my boycott of reality. I do that from time to time. When reality charges me the same amount of money before but gives me inferior services and goods what other choice do I have? I mean take for example right now, reality has been offering me this new product called "your car engine is misfiring." I refused to buy this new product (or any of it's accessories). Reality charged my credit card anyway. I demanded a refund. Reality said all sales are final. So I'm boycotting.

And the boycott was going well for a second. I mean I had almost convinced myself that a smooth ride was overrated, that good handling was a luxury that I as a consumer did not have the right to demand, and that I could in fact shimmy and buck my way from Atlanta to Nashville safely. But finally, I reached a point where my neck could no longer withstand the series of whip-lash inducing donkey kicks my car produced every time it approached speeds in excess of 65 mph. Once it became clear that I was either going to spend money on repairing the car or repairing a ruptured disk in my vertabrae, I opted to just pay to have the car fixed.

Now you may ask yourself, "Why were you going from Atlanta to Nashville?" Well it was in preparation for a Pseudo Road trip. One part sight seeing, one part relocation effort, all parts foolywang and hijinks. And it wasn't me that was relocating, no that honor belonged to my older brother (let's call him Tre). The plan, simple: Drive to L.A.

...in a U-Haul

...in one day.

Shall we pause and reflect on that for a moment? (You might as well. At least then it can be said that someone thought about for a moment and considered the merits of the plan. We certainly didn't)

Atlanta to Nashville:

It seems only right that the day I should decide to leave for Nashville, the "Powers-That-Be" in Atlanta decided that 3 functional lanes on I-75N was 2 too many. Really, who needs to travel at speeds higher than 5 mph? I'll tell you who doesn't: the good and righteous people traveling North on I-75, that's who. These kinds of things frustrate me like subject-verb agreement used to frustrate Karl Malone...

...okay I take that back. In retrospect I think Karl Malone was only too happy to play "english" by his own rules and march to the beat of his own conjugation. The point is traffic jams with no justifiable cause are like taxes you pay for money you didn't actually earn... it just hurts more for some reason. And right now it's hurting like a Karl Malone elbow (I'm not picking on the man, he was just right for both metaphors). There wasn't any road work, no gruesome traffic accident, no botched bank robbery that resulted in a high speed chase, a PIT maneuver, and a high profile arrest, no. There was nothing that would explain why an hour of my life had to be paid as a toll to pass this 5 mile stretch of interstate - just 3 lanes merging into one.

Nashville:

For all you newbies (if you're reading this, that means you) here's what you don't know about me that you need to know about me: I apparently can not do ANYTHING the easy way. If there's a hard way to do it, I'll find it, if there's a worst case scenario, I'll probably activate it, if the Apocalypse happens 2 days earlier than what it was supposed to, I'll probably have had something to do with that (apologies in advance). Now back to the action. We're in Nashville, and now that you know that it's never going to be the easy way with me - you should not be shocked to hear we have problems already. We stopped at a gas station where I filled the tank up halfway, it doesn't usually take so much gas to get from Atlanta to Nashville, but maybe I wasted a lot sitting in that traffic jam. After this pit stop we started running errands when I noticed a fluid leaking from the undercarriage of my car. You're saying to yourself, "it must have been water".

I was thinking the same thing.
I said the same thing.
It's gotta be water - what else could I possibly be leaking - fuel?

Pause.

Reflect.

No not fuel - it couldn't be... that would be the worst possible scen... oh wait. That's right, I'm me. Ok. Yeah, it's the fuel. But I just got my car serviced, how in the world could this happen? And how dangerous had this all been? I mean imagine me driving around Nashville leaving a liquid gun powder trail, that some errantly flicked cigarette butt would ignite, tracing a fiery path back to my car which - in the best case scenario - would explode while I was NOT in it. (And I'm me... so it couldn't possibly be the best case scenario. My contract prohibits it).

Naturally we're going to have to take a trip to the dealership in Nashville. The Coup de Grâce of this entire debacle, was the mechanic at the dealership in Nashville sheepishly trying to explain to me, that there was a hole in my gas tank near one of the gas tank bolts and that he didn't know how it happened. I find this odd, because I didn't know how it happened either, and between the two of us, he's the one that's supposed to have the expertise... I mean that's what I'm paying him for right?

Me: "So how did it happen"

Mechanic: "I mean I really don't know. The screw gouged into the tank"

Me: "Well I just went to a dealership and had the car serviced, it must have happened there"

Mechanic: "Yeah but they wouldn't have worked on that"

Me: "Well how do you know?"

Mechanic: "Because it's not a part of the service schedule"

*pause*

Me: "ok so... then... the hole?"

Mechanic hunches shoulders

*Thinking: Have I oversimplified this?*

Me: "ok so it was the bolt"

Mechanic: "yeah definitely the bolt"

Me: "but how it happened"

*More mummified looks of stupidity and shoulder shrugs*

I won't belabor you with the rest of the convo, it was basically me pointing out to him that his explanation left the prospect that either gremlins had over-tightened the bolts in an effort to frame the mechanics at the Atlanta dealership, or that the bolts magically tightened themselves producing the hole. He didn't let the ridiculous nature of either of these prospects sway him at all - he simply shrugged, as if to say, both scenarios were equally possible in his mind.

Yeah... I'm getting "rolled" here and I know it, but there's nothing I can do about it. I can't ride around leaking gas. And I can't prove that it was the mechanics at the dealership in Atlanta that screwed this up (not if I have to rely on the expert witness testimony of a man doing everything possible to avoid this fact). We know who's going to eat the "cost of repairs" (me and Mastercard, but really just me). He stuck with his story, I was stuck with the bill - I guess that's a fair trade in a world where reality hates you.