Posts Tagged ‘car’

I had hoped to pick up the new car at 12:34:56 on the 7/8/09, but I hadn’t realised that the 7th August was a Friday (I’d worked it out the week before to be the Saturday and the error had simply become established fact in my head until my PC’s calendar on the Friday pointed out to me that actual facts have an annoying habit of trumping imagined ones!) So that bit of numerological fun was denied me. At first glance, there wasn’t an awful lot about the next day, the pick-up Saturday, to warrant making elaborate plans, but TOH pointed out to me that if we took possession of the car at 9:08:08, it being the 08/08/09, we would have ourselves that rarest of things: a true palindromic date (ignoring centuries for the moment!). What’s especially nice about that is that it’s not an “obvious” palindrome: you look at those 08s and you (well, me, anyway) immediately think, ‘how can that ever be reversed? The oh-eights will become eighties!’… but if you start without a zero (hence ‘9:08:08 instead of ‘09:08:08′ ), then it can. It surprised me, anyway, just as I am always superficially convinced that “a man, a plan, a canal, panama” could not possibly ever be correctly reversed.

Anyway, another nice feature of this particular palindromic date is the proliferation of eights it contains. Were I Chinese, at least, I believe this would indicate long life, good fortune and not a speeding ticket in sight for at least a good few years! Neither myself nor TOH is actually Chinese, of course, so perhaps it’s all a bit irrelevant. But it’s satisfying to have hedged one’s numerological bets anyway!

We took out even further Astrally-backed insurance by leaving the house for the trip to the car dealer’s at, precisely, 8:08:08 AM on the 8th of the eighth month. I did the counting down; TOH turned the ignition key, for what was supposed to be the last time in the trusty old Statesman, at the relevant instant.

That meant we arrived at the car dealership with about 20 minutes to spare, and I had worried that the dealer would either take far too long filling in the paperwork so that the palindromic moment would pass, or would conversely be so efficient we’d end up taking possession far too early. I had rehearsed assorted delaying tactics to deal with that last possibility! But, as it turned out, the dealer played along with this silly game very nicely indeed, dangling the key above a sweaty palm, as I again counted down the seconds until 9:08:08 AM arrived -at which point, he let go, and the deal was done.

Well, sort of! Whilst the car was, technically, ours at the precise moment, we weren’t allowed to drive it away! It turned out that the last payment on the old car, made back in April, had not been properly registered by the bank involved, so that somewhere in a dark recess of an obscure computer or other, the bank was still shown as having some sort of lien over the old car. Since it was being traded in as part-payment for the new, the new car couldn’t leave the forecourt until we’d proven clear, unencumbered title to the old one. And, as luck would have it, we’d left the letter from the bank that spelled out that it no longer had any interest in the old vehicle back at home… so, instead of driving away in our shiny new vehicle, we had to make a final old-style 100km round trip to pick up a final, vital piece of paper! And having done that, we still had to sit around for an hour waiting for the dealership to satisfy itself that the letter could be trusted to be genuine. At one point, I seriously thought they were going to tell us to come back next week, but they relented in the end (but after far too much coffee had been consumed during the anxious wait!)

So maybe the moral of this story is that eight’s not quite the lucky number it’s cracked up to be, at least if you happen to be an ex-Brit or ex-Kiwi in Sydney? Or maybe it was the Celestial Spheres’ way of reminding us that, even in luck, one should be a little bit cautious, a little bit modest in one’s assumptions?! Either way, we have our new set of (rather large, I have to say!) wheels:

Oh, and I’m publishing this post at 08:08:08 PM on the 8th of August, just in case it helps!

As impulse purchases go, I suppose it is reasonably impressive:

Stock image of Pajero

That’s obviously a stock image of a Mitsubishi Pajero (and apologies in advance to my Spanish readers, but that’s genuinely what they call these things in Australia!), because we don’t pick ours up until next week. But nevertheless, that’s what we managed to buy for ourselves yesterday. I’m not quite sure why we did it, since the current car (a Holden Statesman WH) is still going strong and it’s not as if we need the ability to drive seven people around. But did it we most certainly did! At least this one won’t be scraping its underside on speed humps or our none-too-smooth driveway anytime soon, which the Statesman did all too frequently -and if we ever get it into our heads to drive off-road, this one will do the job rather more successfully than the Statesman could ever hope to do!

Anyway… I feel like a kid on Christmas eve: very impatient to take delivery of the new toy!