Tiger's Return

My poor car. He hasn't had alot of problems with him, thank God, but this latest one was quite the pickle. For those of you who don't know, I drive a Mercury Cougar named Tiger. He's been a very reliable car for me, only having been through two batteries and one tune-up, he's a fair sport indeed. I took him in to get inspected about three weeks ago, and I just got him back yesterday.

Hey, I'm just glad I got him back at all.

It's never good when you get a call from the guy doing your inspection and he says, "You need to come down here and see something." Like every man should, we have a great, trustworthy mechanic who never steers us wrong. I immediately raced over there and he showed me the frame of my car... my back axle was rusted off of the body, and the bolts holding it together would have to be broken off in order to weld and mix it. He wasn't sure how long I had been driving around like that, but it wasn't like that during my last inspection. All I could think about was how interesting things would have been if I were driving down the street and my back tires fell off of my car and rolled away.

So I handed Tiger over to him and was promised some status report in a few days. Tim, my mechanic, was going to have to bring in a guy who's speciality is welding, because this job was too big for Tim's modest shop. He estimated that it would cost around $500, a price that included an oil change, inspection and four new breaks. If it ended up costing that much, I would be pleased as punch! Any sort of extensive body work like this should have cost at least twice that. Of course, I didn't know I would go without a car for three weeks.

The guy who took the car kept it for a week before he realized that this job was too hard for his feeble old body. He turned Tiger back over to Tim, who was left with few options. Me and Dad had just happened to stop by the shop the day Tim decided to take on the job himself. We walked up to the garage and saw Tiger up on the racks, and Tim trying with all his might to pry the bolts off with a crowbar.

"I'm no expert at this... in fact I've never done something like this before. But I'm gonna give it a try," he said. How very reassuring. The worst that could happen was that he would pry it off too hard and the whole back end fell out, no big deal... I would now have a compact car.

We left Tim to the job and went on vacation, where I wouldn't need my car. When we returned, Tiger was all better, and Tim had a story to tell. Apparently, after failing to get anything done himself, Tim begged a friend of his to take a look at it. His friend put cars together for a living. No, really, he took halves of cars and welded them together to make whole ones. So I guess the guy found time to fix it between Thunderdome matches, but he was very reluctant to do so. Tim talked him into it, and payed him a good chunk of cash, but he got the job done and done well.

When I went to pick up the car, Tim only charged me $471. I looked at the bill and saw it should have been over 500, but then he wrote the word "Discount" on it, which apparently is better than a coupon. I'm glad to have my wonderful car back (I was tired of Dad's dinky V4 Sentra) and even happier to have a good mechanic.