Buying a Car... For Your Phone?

What better way to spend Valentine's Day then buying a used car with your dad? You get to stand in a windswept parking lot full of cars...

Helps to have some reach, too...

Very SHINY cars. So shiny, in fact, that you can see yourself in them :

Not that this has anything to do with getting traffic from the Mirror Project...

Now, all this would be just dandy, if we didn't have one little problem... We have to find the car that fits Dad's phone. Because you see, this phone has a lot of sentimental value for him. I gave it to him, with a matching carkit, back in 2001 when I still worked for a phone manufacturer, and I installed it myself. In other words, it has never cost him a cent. That's FOUR YEARS AGO. That's 28 in dog years, or 40 in internet years. I've changed PDAs twice, phones at least six times, and laptops three times in that many years. I've had a divorce, moved three times, changed jobs, been to a dozen new countries, and started a blog! You'd think it would be time to change phones? Nooooo... We need to fit the new car around the old phone. So Dad, who's nothing if not persistent, has been mugging the car maker, the company they buy the car radio from, and the company that manufactures it by phone, email, fax and pony express for two weeks. He's been leaving ME progress reports on my voicemail THRICE daily for a least a week, and is convinced that I'm in Albi to perform surgery on both cars to transplant this relic from the previous millenium's phone technology.

Spilling her guts...

Now this takes me back to my very first job, pulling radios from cars of this very brand and installing carphones by dismantling dashboards, seats, consoles, drilling holes in the roof, laying cable, splicing wires, and soldering lines, and every so often, starting a fire. This does turn out to be a good way to gauge how desperate they are to sell a car, because if they let you yank all her guts out in the middle of the sales yard, well, you can pretty much set your price. Which proves there's a method to me Dad's madness. The result of all this is, we beat the price down another 500 euros, we determined that I can probably perform the transplant and save him the 300 euros for a new car kit, 300 euros for a new phone and whatever the installation woulda cost him, and I got him to buy me an external HD to bring all my data with me to the US. He's still ahead by a few hundred euros. Dang, he's good! Location : Albi, France.