I’m not sure I do. It is a frightening place.
Specifically, it is a world in which regular people own cars. It appears, because of my job, that I now have to consider becoming one of them.
The ownership of the car is not in itself too scary. Find a used car, get it inspected to ensure it won’t fall apart the minute you drive it away, pay the money. Own car.
But it transpires that Ontario is the most expensive province in Canada for car insurance. Add to the mix someone who’s never owned a car in Canada, never been insured, is completely off the record in automobile-related terms…and the annual cost of even the most basic insurance is almost as much as I was intending to spend on a car.
This is very scary bananas indeed. It has all made me extremely shaky and no longer in the frame of mind to even start looking for a vee-hickle. How do regular people do this?
I am also in a world of actual, as well as mental, pain. Some of you know I can be highly-strung at times, with a great deal of nervous energy fuelled by large amounts of tea and biscuits. Well, the other day in the carpool we got to talking about spiders and wetas and long-legged beasties. You know how talking about those things makes your skin kind of super-sensitive and you imagine there’s a redback climbing up your leg at every moment?
Later that evening I sat working at the computer, and one of the pins that was holding my hair up slid out slowly down my neck.
To my over-prepped, hyper tea-fuelled mind it could clearly be nothing less than a black widow making her deadly way down my shirt, so naturally I freaked the frack out. My left hand flew up to the back of my neck at the speed of light to remove the beast. This had the effect of flaying every last tendon in my left elbow, causing me more pain this week than the actual spider bite would’ve.
Especially bearing in mind that the spider was, in fact, a hairpin.
But what should I do about the car? My carpool buddies say I can keep paying them fuel money. But are they just being nice, and they’d rather I properly pulled my weight? Do you think this insurance thing is just something that needs time to sink into my mind, and after a week or so I’ll be okay with it and ready to take the next step? Could I come round to the idea of making monthly payments on a consumer item (on insurance, for crying out loud), which by the way is also a world that I have never inhabited?
Seriously, is this the kind of thing you regular people do? And are you still able to sleep?
2 comments:
Regular people do this. It sucks, but it's done. Is there no way around having to get a car?
Yeah, but the 'regular people' who have to pay the sort of money they're asking _me_ for are crazy 19-year-old boy racers who only just got their licence and already got fourteen speeding tickets and put a pedestrian in hospital. That's what I am to these people - I'm a 19-year-old boy racer. I don't know, but handing over the sort of money that could buy me, say, a round-the-world plane ticket, for car insurance, sticks in my - what is the thing that things stick in? Your craw? That's where it sticks.
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