Times are crazy and so are the things we have to do to get a car in these days.
A couple of friends ordered a car half a century ago. The last few weeks had already been dominated by the mundane “will you call car dealership and ask whether the car arrived already?” can you please call the admission office and check if the vehicle is registered?”. When they had chosen the car, the girlfriend was about 2 months pregnant, so there was a little bit of urgency, the available cars were anything but family-friendly… Well, a week before the predicted birth date, the car was finally ready to be picked up. “Where?” – t he active reader surely asks… in Nuremberg – 6 hours by car away from home. It could have been delivered, but “I’m not going to pay 1000€ so that I still have to pick it up from Hamburg!” he said to me and continued: “the travel costs may be similarly high, but at least we’ll have a last nice trip, the two of us before the big shouting starts”… at least this was the idea in his mind.
The two of them left for Nuremberg by train in the afternoon. In the evening, they ate a few Nuremberg sausages and probably the largest stew in the history of mankind to then go straight to bed. Next morning both of them woke up earlier than expected filled and thrilled with excitement, a quick breakfast and a last stroll through the beautiful old town of Nuremberg before the car was finally ready to be picked up. It was a beautiful day – sunny, no wind, a lovely late summer day. Smiling like its Christmas, they both bounced into the dealership. Warmly greeted by the car salesman, a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne for the wife (he probably didn’t know she was pregnant) and a cap and keychain for the husband later, the couple were ushered into an adjoining room. As if Christo had been at work, the new car, wrapped in a white cloth, waited impatiently in front of them. “Are you ready?” the car salesman asked, and with a bit of a yank he makes a black, metal beauty appear. The introduction took its time, the girlfriend sitting bored in the back seat while the two men explored the car’s buttons with childlike enthusiasm. “JuniorScienceOlympiade” was what she always called it later. In the meantime, she kept making faces wreathing in pain – “Are you okay?” he would ask, and she would just reply, “There’s a bit of a pull pain in my back, I must have slept oddly.” But nobody really thought anything more of it. An hour later, they were finally on the highway, on their way back home. “JuniorScienceOlympiade” once again, it seemed. First he roared fastly then slowly, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left lane the roads of Germany. He was trying to adjust the mirrors when she sputtered “my water”. “It’s in the back” he replied distractedly… “no honey, my water, the baby”… Quick classification: I’ve known him since I was a little boy and until I was 17 I wasn’t allowed to ride in his almost ancient car because he saw me one time playing Tic Tac Toe on the misted windows in his brother’s car. Now imagine that same man in a car where the new car smell actually still came from the new car and not a scent tree, with gallons of amniotic fluid dripping on the passenger seat… “THE SEAT” he yelled. She looks at him in shock and yells “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”. “YES!” he laughed… from 180 km/h on the left lane to 0 km/h on the hard shoulder in less than 5 seconds already shows that it is a good car. He jumped out of the car, folded down the seats and maneuvered the mother of his still unborn child onto the large recliner to head straight to the hospital….
The crazy things you do to get a car, huh? My northern German friends now have a southern German baby and a new car that smells more like a new person than a new car… but hey… I’m a godfather 😊