Have you ever felt like you were jinxed? Well, maybe not so much you but something that you owned... I knew a girl once who bought a cute little car and loved it at first. And then all of the incidents started... someone broke into it, someone hit it while parked, someone hit it while she was driving, etc. None of it seemed like it was her fault really. Stuff just kept happening to it until she gave up and got rid of it.
I was always a little skeptical of her theory that the car was jinxed. Well that is until now. I'm convinced my car is jinxed. Bad stuff has been happening to it since the very beginning and I'm just about over it!
It all started out good. About 3 or so years ago the hubby and I decided I needed a more practical car. He was traveling a lot and I was often having to haul around the teenager and her friends. This is not easy to do in a Miata and I was always nervous driving around his behemoth of a truck because it was his baby.
We started looking around and I was leaning towards a Volvo C70 because if I was going to have to drive a practical car, it was at least going to be a convertible. Then the gas prices shot up to $3/gallon and we didn't know if it would stop going up... Suddenly going from a car that got around 30 miles per gallon to one that only got 21 seemed like a bad move. So we were back to the drawing board looking for practical cars with better fuel economy.
I had never been a fan of the Mini in the past but it fit all of my qualifications. Backseat... check, fuel efficient... check, fun to drive... check, convertible option... check! So we went to the Mini dealership nearby and test drove a few cars. Here is where things really started going wrong. I didn't realize it at the time but looking back it's obvious. While I was drooling over the Mini Cooper convertible, my husband kept dragging me back to the Clubman (no convertible).
Him: Look honey... there is so much space! It's so much more practical!!
Me: But there is no convertible.
Him: But we will be able to travel in it and save money on gas.
Me: But there is no convertible!!
Then there was the color. I was naturally attracted to the red and black Clubman but someone (I think it was the salesman) talked me into the blue and silver one. Certainly not an ugly car but not what I was attracted to. Basically this purchase wasn't right from the beginning but I didn't think much about it and was happy as I documented here.
I have a new car and I'm pretty happy... and then it happened. A rock hit my windshield hard and the first rock chip occurred on my windshield. It was only about month into my ownership. A week later the second one happened. Only about a month later another one happened but I didn't know about it because it was behind my rear view mirror. As I was considering getting the first two fixed, a long crack developed. I priced a new one and decided that at $600, I would live with rock chips and cracks in the windshield. There have been two more develop since then.
After several of the rock chips happened, I was driving home from meeting my friends after work. The car in front of me drove over a large piece of tire rubber and it flew up. It was the kind of big object flying at your head that makes you instinctively duck and briefly close your eyes to wait for impact. It smashed into the windshield on the passenger side with a loud smack. I opened my eyes back up fully expecting the windshield to be smashed in. It wasn't... WHEW!!! I looked to my passenger side mirror change lanes... where's my mirror??? It was GONE. Not hanging on for dear life but completely missing! I documented my experience with Mini service center in this post.
OK, so we got all of that craziness over with. Surely I've been through enough, right? Ummmmm.... spoke too soon apparently. I am accustomed to cars with trunks. I put my groceries in the trunk and all is well. This car doesn't have a trunk. It has a little space behind the backseats instead. Most of the time this little space is sufficient but sometimes I need more room so I drop the seats down and I have a massive area to carry groceries. Sounds great, right?
It is great right up until you have to make a sudden stop and all of your groceries come flying and hit the back of the front seats. It had happened several times and I had become used to this. So when it happened after a big grocery trip, I just did what I always do and picked everything up from the backseat floorboard and take it in the house. Or so I thought... Do you know how bad chicken smells when left out of the refrigerator for 3 days? I do! Oh and I also know that it takes well over a month for that smell to fade away.
It happened again with laundry detergent that flew to the front. Not a bad smell at all but when the container breaks open and spills in the other floorboard, it's not good. Do you know how hard it is to get laundry detergent out of your car's floorboard? I do (or actually my hubby does)!
So far I've had really bad chicken smell then good but overwhelming laundry detergent smell in that car. We have covered inappropriate smells in the car, right? Nope! Just a few weeks ago some sort of awful dead animal smell would occur when the air conditioner was turned on. It's Houston in July/August. Turning on the air conditioner is not optional. It's a requirement for survival. Great! Another new and exciting smell!! The smell seems to be gone now so the animal that decided to crawl into my air conditioner and die has taken it's little zombie butt somewhere else thankfully.
Adding to all of the above... the rear door inside panel falls off randomly (the dealership doesn't see any reason why), the cigarette lighter tries to disassemble itself when I remove my phone charger, the metal piece on my parking brake falls off when I engage the brake, and one tire wears funny (the dealership also can't find a cause for this other than the tire is being run low which I recently took the car in to have them check and they can't find anything wrong with the tire either).
My car is jinxed!
