I'm Siriusly Jinxed

Sirius satellite radio almost cost me $24,000 yesterday. Why? Because that's the price of a new car. Why would I need a new car? Because on day 2 of enjoying my radio my big freaking mouth jinxed it. If you've been following my Sirius travails you'll remember that I had to purchase a cassette adapter to plug into my radio in order for it to work. I practically did cartwheels when it worked. At the same time I asked my husband, "What happens if the cassette stops working?" His words, "The cassette's probably never even been used so I wouldn't worry about it." My reply, "You know this car is cursed so any thing's possible."

A little backdrop here -- When my father passed I inherited his car. It was a 1999 Olds Intrigue with only 17,000 miles on it, 15,000 of which was probably spent justing moving the car across the street and back to avoid getting alternate side of the street tickets. I thought, "Cool, I'll have a "new" car. My husband warned me, "You know what they say about getting a car from someone who died?" "No, what?" "It's cursed and it'll break down constantly." "It's only got 17,000 miles on it, how bad can it be?" "We'll see."

Well, we saw. From the get-go there were problems. Bringing it down to Roanoke my husband discovered none of the power windows worked so every time he stopped at a toll booth he'd have to open the door. The motor was burnt out so that was the first thing we replaced. That was the beginning of the end as they say. Power steering, brakes, tires, air conditioner, mysterious anti-freeze smells, liquid leaks, heating button jammed, the back panels of the inside door fell off...you name it...it went, and we fixed it. Thank God my husband is a mechanic or I would have really been screwed. There were even two recalls for something I don't remember. Each time we would drop a couple more hundred into it my husband would say, "You know you should think about selling this car." When cash for clunkers came around I was *this close* but my emotional ties to it stopped me. Well, my breaking point happened yesterday.

As I pulled into the shop to go to work I shut the car off before ejecting the cassette adapter. I realized there was a problem when I heard this whirling clicking sound. I started the car back up and tried to eject. No go. It would not come out. Just click, click, click, whirrrrrrrr, click, click, click, whirrrrrr. I tried jiggling the wire which only made it worse, causing me to lose the signal. My husband came out to see what the heck I was doing out there, saw my panicked look and then heard the expletives fly. He told me to calm down and gently removed me from the driver's seat before I picked up the crowbar in the back. He tried to eject it. It didn't work. He asked me what I did. When I told him he said that shouldn't have been a problem as most cars can keep a cassette in the player upon shut-off. He reminded me of what I said, "What happens if the cassette player breaks?" He didn't have to, I already remembered.

He brought the car into the shop, saying he would have to remove the entire radio. I got annoyed as customers came in whining about their unfixed vehicles. I marvelled at my husband's patience as they spoke in slow drawls, talking to him as if he was the neighborhood bartender, which annoyed the shit out of me. I couldn't take it any more so I would call the shop phone from my cell and tell him there was a call which was the only way these people would shut the hell up. After spending 6 hours there I can tell you I will never, ever, question my husband's need for a glass of wine the minute he gets home. In fact, I will make sure I have a case in the house, always, from now on.

But I digress...He gets the cd/cassette/radio out after having to take apart the entire dashboard. Since there's no easy release button he then has to take apart the unit...thirty screws later it's apart. There's still no release to be found. After tinkering for a while with no luck he makes a call to the local dealership to get a schematic of it. Naturally, they don't have it. No one does. So he goes back to trial and error. Since he is an extraordinary mechanic, although has never taken apart a radio before, he eventually figures out that there is a plastic wheel with cogs that seems to be warped. Manually he finagles it while I hold the light, poorly, on it and we're able to slide the tape out. Now, there is no tape in the cassette only a metal piece so it wasn't like it got tangled up or something as I had thought might have happened. By now we're both frustrated so we leave it on the counter and head to lunch.

When we get back, tired from a huge lunch, he figures out how to put it back together and inserts it back into the dashboard but doesn't put the rest of the dash together, just in case. When he presses the eject button the same clicking noise starts and the unit refuses to take the cassette adapter. The radio works as does the cd, surprise of surprises, but the one part that we need for my Sirius is broken. He says we'll have to buy a new radio and this time we'll get one with an auxiliary input so we don't have to use the adapter. How much is that gonna cost I ask. About $200 or so he replies. No, no, no, no, no! That's it! I've had it! This freaking Sirius! This freaking car!!!

I tell him I want a new car. He's thrilled with my decision and immediately takes me to the lot. I really could give a crap about a new car. I just want something that gets me where I gotta go. I've never been the type to say, "Man look at that car, I wish I had those wheels!" I'm more of a "Man look at those boots, I wish I had those heels!" So every car we looked at was like, eh, it's okay. They all look the same, a look I'm not impressed with. The one I sorta liked was a used Caddy and it cost $39,000! Uh, no. Then I looked at some other car which I wasn't thrilled about from the outside but inside it was pretty neat. It was black, had a sunroof and heated seats for the winter. It was something from GM, maybe an Impala and one of those dealer cars that they drop the price on. It had 7,500 miles and was still $24,000. My husband said I looked good in it. I could care less how good I looked in it. What I wanted to know was how much would the dealer give me for my car. He said he could probably give me $2,000. $2,000?! My husband reminded him that my car only had 27,000 miles on it. The dealer said maybe $4,000. $4,000?! I reminded him that the reason I was getting a new car was because the cassette player in the car stopped working. He looked at me like I was full of shit. But I wasn't, maybe crazy, but not full of shit. I told him since this was the first place we looked I'd have to think about it. Meanwhile my husband calls his friend who is a used car dealer at a Toyota lot to see if he had anything other than Toyotas, which is definitely one the many brands I do not want -- too many software problems which my husband says are only going to increase. His friend said he had plenty of used great cars and I should come down tomorrow.

On the way back to the shop I told my husband I did not want a used car with more mileage than the one I was giving up. We both laughed knowing damn well there was no way our buddy was going to have something under 30,000 miles. Then we spoke again about getting a brand new car. How in hell could I even think about buying a brand new car now? Oh sure there's those folks out there who would probably jump at one, financing it, but I bet they don't have one kid who's about to enter college and another who will in two years! I just couldn't justify another monthly bill. When my son called asking where I was since I wasn't home when they got home from school, I told him what was going on..."So I guess it's either put you in school or buy a new car." He replied, "Mom, I don't need college with all the mega bucks I'm now bringing home. Heck in thirty years I could pay for it myself." Haha!

Suddenly $200 for a radio doesn't sound that bad after all...stay tuned.

I'm a Sirius Junkie

I don't know how I survived before satellite radio. I barely lasted a week without it. I tried. I was not going to give them another damn penny especially since my Sirius stock is in the toilet. Freak them, I lost a bundle on them, I said to myself. So when my Orbiter finally bit the dust for the last time, after two years of a blackened screen and a week of having to slap it to work, intermittently at best, I thought I would be putting that $14.95 per month in my pocket.

The first couple of days weren't bad since my Cox Digital has one music channel I like, 917, so the television had been tuned to that all day. By the third day I noticed that I kept hearing the same songs, maybe even in the same order. I thought I could live with it even if it did start to get on my nerves, but what I couldn't live with was not having Sirius in my car. I hate local Roanoke radio, especially the local rock stations. What a bunch of crap. Do they not realize this is 2010? It got to the point that I was forced to listen to only talk radio...the highlight being Dennis Miller who is only on for two hours. Too bad Levine and Coast to Coast is on so late or I would have tuned in to them.

I kept complaining and my husband kept saying, "Stop being cheap, just go buy yourself another radio...life is too short, you enjoy it so just buy it already!" He was right. Why was I being so stubborn and "frugal?" It's not their fault the stock market sucks. They do have a great product. Besides every New Year's Eve I listen to the live broadcast of Patti Smith at the Bowery Ballroom. I couldn't give that up. So I went to buy my new Sirius radio.

Of course I wanted not only the vehicle kit but the boombox as well. Naturally they stopped making the Orbiter so my boom box and vehicle docking station were now obsolete. I started shopping around to see what the new boomboxes were and what radios worked with them. Sirius finally wised up and manufactured a "generic" boombox that most newer radio models can just pop into. About time. When I first became a subscriber every single component was different depending upon which radio you had. At that time there were many different radios, so this didn't work with that, and so on. Now it seems the radio themselves all have the dock and play possibility. Great, I thought, this will be a breeze, until it came to actually buying one.

No one had any boomboxes in stock. Not a one. I checked Best Buy, Walmart, HH Gregg, even Sirius directly...all of them were out of stock. WTF? I refused to buy a radio without the boombox because my fear was that Sirius would suddenly stop manufacturing them (much like they did the Orbiter) and I'd be stuck with just a radio for my car and nothing for my home. I didn't want to listen to Patti sitting in my car on New Year's Eve! I then decided I would go into the stores to see if they had something sitting around...nope, nothing. On my way home I stopped into Radio Shack. They at least had one on display and the Stratus 6 radio was on sale as well. I asked if they had any boxes in stock. He said he didn't but he called the Christiansburg store who said they did. He asked them to send it to Salem. He also said the sale ran through Friday so if I came to the store and picked it up then I would still get the discount. Cool! I told him I would call him first thing in the morning.

I waited until ten and called. Nope, they didn't ship the boombox. Now it wouldn't be in the store until Monday. At this point, I didn't know if I even believed they had one seeing as I couldn't locate one anywhere else. I asked the clerk if they would still honor the discount on Monday and he told me no, the sale ended Friday. Ok, whatever, it was only ten bucks. I gave him my number and told him to call me when it came in. At three on Friday afternoon I got a call saying that the district manager himself had delivered the box if I still wanted it. Did I? Zoom!!!

So I get there and am thrilled they have the box and radio waiting for me. They try and talk me into getting the extended warranty which we all know is stupid so pass. They ring up the radio and it doesn't come up with the sale price. I bring it their attention and they act like the radio was never freaking on sale! Oh, the sign that was prominently displayed is now gone, but the guy behind the counter knows it was there on Thursday and he was the one who told me to buy it before Saturday! The district manager says nope, it's not on sale, sorry. I'm looking at the clerk who knows the truth and he can't look me in the eye, and I saw this guy there yesterday with his three year old daughter saying, daddy, daddy and I don't want to get him fired or in trouble, so I say just ring the freaking thing up, but I do mumble to him under my breath as I'm leaving, "You know you're scamming." Normally I would have told them to shove the freaking radio where they couldn't get reception but I'm desperate so I leave, go home, set it up (and Sirius charges me an additional $15 activation fee even though their old piece of shit radio is the reason I had to buy a new one) but it's working.

By Sunday afternoon my husband was finally able to install it in my car so I took my son's Jeep to go shopping and left my car home. When I got back I asked how it went. My husband said not too good since I needed to buy a cassette adapter to make it work. What?! It seems the new models do not have the FM modulator on the side of the dock and use a direct cable into the car radio instead. Naturally my radio does not have that capability but luckily still had a cassette player. Here we go again, sink some more money into Sirius' pocket. When I called Radio Shack to see if they even had one in stock the clerk told me they did for another $21.99. He also told me I could probably get one at Walmart for $14.99. Guilt? Or did he have the sale price sign up again on the radio I just bought and he didn't want me to see it? I went to Walmart and got the adapter, a generic one that MP3 players use, for $9.99. We tried it in the parking lot and voila it worked!

All is right again in the world, even if it's really not, all because I'm a Sirius junkie...