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••• Saturday, August 02, 2003

Customer Depreciation 

I picked up the new wheels today and I'm really happy with my choice. But there was a moment, while walking the paper trail, that I experienced some serious misgivings.

It happened after the official papers were signed, when the pencil neckster was trying to sell me some extras. I don't mind the premise of the sales pitch for extended warrantees and disability insurance. I understand the guy's trying to make a living. It was during the chat about "gap" insurance when I started to get nervous.

Gap insurance covers the "gap" between the car's Blue Book value and what you owe, in the event the car is totalled in a collision. The pitch was mostly blah blah yadda blah until the anal looked me straight in the eye and said "Kias depreciate faster than most makes. In fact, when you pull out of this parking lot today, whether you go right or left, your car will immediately depreciate in value." Choke.

And he wasn't done there. He went on to tell how he recently saw a three-year-old Kia for sale by owner, $2500. It's frightening, he said.

So I quickly agreed to the"gap" insurance, even though my husband shook his head. But I wasn't thinking of the out-of-pocket risks. I was thinking only of the quickest way out of there. I was in a hurry to drive my car while she was still in her prime (a time frame I now believed to be about the next 45 minutes). I saw myself running stoplights and racing trains to maximize what remained of our "valuable" time together. I signed the papers because a potentially wonderful relationship was depreciating faster than the ink was drying.

I'm feeling better now. I had an epiphany.

My husband is four years younger than I am, and never before married. After we were engaged, I often asked him if he knew what he was doing, hitching himself to a middle-aged woman. I'd been around the block. My eggs were rotting in the pod. I was depreciating.

But he didn't care about that. And before God, family and friends, he made all the promises. Afterwards he signed all the papers. And he waived the gap insurance.

As far as I'm concerned, depreciation doesn't get any better than that.

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# posted by Marcia @ 9:11 PM


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