I am surprised I am sitting here at this moment. It has been a day. A long, drawn out day. The irony of it is I finished Bleak House this morning which is a long drawn out book, but it is meant to be. The book is symbolism for its plot. Bleak House is a novel about a long drawn out never ending inheritance court case, and pardon me for the 170 year old spoilers, that ends when the lawyers on whatever sides there were end up using up all the funds.
The book itself is full of winding plots, characters that have no consequence on the story, confusing introductions to characters, and plot twists that come out of nowhere. One such plot point is the narrator, Esther Summerson, getting engaged to her guardian and then marrying someone completely different on the day of the wedding. The books plot is meant to be like the court case. It is a nearly 900 page novel that can be summed up in a sentence or two.
Finishing Bleak House was how my day began and how it ended or mostly ended was getting a new van for the family. Like Bleak House that is also confusing and full of twists and turns no one really understands. We got a call yesterday from a salesperson at the dealership where we lease our van offering us to bring in the van and get upgraded to a new van with no change to our monthly payment.
That is exactly what happened but there were plenty of plot twists along the way. The weirdest and funniest is the salesperson didn’t remember calling us or our conversation. He kept asking us who our lender was and how much we still owed on the car. I had to tell him that technically they owned the car and we had no lender as it was leased. We were simply giving them back their car and they were giving us a different one. One that happened to be brand new with 60 miles on it.
I can’t complain about having no change to our financial situation and walking away with a car that is one model year newer. It extends our lease by one year but lowered the residual. It is all together a tad confusing to me why it happened but I looked up what used 2020 Honda Odysseys with 5,000 miles are selling for and I see they will make a decent profit on it. We paid $6,000 in our one year of leasing the vehicle and they can sell it for around $35,000 or possibly more depending on how the chip shortage goes.
We took the next to last new Odyssey off them and they aren’t expecting any new ones in for a time. Meaning that when someone calls looking for this extremely popular model they can tell them that they unfortunately don’t have any new ones left but would be happy to sell them a used one that is only one year old and has about 5,000 miles on it. They can push it as like new and when you add in what we paid on the lease they will be making a good deal for themselves. I doubt they even call us if there isn’t a chip shortage despite all their talk of upgrade programs and customer loyalty.
We have now leased two vehicles from this dealership and I despise their sales tactics. Next time we go I might just tell them give us the numbers and get us out of here. I don’t want to miss cooking dinner the next time. They should have had everything worked up in advance. They’re the only ones that have serviced the vehicle and should have had all the lease data available before we showed up for appointment today. Instead the salesperson looked like a fool not remembering while we were there and his manager looks like an idiot for having to pretend to bail him out to close the deal.
We got what we wanted, a van one model year newer with no change to monthly payments, and they got what they wanted, a used car to sell for new car prices. I don’t understand why we had to go through the torture of their four hour car buying process. I think next time I’ll tell them to have the paperwork ready for when I show up. Of course I don’t expect to go on until this lease is up and we are either turning the car in for a newer model or buying it outright. Both are deals that can mostly be completed over the phone. I’ll remember this for when my lease is up on my vehicle in August of 2022.
David Huzzard Writes 