One Wednesday evening, Russell and I were at my house, chatting and procrastinating moving his boxes to his new place, when all of a sudden, a knock came on the door.
"Is that your black car?", the man at the door asked. I reluctantly answered yes, while trying to think of ways that my car parked in the driveway could have offended him. "Have you ever thought about getting the body damage repaired?", he asked? Being caught off guard, I replied: "Well, yes, I've thought about it..." He then convinced me to walk outside and discuss my car with him.
"I'm work at the repair shop around the corner, and I'm on my day off, and I was walking by and saw your car..." he explained. Fair enough -- my car does have enough visible rust spots and dents to attract a body repair specialists' attention. He then spent the next couple of minutes explaining what kind of wonders he could do to my car to make it look "like new", with pulling out dents, cutting out and replacing some of the metal, touch up paints, and so on and on.
Finally, time came for him to offer me an estimate. "I can fix all this up for $300". "Wow, that is a good price," I said. Since most of the damage on my car is cosmetic, I wasn't very serious about getting it repaired, but this price made it almost worthwhile. I was all happy, waiting for him to give me his card, and telling him that I would definitely think about dropping by his garage. Apparently, this was not what he had in mind.
"Great!", he said, "I'm on my day off, and I've got all the tools in my van back there, I can do it for you right now." Once it hit me that he was suggesting to start working on my car in my driveway, right away, the whole proposition seemed much more shady. "I don't know about today...", I replied, "perhaps another time?". "Why not today?" Conveniently, I had a good excuse! "I have to move my friend's stuff tonight."
He was unconvinced. "When do you need to move it? I can have everything done in a couple of hours," he offered. As eager as I am to have an excuse to procrastinate, this seemed increasingly like a bad idea, so I suggested that I needed to start right away. He then adopted a tactic of offering lower and lower time and price estimates. Of course, the only thing that accomplished was to reduce my faith in him even further. When he finally got down to $150 and 45 minutes to do only part of the work, I decided I should make myself clear: "I don't want you to work on my car today."
Slightly saddened, he finally accepted his fate. Just when I thought that was the last of it, he decided to pop one final question: "Do you know where I could get some weed?"
Ah! Only in the Bay Area!