Here's my boss colleague Marcel with his new previously owned Lexus 400:

               

Marcel is Dutch, the car is Japanese, and the company is GoDaddy, which is about as American as things get. (however, we have recently opened a data center in Amsterdam, so we've gone international) .

Marcel got a great deal on the car - it was ordered by some unknown person who was (the story goes) counting on a big upcoming bonus to pay for it, and then the bonus never happened. Our bonuses at GoDaddy are as regular as clockwork, but they aren't of a size sufficient to buy Lexuses (or Lexi) but Marcel wasn't counting on that, anyway.

Marcel says that he's my "colleague" - that word seems to indicate that we league together, but I don't know how to do that. Those who know me know that I am a Leaf Node in the Org Chart of Life; no matter how high-level my work, nor how much I get paid, I'm still always at the end of the little diagrams, with no little boxes under me. So I figure that Marcel is my boss, because that's easier for my mind to manage; it means that if Marcel makes a suggestion, I tend to treat it as an instruction (unless he is obviously making the suggestion as something to consider, rather than as a task to to complete).

My car recently went over 100K - I'm hoping to get 200K out of it. Doing the math, I see that I'm driving about 1000 miles/month - that would have me hitting 200K sometime in the late winter of 2017/2018.

Which seems ridiculous. But, at some point, I'll have to buy another car; however, I can't see myself in anything but another Beemer roadster; it might have to be a Z4, though, because by that time all of the other Z3s will have 200K miles on 'em, too.

I especially can't see myself in a Lexus; I don't know why. I've owned an Infiniti, which is to Nissan what Lexus is to Toyota. But the Infiniti didn't feel like a Lexus - it felt more like a Nissan with very nice upholstery.

I wonder why a European would want a Japanese car? With normal American geographic centricity, I tend to think of the rest of the world as being "somewhere out there", and it's all in different directions from America, since America (seems to us) to be the center of everything. (Those who find this attitude offensive would do well to read any British novels of the 20th Century, in which everything that happens anywhere in the world involves a Brit, and the most important aspects of the event are those aspects that affect London. We've got nothing on the English when it comes to provincialism).

And, since America is the center, I can see us buying Euro cars and Japanese cars, but it seems that the Euros ought to be buying Euro and the Japanese ought to be buying Japanese, or at least Asian, since it's obviously so far from Europe to Asia...you have to go through the Panama Canal, or something like that.

(editor's note: why is "Jap" an ethnic slur while "Brit", "Aussie" and "Euro", which are also shortened versions of geographic names, aren't ethnic slurs? No, never mind. I'm not really looking for an answer. Just wanted to fuss about inconsistencies. )

As to why I don't buy American - I have. And won't, again, until American cars last as long as European or Japanese cars (I exempt the Brits from this discussion, since their cars, while very functional and luxurious, are terrible in terms of reliability or endurance - as the old joke goes, 'the reason the Brits don't make computers is that they couldn't find a way to make 'em leak oil'). I believe that the champions in auto-longevity are Volvos, which can easily last a million miles - but who wants a car to be ugly for that long?

Enjoy your car, Marcel. I hope you drive it to lots of "soccer" games.


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