Confessions of A Working Girl

A little over a year ago, I got my very first car for about $3000. I named her Dibynadwy, or Diby for short. (It means ‘reliable, dependable, trustworthy’ in welsh)

Diby was a little red bmw that was a year older than I was. The night we were going to bring her home, I begged my parents until they agreed to let me drive. At that point, I had never driven Diby before, never driven at night before, and still had only my permit.  Still, I insisted. My mom rode with me…I thought I was doing all right. Well, at least until I was three inches from crashing into a huge truck. A few minutes after that, I got pulled over. When the policeman came up to the window, he said something along the lines of, “We’ve had reports that you were driving like you were drunk.” Oops!

My mom leaned over and said “She still has her permit.” The officer was like ‘oh, okay’ then he went back to his car. I learned that it’s kinda hard to pull away from the curb with blue lights flashing in your rearview mirror. And my mom wouldn’t drive with me for a few months.

Diby and I took lots of trips together–for example, the five hour drive to my college. Although the first time I drove to school it took me nine hours…

Because Diby was an old car, things did break. The gearshift had to be replaced at one point, a boot in the engine, the powerstearing, the breaklines, the tires…

And then, a few days ago, I noticed that it was awfully hard to turn. My dad took Diby for a test drive and came back saying that he thought the power steering was bad again. It was bad timing…my dad’s car (which I had long ago named Coche) had just gone into the shop. In the meanwhile, he was driving my nana’s car (which I had named Ranz) , so transportation wasn’t really a problem.

The problem was that it’s going to cost about $1200 to fix Coche.  But to fix Diby would cost even more. Everyone–my dad, the mechanics–say that it’s better to fix just Coche and sell Diby for whatever we can get, even though that’s probably only going to be three or four hundred dollars. (In my opinion, she’s worth at least a thousand, easy!)

Much as I hated to, much as I love Diby, I had to agree. I just can’t afford to keep sinking money into a car that’s going to get more expensive as time goes on. Intellectually, that’s what I think. Emotionally, it’s just like Nooooooooooo!