Commuting Sentences

Position: 39°18’10.3″N 77°01’10.6″W

“On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted” That slogan is from 1995. A vintage similar to a 30-year-old bottle of Macallan’s Single Malt Whiskey. A bottle of which will set you back $7,999.99. Or about $1,000 more than a nicely equipped 2009 VW Touareg with 140,000 miles on it. If you’re feeling flush, and you’re in the passenger seat, then you could fork out $65,248.99 for a bottle of 1937 Vintage Macallan Fine and Rare Whiskey. That’s about the same price as a brand new VW ID Buzz electric minibus, with enough left over to drive it across America a few times.

For the past week I’ve been reliving the joys of commuting. A joy that I gave up back in 2008, when gas prices soared above $4.00 a gallon and almost every meeting I had was virtual. For years I woke at 6:30AM, showered, grabbed a bite and hopped in my 2002 VW Passat, Schätze, for the 30-mile drive to work. It took a little less than an hour and about a gallon of gas each way. Given how many people have moved into the Portland/Vancouver area I hate to think how long it would take now. I spent my time catching up on the news (NPR) or listening to music. This was still the pre-podcast era. The drive buffered my day and put some mental distance between home and work.

Commute

Out here on the back roads of Maryland my commute between Baltimore and my clients at NIST in Gaithersburg takes almost 90 minutes. That’s long enough to listen to a couple of chapters of “The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared”. A hilariously dark comedy with echoes of Forrest Gump in a very Swedish style. And while I’m not wild about being a slave to the alarm clock and chewing up tarmac first thing in the morning, driving an all-electric vehicle is proving to have its own rewards. The thorny challenge of charging the darn thing up notwithstanding.

Finding a working car charger is no easier on the densely populated east coast than it was on the west coast. But once you locate one and figure out the complex alchemy that blends crappy smartphone apps with crappy user interfaces at crappy charging stations you have an hour or two to fill. For me that’s an opportunity to throw a leg over shanks’s pony and explore the local area.

This morning I popped into Rosie’s Delicatessen in Howard County for a coffee. With a dozen options for breakfast sandwiches, I asked the young man for a recommendation. He convinced me that a pastrami, egg and cheese on a plain bagel would be a good complement for their dark roast coffee. Then we chatted about the Portland Trailblazers, which I thought was a bit random, until I remembered my debit card has a Trailblazer logo on it. Well spotted, sir! I expect when it takes 10 minutes or less to supercharge your EV, the opportunity for random encounters will, once again, disappear.

Schätze

As previously mentioned in this blog, I have a fondness for VWs. When I succumbed to Volkswagen’s marketing ‘road of life’ guff and purchased a Passat as my commuter car, it was for all the iconoclastic reasons VW’s ad men had hoped for. I had decided I wanted to be a driver in life, not a passenger. That meant I needed a driver’s car. One with a stick shift. After all, “Real Drivers Use Both Feet”. (That’s a bumper sticker I never printed.)

When I bought Schätze, I walked into the dealership and was greeted by a pimply youth who had clearly never sold anything in his life. He was so new to the business that his smile seemed genuinely genuine. We shook hands and I pointed to a metallic grey 1.8 litre Passat sedan and said, “I’m interested in this car”.

Double checking the sticker price and the promotional discount in the newspaper, I asked him for a business card. On it I wrote a number that was $2,000 less than the lowest figure. I signed it and handed it back to the skinny lad with the sort of long, limp hair one might associate with his complexion. “Here, give this to your manager. I’ll wait here.” He walked down to an office with a large plate glass window overlooking the salesroom. The youth handed my offer to a pair of beefy middle-aged guys who turned and looked me over for about five seconds then handed the card back to him.

A minute later he returned, slightly out of breath and a little wide eyed. “Okay! It’s a deal! I didn’t think they’d take that offer.” I knew they would. By that time I’d been in enough dealerships to know the comedy routines involved in buying a car. It was a fair price, and everyone was happy. Fifteen minutes later I drove off the lot in the only new Passat with a stick shift and a moon roof in a 500-mile radius.

Flatula

You see, I really wanted a manual. And the dealer really wanted to get rid of every manual they had (all three of them). They just couldn’t shift them. Back in those days, the only folks driving a stick shift were oddball geezers (show of hands please!), and enthusiasts. Enthusiasts, we called them ‘wide boys’ in the UK, all wanted a Golf GTI. The even faster Golf R32 was a chimera, an ignis flatula, that only existed in Car and Driver magazine and few high rent districts in California.

But Schätze with her turbo and five speed gearbox was agile enough to outmanoeuvre much more expensive cars. Particularly the growing ranks of Urban Assault Vehicles (UAVs) prowling around suburbia. When I trained for my first marathon the seat heaters were a godsend in the early morning. When I quit running and took up bike riding instead, Schätze took it in stride. I’d fold her rear seat down and slide the bike in. My bike lived in that car.

When the time came I was sorry to let Schätze go. We had covered many, many happy miles together.

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