If You Break It, You Buy It

"If you break it, you buy it," was a quote I often heard as a boy.  I think it probably originated from shopkeepers who tired of young boys going in their shops, rough-housing and breaking the merchandise.  They wisely instituted a rule that made the parents have to buy the items that kids broke.

I hadn't thought about that in a long time until just recently.  At my last place of employment, I had a company car.  I figured since I was driving a company vehicle, I had no reason to keep the old "beater" that I was driving, even though it was paid for to save paying insurance on a car I wasn't driving.  So I let it go.  It seemed like a wise move until my employment came to an end after a year and I suddenly found myself shopping for a vehicle.

We scoured the Internet looking for a dependable used car and found it right in our home town.  On a recent Saturday morning, Tricia and I poured ourselves big mugs of coffee (this will be an important part of the story later on) and drove approximately 4 1/2 miles into town to the used car dealer.  And there she was: A pearl white 2017 Hyundai Sonata with only 31,500 miles on it and reasonably priced.  It was a rental vehicle like our existing car.  They must turn them in after 31,000 miles as that was the same amount of mileage that our existing car had.

We were pretty certain if we could get the price down by $400 or so, we'd make the purchase.  I sat in the driver's seat and turned on the ignition.  I heard Tricia open the back door on the driver's seat and lean over.  She may have said, "uh oh."  Or she may have said, "Doggonit!"  I'm not sure, but when I turned around, she had a funny look on her face and said, "I spilled my coffee on the backseat!" 

She went and told the car salesman what she had done.  He said, "That's okay.  We'll get it out."  I told him, "If we break it, we have to buy it?"  We laughed.  A few days later we went back and closed the deal.  Tricia's coffee stain still graces the back seat reminding us that it okay to laugh at ourselves.

No one else probably notices it, but we do.  Everyone always says after you buy a new car, that sooner or later you get that first 'ding' in the door that initiates a vehicle's rapid depreciation.  Our first 'ding' or coffee stain actually happened before we officially purchased it!