Smog
Yesterday afternoon I took a little time out to run some errands. Missed a meeting at work as a result, but still felt productive.
In particular, I got my smog check done. Last year, I failed the smog check, which surprised me a great deal; I've got a '92 Geo Metro, it gets better gas mileage than any other gasoline-only car on the road, I just assumed its emissions would also be low. I took the car to my mechanic, who didn't see anything in particular wrong but did a lot of tiny tweaks and fiddles and then re-ran the test, and it passed. But I somehow got the impression that it barely passed, and I definitely got the impression that the mechanic's goal was to make it pass even if only by a tiny bit. Whereas my goal was to avoid spewing large quantities of nasty stuff into the air.
Since the car failed the test last year, I had to do it again this year. I've been putting it off for about two months now. You'd think that during the time I was off work it would've been easy, but I never quite got around to it. I wanted to take the car to the mechanics I like, who are a fifteen-minute drive away, and that seemed somehow like too much effort. Also, I was trying not to think about it, because I figured if it was tweaked to barely pass last year, then it would probably fail again this year, and if one of my major goals in driving the thing (as opposed to some other car) is to minimize the pollution impact of using a car, then I'm not achieving that goal by driving something that's right at the edge of failing smog tests all the time. Which meant I should either get another car or start taking the train to work, and I'm too lazy to look forward to either of those eventualities.
But the registration payment was due this month (turns out it's due tomorrow, which surprised me; I'd been thinking it wasn't due 'til the end of the month), so I finally took the car to the gas station down the block, the one that was so unhelpful when I took it in for a tune-up. I figured I'd probably fail the test, and then would make an appointment with the mechanics I like to fix the problems, and then decide what to do next. I've been contemplating getting a new Honda Civic hybrid gas/electric, the one that's supposed to be coming out this summer, but that's a lot of money and I just read an article about the likelihood of a first-year-of-manufacture model having lots of problems. So I was hesitant about that, too, especially since the hybrids don't get all that much better gas mileage than I already get. (Though certain friends of mine would like me to switch cars simply because they feel the Metro's light frame doesn't afford enough protection in event of an accident. I tend to feel that if the car passed safety standards when it was manufactured, that's probably good enough (especially since I'm an extremely cautious driver most of the time), but I could be wrong.)
The same guy at the gas station who last time asked me what he should do to tune up my car, this time had trouble getting my keys out of the ignition. He continues to not fill me with confidence. But in the end, the car not only passed the smog check, it passed by quite a lot. In every category where they had specific numbers listed, my car's numbers were between half and one-tenth of the average passing numbers, which in turn were much less than the maximum allowed numbers.
So either the people who did the smog check last year lied to me, or last year's smog check was a fluke. (I'm pretty sure it hadn't come close to failing the previous time I got one either.)
I suppose the short version of the above would be: my car passed its smog check with flying colors, so I won't be buying a new car anytime soon. But I'm feeling verbose this morning.
Briefly, the other errands: stopped by the post office to mail an item to a friend; stopped by the bank to pick up quarters (for laundry) and Goldies. The bank teller was astonishingly slow. It took something like a minute for her to prepare the information she needed to go into the back room and see if they had Sacajawea dollars on hand, and it must have been a full ten minutes later that she came out with them. I can't figure out what could've taken her so long. Perhaps she stopped for a coffee break, or went to get a smog check or something. During my wait, I managed to forget one of the main things I'd gone in for (envelopes for sending deposits by mail); I remembered shortly after leaving the counter, but by that time another customer had stepped up and there was a ten-person line behind them (and the one-person line I'd stood in on arrival had taken five or ten minutes to get through), so I gave up. And then I went to get cash, and the bank's ATM was out of order. Sigh.
Okay, off to work for me.