by Doug DeMuro
It dawned on me: I was witnessing a community of Monday/Thursday people just waiting for the street sweeper to come by.
What happens, I reasoned, is that these people don’t move their cars during the times stated on the signs, because it would be too difficult to find other parking spaces. Instead, they just hang out with their cars—and in some cases, they hang out with each other. Presumably, when they actually have to move for the street sweeper to come by, they simply move out of its way, and then return to their space the moment the street is clean.
As I drove around, continuing to look for a parking spot, I noticed this on every block. Every street. Every corner. People standing around, talking with their neighbors, playing with their kids, doing work, sitting on folding chairs. And as I sat there watching this beautiful display of socialization, this unique community experience, this bizarre, lovable neighborhood situation that could only happen in New York, I started to think to myself: What the hell kind of job do these people have where they can stand around on the street twice a week for ninety minutes on a weekday?
Eventually, at about 10:25 a.m., I found a spot on a block that expired at 10:30, right between a guy sitting in his BMW X3 typing on a laptop and a guy standing next to his Subaru Outback fiddling with his cell phone. This will be perfect! I thought. Park the car here, sit around for five minutes, and then I’m good for the rest of the day!
So 10:26 came and went, and 10:27, and 10:28. And yet, nobody was leaving. The BMW X3 guy was still typing on his laptop. The Subaru Outback guy was still playing with his phone. I was worried: Do they know something I don’t? Did I misread the sign? No … it clearly stated that the parking restrictions expired at 10:30. People should have been packing up, going home, getting on with their lives, away from the twice-weekly grind of the street-sweeper schedule. But why aren’t they? Maybe the street sweeper hasn’t come yet? Maybe it shows up late sometimes? Maybe they know they’ll get a ticket, even if it comes at 10:45?
So I decided to break a cardinal rule of New York City: I decided to ask someone for help.
I chose the Outback guy. He has a Subaru, I reasoned. He might not yell at me. He might keep his cursing to just three ‘fucks’ and one ‘shit’ per sentence.
“Hey, man,” was my opener. In New York City, this line only works if you’re a white guy stepping out of a Range Rover.
“We can leave at 10:30, right?”
“Yep,” he replied. “Right at 10:30, we’re good.”
It was 10:29. Nobody had left. Then I glanced at the ground: it was a typical New York City street. McDonalds wrappers. Wine-urine. Discarded receipts, undoubtedly printed on paper created in Charleston, West Virginia. Leaflets for liberal causes. Rodents eating leaflets for liberal causes.
There had been no street sweeper here.
Was he lying to me? I pressed him: “Even if the thing doesn’t come by?”
He glanced up from his phone and gave me this look, the kind of look you’d get if you were on a job interview with Coca-Cola, and they were down to the last three candidates, and they had just taken you to a dinner with the team, and the server asked you want you want to drink, and you cheerfully replied: “I’ll have a Pepsi.” I would describe this look as a mixture of confusion and the kind of sheer resentment that you really only experience when you ask a New Yorker for help.
And then, with the harsh tone of a man who spent many years leaning on a Subaru Outback at the behest of the New York City Department of Sweeping Up Wine-Urine, he replied, “The thing NEVER comes by. You just can’t be here between 9:00 and 10:30.”
The thing never comes by.
In other words: these people walk outside every couple of days, they interrupt their lives for ninety minutes twice a week, they bring their laptops into the car, they tell their boss they won’t be online for the next hour and a half, they get a cooler and grab drinks, and then they sit there. All to meet the regulations set forth by a street sweeper that never comes.
At that moment, I noticed the BMW X3 guy packing up his laptop and going inside. He was on the phone now, on an important call. It was 10:30, and he was free. At least until 9:00 a.m. on Thursday.
Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest city in the world.
Here’s Why I Don’t Help People Buy Cars Anymore
I recently helped a friend buy a car. Afterwards, I started thinking that maybe I should’ve chosen a different career path, such as commercial spearfishing.
Several times over the years, I have documented my frustrations with helping people choose a car. What happens there is, they ask me what car to buy, and I—a professional automotive expert who has owned more than twenty vehicles and driven literally everything on the road—provide them with a list of choices. So they thank me, and they “carefully consider” the list, and then months later I—a professional automotive expert who has owned more than twenty vehicles and driven literally everything on the road—see them at a party, and they bought a New Beetle.
“But you should see the color!” they say.
So I’ve basically stopped helping people choose a car. Instead, I have developed a completely different strategy for dealing with this sort of issue. When people come to me for a car suggestion, what I do now is, I ask them what they want to buy. Then I tell them that it’s an excellent choice, and they should totally buy it, regardless of what it is.
Someone could tell me they’re interested in a nice, safe car to transport their family, which consists of four children and an adult ocelot, and they’re choosing between a Mitsubishi Eclipse and an industrial forklift, and I would tell them that both of those options are excellent choices and they should totally buy either one.
I do this because I’ve learned that people are typically going to buy the car they want to, regardless of whether I recommend it or not. So now, this is how these conversations tend to go:
Advice Asker: What car should I get?
Me: What car do you want to get?
Advice Asker: I WANT A BLUE MINI COOPER WITH YELLOW SEATS!!!!
Me: That sounds excellent. You should get that!
Months later…
Advice Asker: I GOT MY MINI COOPER!
Me: Oh! How do you like it?
Advice Asker: It’s great!! Thanks so much for helping me choose it! You’re AWESOME!
I relish being awesome.
So this is how I help people choose a car. But I was taken by surprise the other day when someone I know asked for help with the entire car-buying process. My attorney has advised me not to mention her name, which is Jessica, so instead I will call her Samantha.
Now, before I get into this story, I should mention that Samantha is very nice. What I mean by this is, if Samantha was walking down the street and she got attacked by a dog, she would apologize to the dog, and try to find it some food, and then she would call her congressperson to see if she could get the dog on some sort of government assistance program. So I think Samantha was a little afraid of car dealers, in the sense that she has heard stories wherein nice people like her walk in to a car dealership to buy a vehicle for, say $20,000, and they do a little negotiating, and hours later they walk out without an esophagus.
Not surprisingly, Samantha wanted a compact crossover. I say “not surprisingly,” because Samantha was a 27-year-old woman, and this is how the world works. If you’re a police officer, you have a badge. If you’re a car dealer, you have an esophagus stealer. And if you’re a 27-year-old woman, you have a compact crossover.
So I spoke to Samantha, and we came up with the following game plan: she would start her search by visiting CarMax, which is a nationwide used car retailer that’s currently locked in a death battle with Best Buy for the title of “World’s Largest Consumer of Blue Polo Shirts.”
The reason for starting Samantha’s search there is that CarMax is home to a wide range of vehicle options, including every single model she was considering: the Honda CR-V, the Toyota RAV4, the Hyundai Tucson, the Ford Escape, etc. But
here’s the thing about CarMax: it’s also home to—how shall I put this delicately—the CarMax price premium. What I mean by this is, if CarMax was in the home goods business, a hammer would cost $499.95, unless you were only visiting the store to trade in your old hammer, in which case they would offer you 12 cents and a CarMax promotional windbreaker.
So here’s what I told Samantha to do: test-drive all your options at CarMax, since they’re all in one place, and decide which one you like best. Then go buy it somewhere else, where it will be cheaper. These seemed like incredibly easy instructions, like when you get in an elevator, and push “3,” and the elevator goes to level three. Samantha could not possibly screw this up, I thought, though she might call her congressperson and ask if she can get her salesperson on some sort of government assistance program.
So Samantha went to CarMax, and she test-drove all her options, and she ultimately decided that she preferred the Hyundai Tucson. I was tremendously impressed with this decision, because I—a professional automotive expert who has owned more than twenty vehicles and driven literally everything on the road—cannot personally tell apart the compact SUVs. Seriously: if you blindfolded me, placed me in a compact SUV, and asked me to tell you if it was the Honda CR-V or the Nissan Rogue or the Toyota RAV4, I would run off the road and possibly kill someone. This is because blindfolding is not a good idea, when it comes to operating a motor vehicle.
So anyway, once Samantha made her choice, we started looking at other dealerships for the best possible Hyundai Tucson for her. This is where we discovered the first problem: Samantha does not like to negotiate.
I should’ve seen this coming, because people in my generation fear negotiating when buying a good, because they see it as a serious source of distress. People who grew up during hard times, such as the Great Depression, would negotiate things constantly, because it was a way of life. “Give me three hot meals for my family,” they would say, revealing their hard-knock negotiating strategy, “and I won’t drive a knife through your spleen.”
But people in my generation are typically scared of creating any sort of discourse, and that includes negotiating. I think Samantha thought that asking a salesperson to lower the price on his vehicle would be akin to telling him that he was stupid, and his wife was ugly, and his ridiculous comb-over doesn’t hide the fact that he has approximately as much head hair as a harbor seal.
So I called up my friend Mike, who has negotiated several car purchases, and I asked him to call a local car dealer and negotiate a price for Samantha on a used Tucson. I would’ve done it myself, but Samantha and Mike were in the same city, and I was a few hundred miles away. This would make things as easy as possible: Mike and the dealer would agree on the price, and Samantha would simply walk in, sign the papers, and be on her way. After only a few e-mails, Mike already had the car $1,000 cheaper than the one at CarMax.
Unfortunately, Samantha balked at this plan.
“WHY?!” I asked. “This is SO SIMPLE! All you have to do is go down there, sign something, and it’s YOURS!” The only time paying money for transportation has ever been easier than this is when you call an Uber from your phone and you pay him with your fingerprint.
And then, the admission.
It turns out the salesperson from CarMax had called Samantha a few times to follow up after her test drives, and now she felt bad for him. “I don’t want to abandon him,” she told me. “I should really buy the car from him.”
In other words: Samantha was prepared to spend an extra thousand dollars because she felt bad for the salesperson.
I begged her to reconsider. Salespeople deal with customers all the time who don’t buy anything. Do you think everyone who walks into Home Depot walks out with lumber? Do you think everyone who walks into Tiffany’s walks out with jewelry? Could you imagine if this was how our economy worked? Every time you talk to a salesperson you’re obligated to buy something from them? The whole idea is absurd! And boat salespeople would become social pariahs!
Unfortunately, Samantha was undeterred by this sort of logic, or by any sort of logic, or by the thousand dollars she could’ve saved by simply driving down to the dealership and signing the papers on the other car. The next day, she returned to CarMax and purchased the Tucson from the salesperson she felt bad for. Months later, she told me that her parents were so impressed with the Tucson that they, too, bought one from the same CarMax salesperson.
A family of people who apologize to dogs.
But really, I’m happy all of this happened, because this whole experience taught me a lesson. These days, when people come up to me and ask me for advice on how to buy a car, the conversation goes something like this:
Advice Asker: I REALLY NEED HELP BUYING A NEW CAR!!! Can you help me?!
Me: How do you want to buy your new car?
Advice Asker: With nothing down and 29.9 percent interest financed over eighty-four months!!!!
Me: That sounds excellent. You should do that!
Months later …
Advice Asker: I GOT MY NEW CAR!
Me: Oh! How did it go?
Advice Asker: It went great!! Thanks so much for helping me buy it! You’re AWESOME!
I relish being awesome.
The Time I Bribed a South African Government Official
I recently had the opportunity to drive a brand-new Porsche 911 in South Africa. At the same time, I also had the opportunity to bribe a government official. And by “government official,” what I mean to say is “tollbooth collector,” which is about the lowest rung of government official aside from school janitors, presidential pets, and people who put warning labels on melons. THAT DOES NOT MAKE THIS STORY ANY LESS COOL, OK?
It’s all in a day’s work if you’re Doug DeMuro, also known as “Super Journalist,” or, more accurately, “Journalist Who Sits Around All Day Without Any Pants Wondering Why They Don’t Make Bacon-Flavored Doritos.”
Before I get into the whole bribing thing, a little background. Sometime in December 2015, I received an e-mail from GQ Magazine asking if I wanted to fly to South Africa and drive the new Porsche 911 Turbo. The details were these: I would fly from New York City to Johannesburg on a flight that is twenty-five minutes shy of being the longest regularly scheduled commercial flight in the world, at sixteen hours and five minutes in the air. I would spend a day and a half in South Africa. I would fly back to New York City on the same sixteen-hour-and-five-minute flight. And then I would spend the next week throwing up because I ate tainted wild boar. At least, this is what I thought would happen if I went to South Africa.
Despite the hectic timing and the vomiting fears, you do not say “no” to GQ Magazine. What you say to GQ Magazine is: Are you sure you want a guy whose primary outfit includes sweatpants he got in middle school?
Apparently, they were sure. And so, a few weeks later, I was boarding my flight at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, bound for Johannesburg. About four hours after I took off, an enormous snowstorm moved in on the entire northeastern United States, dumping more than twenty-five inches on Philadelphia and a similar amount on New York. I missed it all. I was sitting in business class, watching movies, eating stupid old regular-flavored Doritos.
When I landed in Johannesburg, Porsche had forgotten to send someone to pick me up, so I got a ride from a South African taxi driver. This is when I discovered that things in South Africa are not particularly expensive. I rode from the airport to the Four Seasons—a distance of maybe fifteen miles that felt, in the back of an old Renault with vinyl seats, like one regulation eon—for a grand total of twelve dollars.
This is also when I discovered that things in South Africa are not especially well regulated. When I picked up the taxi, I had to give a one-dollar “tip” to everyone who helped me find it. I know this because they all shoved their hands in my face and wouldn’t allow me to walk away unless this tip had been provided. Imagine, if you will, a guy at the O’Hare Airport taxi stand preventing your cab from le
aving until you’ve paid him a dollar, and also there’s a guy at the baggage carousel who wants a dollar because he pulled your bag off the conveyor belt, and also there’s a guy in the bathroom who wants a dollar because he didn’t stab you in the ear while you peed.
My next experience with the lack of regulation came on the drive to the hotel. My taxi driver wasn’t especially fast, or especially slow, but he was especially adept at driving in between lanes until he had a clear indication of which one would be moving faster. This tactic did not seem to bother other drivers. He had also installed a photograph of someone, maybe a family member, right where he could always be sure to see it: directly in front of his speedometer.
And then there was the other traffic: we were passed more than one time by a 1990s Toyota van carrying what I could only surmise was half of suburban Johannesburg, and also a few barnyard animals. Admittedly, this was not all bedlam: at one point, we were also passed by a marked Volkswagen GTI police car.