Over the next week I managed to get around either through rides from various new co-workers or just through walking back and forth (this was not easy as Poughkeepsie isn't very friendly to non-automotive means of transport).

At the weekend, with the confidence that comes with having been paid for a week's work at IBM of all places, I went car hunting. This literally felt like hunting since I had to walk from dealer to dealer.

I found a nice Mazda GLC for $2000. It was clean, had some miles on it, but would do the job for me and I'd feel no qualms about getting rid of it at the end of the internship.

But, I had no money.

So I called the bank of parents, one of whom was quite upset about my borrowing and then essentially wrecking his van. Anyway, I quite cheerily called and asked for a loan of about $500, which would get me the car and a decent rate on the remaining $1500.

They said No.

No, they would not give me moeny to buy a foreign car. If I would buy a nice new American car they'd give me more, say $1000.

At this point I was getting kind of tired of walking and bumming rides off co-workers.

So I caved, and bought a 1990 Pontiac Sunbird. Fire engine red even.

With taxes and various options, the total came to about $16,000.

The monthly payment was $271.

As I was under 25, my insurance was about $150 per month.

As I was technically not in school for the fall semester ('twas a nine month internship), I had to start paying my student loans.

I quickly found my financial skills to be somewhat lacking, because the car was costing me close to $500 per month, about a third of my after tax income.

My rent was $650, the student loans were about $290, leaving about $200 per month for everything else (food, cable, phone, etc).

This wasn't my brightest moment, financially speaking. The car became a black hole for my income and savings for years. When I returned to school in 1991 I had to cover five months of payments, plus a kick in my insurance (for moving back to Pennsylvania), with no income whatsoever. What little savings I'd made while working in 1990 quickly evaporated.

And, the car?

The car sucked. For a small car it guzzled gas at an amazing rate. The air conditioning was lousy and within two years of buying it the driver's side window started falling into the door unexplicably.

The dealer I bought the car from was closed due to fraudulent business activities, which really didn't help my mood.

On returning to Pittsburgh in January 1991 I discovered that the air conditioning was lousy because an entire component of the a/c and heat system had been left out. A dealer in Pittsburgh did the repair for free to me, even though the car was technically out of warranty (1 year or 12,000 miles, I ate through the 12k miles in the months of driving between Pittsburgh and Poughkeepsie).

I ended up driving the car for another seven years, from 1995-1996 I drove it normally 100 miles round trip between Poughkeepsie and Armonk. It managed to do the job, but I hated the car.

I managed to refinance the loan at some point after I returned to IBM as a real employee (and could thus get a loan through the employee credit union). I lowered the monthly payment by about $130 but felt like I was going to be paying for years for my earlier mistake in buying the car in the first place.

In 1997 I moved to New York City and all but stopped driving. I had a four block commute from an apartment on Battery Place to my office on Broad Street. And although the car was paid off at this point, I was still paying insurance and now parking, about $350 a month still.

The car had no residual resale value.

One morning, before moving to New York but after I started commuting by train to NYC, anyway, one morning I happened to walk around the passenger side of the car. How many people hop in their cars on a daily basis and never look at the passenger side? I did this morning and discovered the passenger door had been gouged, if not carved, from the hinge to about half the length of the door. About the right height for...a snowplow ? I don't know what had hit it, nor when it had occurred since I'd been training for about a month at that point.

So, over the summer of 1997 the car spent most of its time parked in a lot in front of my apartment at Battery place.

Once, a colleague found his car blocked in in the same lot and called to see if he could borrow my car to drive himself and a couple other employees to Armonk for the day.

I said sure, but do you know what shape my car is in? since at this point the passenger door was frozen in place, and the driver's side window randomly fell into the door at odd moments, like during blizzards or rainstorms.

At this point it was cheaper to rent a luxury car from Hertz periodically than to hold onto the Sunbird.

I never really planned to abandon it, it just happened.

September 1997 dawned and the Museum of Jewish Heritage opened just south of my apartment in Battery Park City. No parking was allowed on the street, and the lot I parked in was to be closed for the days surrounding the opening. I in turn was to go to Boston for that year's ICC meeting. The ICC was a family of employees (mostly guys) who ran IBM's internet operations. Not marketing types, hardcore geeks, hackers, and systems administrators. I had a weird role in that I frequently had to butt heads with the guys since my job was to eliminate rogue web sites and internet operations.

Anyway, so I had to go to Boston and move my car somewhere. So I parked it in a local parking garage and took the train to Boston.

On returning I....didn't retrieve the car. Instead I flew to Tampa, FL to do some work with the guys working on the 1998 Nagano Olympic Games web site.

And on returning from Tampa...I didn't retrieve the car.

As the days became weeks and then nearly a month, I did go to the car to get it out of the lot and, lo, it was dead.

Not a spark of life in the battery, nothing.

Now not only did I have a car with a running bill of $35/day parking, but it was dead and I'd have to find a tow truck willing to go up multiple levels in a parking garage to either retrieve it or at least charge it.

Another month or two passed. December '97 dawned and I found myself working on the 1998 Superbowl web site. In the midst of a trip to Atlanta I learned my father had had a heart attack and was due to have bypass surgery. The surgery was successful but he had a difficult recovery.

At this point, the fact that I owned a car or that it was parked in a garage in downtown Manhattan was the farthest concern from my mind.

December became January. January became February. In those months I flitted between Chicago, New York, San Diego, and Nagano, Japan.

On returning to New York at the end of February 1998 I resolved to do something about the car. Swallow my whatever, pay the parking bill, and get rid of the car.

Only...the car was gone. I walked throughout the garage and it wasn't on any level of the garage. Totally gone. Stolen? Who knows. Only that at least one problem had been resolved. I wasn't sure if I was still lliable for the parking bill but at this point was not going to ask.

Some years later I did a search on the VIN at Carfax and discovered that the car had been transferred, somehow, to someone in New Jersey.

So, someone somewhere is driving a 1990 Pontiac Sunbird, with a slight shimmy in the front end, and I hope a replacement passenger door.

As for me, I blame the truck tire that started the whole mess.