my life is a comedy.
© 2002 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

I decided to get rzr_grl a car stereo for Christmas. The stereo in her car only has cassette, and as far as I can tell, she only owns one cassette (Best of Prince or something. Nothing against the Purple Doily mind you, but really.) So I ordered one that plays MP3 CDRs; I have one in my car, and it's just great.

I ordered it in early December, and when she left to go visit her family last week, I finally mailed the online store to find out where the hell it was. ``Oh, we'll be shipping those out some time in January.'' Nice. So I canceled the order, and bought one in person, two hours later. (Aren't we in the future yet?)

Fortunately, she had decided to leave her car and car keys at my house without me having to concoct some reason that I should have a copy of the keys!

So I patched together the proper cable and installed it in her car (even running a power line through the firewall to the battery, because try though I might, I couldn't talk myself into ignoring the manual's admonition not to use the power available behind the dash.)

However, as I mentioned in the subject, my life is a comedy. I've known this for some time, I've come to expect it, and sometimes, I try to intervene before the rules of dramatic structure take things in a direction I don't want them to go.

Therefore, I didn't actually install the stereo in the car the day after she left: I got it hooked up and saw it work, then I took it inside, planning on installing it on the afternoon before she came back into town. Why? Because it would have been really funny if I were to install this stereo, and then it got stolen while sitting in the car for five days before she even got to see it. That would have been hilarious, and so it was, of course, inevitable.

So last night, I made the trip out to feed her cat. It was wet and cold out, so I decided to take my car instead of bicycling, because I'm a lazy fatass.

Yes, my stereo was stolen, some time after I dropped her off at the airport.

Same stereo. Different car.

The hand of fate will not be thwarted.

So today I finished installing her stereo, and picked her up at the airport in my car. We made it all the way home before she noticed that my car had a gaping hole where the stereo should be! ``Um, where's your stereo?'' she asked. ``Yeah, Merry Fucking Christmas. Apparently I gave it to some crackhead.''

So we stopped off at my place, and then went over to her place in her car to feed the cat again. This time she noticed the blank plate in the car right away! She looked at it with horror, then realized it was flat, not a hole, then looked confusedly at me, and I handed her the faceplate (with a little duct tape bow and everything.)

Then her car wouldn't start.

(Well, it did eventually. But clearly that was the end of the chapter.)

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