The curse gods...

Do suppose that there could possibly be some kind of curse god who hands out bizarre, random, lifelong curses to people?

The clutch on my husbands 18 month old Hyundai went out this week. If that isn’t bad enough, the dealership calls and says that the clutch and transmission were both bad (to the tune of $3600), and that it ‘s not covered by the warranty because of the “non standard” transmission parts they have found on out car. Huh???. We march down to the dealer where they point at areas in our torn apart car and say that part is wrong, it’s too big, look where someone drilled out this hole, look at this pin, the part color is even wrong…. blah, blah, blah. We of course are dumbfounded because we bought the car new from the dealer, have never had anything done to it other than oil changes and tires. I don’t think that our city has a weird band of thieves that go around replacing car parts in the middle of the night. And who in their right mine would buy a car with a 10,000 mile warranty and then take it to someone other than the dealer to have a major repair done? We rightfully so, pitch a fit, insisting that they should be fixing our car, and after getting pretty huffy and even mentioning the “L” word (lawyer) they finally agreed to cover the repair. I’m not sure they really believed us as they kept insisting they have never a seen a car like ours with those particular transmission parts. I hate feeling like someone is calling me dishonest, and of course we have no way to prove that we have not had some weird repair job done on our car. (How do you prove a non-event?) I was pretty cranky. Unfortunately they later called us and said they wouldn’t cover the clutch portion after all, because the clutch only has a 12,000 mile warranty. I guess that will be our argument with them tomorrow Did the weird transmission cause the clutch to fail prematurely?? Who wants a $1000 repair bill for Christmas? Argh!!

Now this brings me to the curse part. Does my husband have some kind of clutch curse? Is there some strange god up there dolling out curses and it is my husbands lot in life to get cars with lousy clutches? Flashback to ’85 when the clutch failed on his less than 2 year old Honda. We were heading to Park City to celebrate out 1st anniversary, and were 60 miles from our home when the clutch went out. We had it towed to a dealership in Salt Lake and they replaced the clutch, which was of course no longer under warranty. The clutch started slipping before we made it the 40 miles home. So we took it to the Ogden dealership, who repaired it a second time. That clutch repair lasted about 2 weeks longer than the 90 day warranty. At that point we said “screw the Honda dealers” and took it to Mort’s Transmissions, a local shop run by a couple of Iranian guys who mostly fixed Mercedes. Those guys could fix cars! That clutch job lasted quite a few years.. Eventually the clutch went out again, and since we’d moved to Salt Lake we took it to some local yocals for the repair. (We were fools, we should have had it towed 40 miles to our buddy Mort’s!) This time the clutch started slipping before the car made it the 6 miles home and we had to fight with shop to get it re-repaired. I think the clutch failed again after that. If my memory serves we has 5 clutch repairs in 150,000 miles.

By now you must be thinking whoa, these people must not know how to drive a stick. Rest assured that is not true. Some where along the line we were told that particular year Honda had a “weird” clutch design and this Hyundai thing is just plain weird, all I can assume is that a part got put on the wrong assembly line and some moron installed it anyway. So are we cursed? Or is my husband cursed? My little silver Dodge Shadow went over 120,000 miles without having any repairs to the clutch. But that was primarily my car, does this mean the clutch curse is really my husbands? Or does the curse only apply to cars beginning with an “H”? Or only to cars that are red? Will it be our lot in life to forever deal with problem clutches? Are other people plagued by weird curses like this? Or are we just some of the lucky few who get visited by the curse gods?