Boston MA: Wheeler Dealer
I was woken by Eric with the minivan ringing me up, his phone was dead so he only just got my message. I sleepily started negotiating, blah blah, broken AC, there is a better one with AC and less miles for $3k,blah blah, so I offered him $2k. He said he only wanted to go as low as $2200 which was ok, that would be fine so I offered him that and he said he would have to check with his wife (!) and get back to me. I said I needed a couple of days to get the cash from the ATMs as I could only get $600 a day. He said ok and I started looking for insurance. He phoned back to say his wife said ‘stop messing about and take the offer’. Cool. Seems like I had a minivan. Or not…
He called back again and said he had already promised some people who had cash they could come and see it anyway….! Um, Great. Yeah he wants to sell it and I want to buy it. Sure, maybe I could find something better in the meantime and get that instead but it didn’t look likely, and the other minivan I was using to negotiate the price was now gone from criagslist. So I said if this was the case I would try to get the cash together that day. So instead of looking for insurance I had to walk to the ATM. I only had $800 in cash so needed $1400 more. $1000 withdrawal didn’t work, nor did $700 so I got $600×2 on my nationwide and Lloydstsb, still $200 short. I tried another ATM and think I broke my Lloyds card by trying a few times. So, $200 to find and I didn’t have my VISA card so I walked back to the house and then back to the Bank of America on Mass Av. The PIN didn’t work…. new card, I told them not to change it but it seems they did. Barclays are idiots anyway, I called to get new cards and they sent me cards with the same expiry date. In January I will have a new windshield scraper.
So I summoned my courage, swallowed my pride and rang Frank for a loan. This was not what I wanted at all, I had known the guy a few days and Im asking for money…. bleh. Still, I offered my passport as collateral, was suffiently apologetic and he took a chance. I rang Eric back and told him it was all good. Eric had actually phoned me back to apologise for saying he was taking an option on our verbal aggreement which was nice of him, but I had the cash now and it was all academic. We arranged to get it dropped off at 8pm and by now half the day was gone. I seached a few more places on the net for insurance but I was sick of the whole hassle by now so it seemed like I had another wasted day.
Tags: Travel, atm, insurance, bleh, hassle, money, cards