It was a Dodge Cal­iber, and it looked pretty much exactly like this:

1. It was orange.
2. Its speak­ers were woe­fully inad­e­quate. I like my music on the loud side, and I enjoy the bass. This would let me do nei­ther, trag­i­cally, with­out sound­ing like all four speak­ers in the car were blown. Every­thing from Bare­naked Ladies to Corb Lund to KMFDM caused dis­tor­tion. It didn’t make me happy.
3. Its rear-window wiper was a god­send on the dirt roads around my grandpa’s farm.
4. Its cruise con­trol, when told to RESUME, would actu­ally take me up to 5km/h faster than I had set it to, and then slowly ease back off on the ham­mer. I had a car that used to do that, once. It was a 1988 Tem­pest. I think cruise con­trol tech­nol­ogy should by now have evolved to the point where RESUME means what I think it does — take me back to the speed I was going before, not faster, not slower.
5. It had four wheels, four doors and a hatch­back, and as far as I can tell, four cylinders.
6. It had cup hold­ers that lit up when the head­lights were on, for no rea­son I can think of. (Well, that’s not true. I can see the engi­neers say­ing to each other, “Hey, you know what would be cool…” Too bad they missed #10.)
7. It had a “rac­ing style” gearshift to make you think you were dri­ving a high-performance car, and…
8. its cruise con­trol con­trol was set up like a racing-car pad­dle shifter on the steer­ing wheel, to fur­ther develop the high-performance illusion.
9. It had decent acceleration.
10. It had the worst vis­i­bil­ity out the rear win­dows — I dreaded chang­ing lanes, because all I could see when I shoulder-checked was car inte­rior. Not a clue what might be lurk­ing in my blind spot. As far as I can tell, this was due to the sub-porthole-sized rear­most win­dows, and the fact that the driver’s seat head­rest and the back door pil­lars got in the way.
11. It did not con­form to my stan­dards of an attrac­tive car.
12. Since it was the long week­end, it was half-price.
13. And it was what they had left down at the rental place.

So no, I won’t be buy­ing a Dodge Cal­iber any time soon.

• Doug got lazy. Sort of.
• Steph likes the 80s
• Mike’s First Time
• Post a com­ment and I’ll link you up!