Be Seated

I hate when I get accused of being lazy just because I put something off for a few days or several months. You know - like posting.

(True, sometimes it is because I'm lazy, but that doesn't mean I have to like being accused of it.)

Yet sometimes the reason has nothing to do with laziness. For example, I have a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be organized. I also have developed a pretty good framework for how I want to organize it. I just need to put the organizational system into place, then all the organizing will be easy. My problem - and thus the delay - is finishing the system. You see, I'm a perfectionist; I'm just not very good at it. But here the problem is crazy, not lazy.

Then there are other reasons. The driver's seat of my car, for instance, broke. Apparently there is a weld in the frame of the seatback that snapped at some point. When this first happened, the seat leaned to right a little bit but still held up OK. After a while, something snapped again and suddenly I could no longer incrementally adjust the reclining angle of the seat. Also, if I leaned too hard, the seat would make a Pop! and suddenly it would recline a lot. When this happened, I would have to get out of the car, pull the lever that allows you to recline the seat, and give the seat back a big shove forward.

Lately, however, the seat turned terminal. The seat back had all the structural integrity of wet cardboard and it had to be replaced. This led to the conversation that I had been avoiding. I took Hubert (I drive a mid-90's Buick ... it's an old man's car, it needs an old man's name!) to the local dealership and asked for an estimate.

I know what you're thinking at this point. First, I don't know why, oh why, you are still reading this. Second, you are getting ready to point the lazy finger at me for not getting an estimate sooner.

But you see, I already had an estimate; I just needed one from the dealer. And as I had estimated, the dealer's estimate was indeed higher than my estimate of the dealer's estimate. See, I hadn't been putting this off out of laziness, I had been putting this off because I'm cheap.

Fortunately for me, the service manager on duty that day was also cheap. He suggested I check with salvage yards to see if I could track down a new, er, replacement seat that way.

(One good thing about driving an old man's car is there are always plenty of parts available from salvage yards. Many old men drive either too slow or too fast, which means there are a lot of cars out there that are OK except for the tremendous front-end or rear-end damage. As they used to say about chicken nuggets, parts is parts.)

Sure enough, I found a seat.

All it took was a couple hours of work, a trip to the local auto parts store to find the special ratchet attachment for the one freaking star-shaped bolt, and some colorful metaphors and voila! I had replacement seat in my car for a good $1,000 less than it would have been to have the dealer do it.

And to prove laziness was not the issue, the next day I uninstalled and reinstalled the seat again.

(That aforementioned one freaking star-shaped bolt is used to attach the seat belt to the frame of the car. The seat belt receptacle on the replacement seat was incompatible with the seat belt on the car. I didn't realize this until Saturday night when we drove to the store. As I was driving, my seat belt, which I had clicked into the receptacle, started retracting. It clicked, it just didn't latch.)

I'm actually going to have to uninstall and reinstall the seat one more time. The upholstery on the seats don't match, so there is a slight deviation between the fabric on the various seats.

(By slight deviation, I mean the back and passenger seats are maroon, the driver's seat is beige.)

That's a repair for a different day, however. Perhaps even a different month.