When I was a young teenager, I was really into cars. We would go to the Thomasville airport to watch the NHRA drag races (from a distance, at the end of the runway). I subscribed to car magazines and devoured them. At one point I even thought I might go to Vo-Tech and learn to be an auto mechanic.
Oh, what a misguided idea that would have been! On one of those school-administered aptitude tests I scored quite low on Mechanical Reasoning; the lack of said ability likely would have stunted my progress learning how motors work and then fixing them. I think I had a much better career in the arts.
Anyway, for one of my birthdays as a teen, I had enough money to buy a really cool model car. But for some reason, at the last moment, I decided to get a Volkswagen Beetle fuel-burning self-propelled car. This one was of the most profoundly poor purchases of my life, and one that I regret still to this day and don’t understand why I did what I did.
First of all, it wasn’t radio-controlled. You’d pull the starter cord, get the engine running, and then let it go. You could change the front wheels’ orientation to have it go in circles or have it run in a straight line, but you had to handle it to make the change. And that kind of takes the fun out of it driving itself.
But worse than that was the fact that, when I got it running, it wouldn’t keep running. Pull, pull, pull, and it would start! And stop. Or run until I closed the body and readied it to drive. Or sat it down on the road and watch it drive for 6 feet and then stall out and stop dead.
I tried and tried. We took it back to the store (Race-O-Rama, the hobby store in York, PA) and the counter guy tried, and he couldn’t get it to keep running either. Perhaps defective? I guess. Did I want an exchange? No. Refund. Luckily they gave it to me. I left with my money and no other purchase. How disappointing.
MUSOFYR 