Haggling.

I love haggling.  I haven’t inherited a lot of cultural traditions, but haggling is recreation for old Jews, like those stupid balls are for old Italians.  It’s sport.  And there’s little that’s more disappointing than goys who don’t understand it, know how to do it, or appreciate its value in the realm of social intercourse.  Today I start this blog entry because this morning’s haggle was a thing of beauty and it would be a shame to allow it to be forgotten.  Sometimes improvisation kicks the ass of anything you could write.

The Gate

Some stuff happened here recently – the acreage down the road where my girls have been riding and keeping a couple of horses was sold, so we had to bring the horses home.  But we’re about to take off for a week of camping (and sailing, I hope) in Montana, and didn’t want to deal with having someone stay here to take care of them or hauling them off to yet another stable.  Instead, it was decided they’d be turned out in our field.  Only that field has never been properly fenced – we’ve just kludged up electric fencing from time to time and the stupid things sometimes manage to get past it.  So now I’m dealing with planting 50 fenceposts and stringing half a mile of barbed (ahem – Canadian) wire, which really isn’t much fun.  Job’s nearly done, though, and we just needed a (10′ long steel tube) gate.  Spotted one at a garage sale in town last week, asked about it, and was quoted $90.  Didn’t get it then because I wasn’t sure the size was right.  But a week later we decided it would work, so I went back, and it was still there (outside – where, truth be told, we probably could have just stolen it at night, but that wouldn’t be as good a story as this).  So here’s where we pick up this morning’s dialogue:

Me:  I figure we should take that gate off your hands.  Might be a little small, but I think we can make it work.  How does $60 sound?

Him:  Oh, I have to get $90 out of that.

Me:  Come on, $90 was last week’s price, and it’s still here.

Him:  Well, I’ve had a lot of interest in it.

Me:  You have a lot of interest, but I have cash and a car.

Him:  Okay, but I can’t go any lower than $80.

Me:  Sold.

Honestly, it’s not the ten bucks.  It’s the game.

The (first) 2001 Subaru Outback 3.0 H6

It’s the summer of 2019 and I really want to move up to one of these cars – we’ve been towing sailboats and Seadoos all over the place with the four of us and all our gear, and with that load the four-cylinder 2.5 litre engines in our existing Subarus are really at their limit.  I needed more power and was reluctant to go the turbo route, as the 2.5 litre w/ turbo combination has a bad reputation.  So I spotted this H6 on kijiji and took a look.  Body was terrible – more than the usual rust around the rear wheel wells, grille and bumper missing, hood not closing due to slight crease (all of the front end stuff a product of a minor crash).  But it started and ran great, so we got down to business.  I think she was asking a thousand, and I didn’t have any sense of how low she might go, so I said “Look, I don’t want to insult you with a low-ball offer like $600…”, and before I could get any further, she interrupted me and said “I’ll take 600”.

I’m happy with the result, of course, but almost a little disappointed that she didn’t make me work harder for it.

The (second) 2001 Subaru Outback 3.0 H6

I hadn’t even been able to get the first one on the road yet.  I’d taken care of the front end stuff, but it really needed the brakes done, and some MORON had installed Simbolz locking wheel nuts on this thing.  Go look them up if you wish; they use this idiotic system of keying pins, and you have to get the right key to fit the nut.  It wasn’t so much having to spend $30 to buy the key from a place in Vancouver that pissed me off – it was that when the car got new tires a year or two previous someone was stunned enough to reinstall these things on a nearly-20-year-old beater rather than replace them with regular lug nuts – and then lose the key!  I mean, if you’ve got $10,000 worth of rims, I guess locks make sense, but these were old stock rims.  So between that delay and my having to make a blitz trip (in the ’99 Outback whose engine I’d rebuilt the previous winter) to Long Island (a 5000 mile round trip) to pick up a Supercat 19, next thing I knew it was the dead of winter and I didn’t have a chance to get at it until mid-May 2020.

But, being stupid, I was still watching kijiji and another one popped up in October of 2019.  I got ahold of the guy and took a look at it the night before I headed to New York, and the story was that it had a head gasket leak and he started to take it apart, but soon realized that he was in over his head.  Pulling heads on the older 2.5 litre engines in situ isn’t a big deal – it’s tight, but doable – but I don’t think it can be done with the larger H6, which is quite a bit more complicated (for example, unlike the plastic EJ22 and EJ25 timing covers, this one’s is metal and has 60 screws that need to be torqued).  To really seal it, though, he was working out behind the house on a soft, unpaved parking spot – no pad, no shelter.  So he just stopped in his tracks and left it in pieces – a kit car, though with a body rather better than the first.  I told him I was interested, and when I saw in January that it was still there (not a big surprise), I dropped him a note to begin to arrange towing it home.  The fun happened when we had to settle on the price.  (Before I forget, this one too had those fucking Simbolz locks (and no key) made worse by his attempt to drill one off – a mess I have yet to clean up.)

He was asking $800.  Suzy was (for various reasons) resistant to getting it at all, but if it had to happen (it did), she wanted to see it at $400.  I told her that was a nonstarter, but that I could probably pull off $500.  So when I broached the subject with buddy, here’s what happened (Oh, and did I mention that he was a Jesus freak?  Some weird Christian sect that flash around a lot of Hebrew and shaloms and shit, but think that the Jews got it all wrong.  No matter.):

Me:  You were asking $800, right?  All things considered, I don’t think we can do that, so where can we go?

Him:  Well, I prayed on it, and the answer I received was $600.

Me:  Yeah, that’s still tough.  I too answer to a higher authority, and I’m getting some real heat from her over this.  We have too many cars right now, she just left her job, and it’s a collection of parts – she wants to see $400, but I don’t think that’s fair.  But I’ll tell you what.   I’ll check with her and we’ll settle it tomorrow.

The next day I came back and told him that the answer I’d received was $500, which he accepted.

The moral of this story is that Susan > God.