Red to Positive, Black to Negative

OK. Not to complain . . . I have been trying really hard to only see positive things, but unless I was supposed to radically revise my definition of "positive," I have failed miserably.

I won't even try to talk about the other matter that is sort of a continuously operating negativity engine with occasional  positive hiccoughs, so let's start with my motorcycle shopping tour of yesterday.  (Just, really, really bored, folks.)  I must have been doing something wrong because before I left one particular business establishment, I was wading hip deep in bullshit and thought I was never going to make it out.

You see, the sales guy, who is my age, started by telling me about how his girlfriend died five years ago, and somehow he worked in his Viet Nam injuries and--I ain't lyin'--he pulled up his pant leg to show me the scars from the multiple bullet-wound injury.

It was touch and go for a moment where I thought I wouldn't be able to resist saying something about how glad I was that he wasn't shot in the left buttock like Forrest Gump,  but managed to check out the scars and nod in that delicate dance between empathy and awe, not sure, at the moment, which he was looking for.

He continued his story, how he met his current wife of two years, and it was she who dragged him to church, and eventually there was some sort of biker get together involving the blessing of the bikes.   The Blessing of the Bikes?  Anyway . . .

He watched me carefully as he told this story.  Independence, MO, has more than its share of super-religious folk and a good business man has to cover all the bases.  When he saw I wasn't buying into it, he kind of chuckled and scoffed, as if to say, wives, what are you going to do with them?  Yeah.

Then the real lying started.  It had to do with a 2007 model year Kawasaki that was still "brand new."  This was something he never managed to sell, somehow since he got it in the crate from Kawasaki.  He told me they were $7,200 new, but of course he had to mark it down to $5,995 even though it still came with the full one-year factory warranty.

Wrong. The MSRP on the bike in 2007 was $6,295 so even if I was buying one way back then, (five [5] model years ago,) a measly discount of $300 would have been just a little insulting. Four years later, it borders on the outrageous.  But he was sure to tell me that he was only going to make $200 off of this bike, and if he couldn't do that, he wasn't going to sell it, and to prove this assertion, he even showed me, not the invoice ("Anyone can write up a fake invoice and show it to you,") but a recipe box with index cards in it, which he riffled through to find the card for this bike and there, scrawled with ballpoint pen, was the incontrovertible truth of the matter.  There was the bike, VIN number, and amount he had to make to get $200 profit, and he showed it to me and said, I'm just showing you this because I can see you're the kind of man who appreciates honesty.

It goes on.  I could buy the extended warranty, at these prices, for 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, respectively, which is half, HALF, what Kawasaki wants him to charge, but he's here to help his customers, not to make Kawasaki happy--and here he told me how they call him up at regular intervals to complain about this good-guy policy of his, and to drive his point home, he acts out their part, then his part on the phone, complete with a very bad Japanese accent which I find not only discomforting but insulting as well, as if this is the icing on the cake, that he has done his best to sell this bike to me because he has done everything he knows to do, provided that I am a religious, superstitious, bigoted idiot who doesn't know how to Google something or even do simple arithmetic.

 So perhaps I brought this on myself.  I got cocky with all this "positive" stuff and the universe is now slapping me around a little bit. Or, perhaps the universe is showing me that while appreciating, even expecting, the positive is a good idea, car and motorcycle dealers are exempt from this Karmic loophole. With them, you have to fall back on the law of the jungle; you are on your own.