It was an eventful Tuesday in Bangalore. I found a nice apartment complex with all amenities in the locality I wanted to be in and signed the lease. Here’s the catch: besides the rent being astronomical, the security deposit is 10 months’ rent. Remember the times when we used to bitch about the one month deposit in the US? How the heck am I supposed to shell out a 10 month deposit upfront? Apparently, everyone else does.
The company helped me out a lot with the initial setup concerns. They put me up in a Guest House until I found a place to live. Amenities included free food and laundry. They set me up with a company car until I bought one. They even signed the apartment lease in their name and paid the security deposit.
On the same Tuesday, I also put down the deposit on my used car. I’ll pick it up on Tuesday. It was about 7:00 PM when I got done with everything. Mom and I were driving back home from somewhere in the outskirts of the city. At a traffic light, I noticed that the bus in front of me was spewing smoke on to the front of my car. I mentioned this to Mom, so we both were cursing pollution in the city. Then we found that everyone else around was looking at us with stupid expressions. So I took a closer look and found out why. The smoke was emanating from under the hood of MY car! The engine temperature gauge had gone bonkers, reading somewhere above the "Very Hot" mark. I pulled over to the curb, opened up the hood and found to my dismay that all the radiator coolant was boiling over. All I could think of was the AAA. Since they weren’t around to offer me a tow halfway across the world, I had to call the local service guys to take the car away. The response time was great; they were at the site within 20 minutes of my distress call. In the meantime I had to deal with wannabe mechanics in the form of auto rickshaw drivers, random bikers and truck drivers, all of whom wanted to help me out in different ways.
Well, at least I take solace in the fact that it was my company car, not my own.
2 comments:
So how badly are you missing the RSX?
-Jason
Hey Jason! Good to know you are reading up on the blog too! Yeah dude, tell me about it. Every day during my morning commute I think about the RSX and the experience I had driving it on the Pocono Nascar race track. Maybe someday the roads here will be good enough for an RSX to survive... how's your Contour doing?
Post a Comment