My First Internship

 

I did two internships during my time at BYU, and the first was an unpaid summer internship for my hometown newspaper, The Dalles Chronicle.

I grew up reading the Chronicle, and it shaped my idea of local journalism before I headed off to college. I had also been featured in the Chronicle a few times in high school – once, I was quoted as a student representative on a committee advising the school board; another time, I appeared in a front page photo as Cinderella’s stepmother in the spring musical. So getting my byline in that particular paper was satisfying.

Everyone at the Chronicle was significantly older than me, but the two full-time general assignment reporters, both near retirement age, were gracious in taking me under their wing. The sum total of my journalism experience thus far was a single semester at a student publication, but once I proved my worth my editor trusted me to go off and report on all sorts of stories.

I filled in for the sports reporter while he went on vacation, and while there were no high school games to cover, I filled the sports page for the week with features on off-beat “sports” like dirt biking and fly fishing. I covered various local summer events, and wrote a column defending my decision to go into journalism even though people kept telling me print was dead. One of my favorite stories I did that summer was a long Sunday feature on a tattoo artist, talking about her journey to sobriety from drugs.

During my internship I confronted one of the weaknesses that many journalists of my generation face: I really hated talking on the phone. The idea of picking up the phone and cold-calling a stranger was about as daunting as walking into an interview in my underwear.

At the Daily Universe, I had almost always been able to avoid this by using the university directory to email professors to set up an interview and then interviewing them in person. But in the real world in 2009, most businesses didn’t have a website listing all their staff email addresses, Facebook was for college students, and texting was for people who could afford to pay 10 cents a text.

I don’t know if it was more a Millennial thing or a McDowell thing. My mom and my aunt once bonded over laughing hysterically at stories of the lengths their husbands went to avoid picking up a phone. Why call the number in the window of the car you are really interested in buying, when you can just drive by it every day in the hopes that the owner will be standing there?

Either way, I had to really psyche myself up every time I made a phone call. I would literally write down a script for introducing myself and study it, rehearsing the words in my head, taking a few deep breaths and then saying to myself, “Actually, maybe I’ll do this other thing and call later.” Every time I got an answering machine, I breathed a sigh of relief.

They weren’t even hard calls, unlike later in my career, when I would have to call people to ask questions like, “Did you commit this crime you’re accused of?” or “Why did you get fired?” You would think people would yell at you or hang up on you when you told them you were going to write in the paper that they were being charged with a crime, but surprisingly, those conversations were sometimes downright pleasant. A man accused of defrauding people by collecting “investments” in creation of a biofuels plant and then allegedly spending all that money on himself, for example, cheerfully told me he would be happy to invite me to the groundbreaking when it was ready to take place.

On the other hand, sometimes the most innocuous-seeming stories you didn’t think twice about will get you yelled at. I once covered a 5k event on Thanksgiving, for example, and when I arrived I asked who was in charge and interviewed the woman who was pointed out, referring to her as “Organizer so-and-so” in the story that also featured quotes from several runners and information about the charity the event was benefitting. Later a different woman called, irate, and asked how I could be so incompetent to give someone else credit for the event that she organized. No “thank you for missing out on family time to work Thanksgiving Day to give some positive coverage of our event,” just complaints.

Anyway, I took the first step in getting over my phone phobia with my internship at the Chronicle, and survived. I couldn’t afford to spend the entire summer there, because college is expensive, but I did spend eight weeks of my four-month summer break there and then spent the next couple of months working 60-hour weeks to make up for it.

I had assumed I would be heading into my first paid journalism job in the fall, after faculty at the Daily Universe told me I did a great job as a reporter there and I should apply for a paid editor position when I came back. However, they ended up deciding to hire students who were closer to graduation and hadn’t had the opportunity for that experience yet.

This resulted in the only period of unemployment in my adult life. It was in 2009, when the recession was still going strong, and there was more supply than demand when it came to student labor. Everywhere I went that fall semester, I’d hand over my job application only to see it placed on an inch-thick stack of applications already submitted. I’d like to say that I used that extra 20 hours a week wisely, but to be honest, my grades weren’t any better, I just spent more time socializing and actually had time to watch TV for once.

I applied for the Daily Universe again as the fall semester came to a close, and at first I was once again told that there were seniors who needed the experience more than I did. But over Christmas break, I caught a lucky break: One of the girls hired had changed her mind about working there, and I was asked to take her place.

I was ready.

The Story of How I Became a Journalist

 

The first news article I ever published was in a newspaper that my brother Lance and I created. The Family News only published a single edition, created solely for the purpose of mocking my father, who had sprained his ankle by stepping on a walnut. For some reason this was very funny to us, and we let our bias on the matter show by including the line, “People say Rodney will be participating in physical therapy, which is funny because he’s a therapist too.”

Other than the front page news, titled “The Walnut Catastrophe,” the edition included an article about how our youngest brother Cole was sick that week and a tongue-in-cheek advice column in which I recommended a fictious sister frustrated by her younger brothers call Poison Control to find a suitable poison for getting rid of them

(I don’t know exactly how old I was when this took place, maybe 12? Old enough I should have had a better understanding of the purpose of Poison Control, since by then I’m pretty sure my parents had called Poison Control three times, once for each of my brothers.)

At that point, I didn’t know yet that I was going to make a career out of journalism. When I was a kid with a voracious appetite for books I said I was going to be an author, and then when I got old enough to understand how many bills adults have I went through a phase where I said I wanted to be an English teacher, because that seemed safer. During my junior year of high school, I took AP English Language, and we started off each class period reading news columns by people like George Will and Gail Collins, and I decided that being a columnist sounded like the perfect marriage of two of my great loves: Writing and telling people my opinions.

I took a journalism class my senior year, and my teacher, who went by Ms. Jennings at the time, was pretty cool.

Once, I was persuaded to skip her class by some friends who had a free period that period and wanted to hang out. It seemed like a fine idea at the time, until a few hours later when I found myself at parent-teacher conferences and realized that:

1)     My locker was next to Ms. Jennings’ room and she was sure to have noticed that I was at school that day but never quite made it to her class.

2)     This seemed sure to come up when my parents arrived at her room.

3)     My parents at this point had no idea that I occasionally did not quite make it to a class I was supposed to be attending and I wasn’t quite sure exactly how mad they would be about it.

As we made the rounds to the teachers Lance and I had, I caught a lucky break when the rest of the family was caught up by someone in the hallway and I entered Ms. Jennings’ classroom alone, looking, no doubt, incredibly guilty.

She looked at me knowingly, and said lightly, “I noticed you didn’t make it to class today. I figured after all the hard work you’ve been putting in lately you had earned a mental health day. Just know you’ve used your one for the semester.”

She did not mention anything to my parents, and out of gratitude I worked harder than ever before in her class and attended all my classes faithfully for the rest of the semester.

At the end of that class I had made up my mind that journalism did seem like something that might be a good fit, and so I signed up for some journalism prerequisites when I headed off to BYU.

Those journalism prereqs were kind of boring, to be honest. Classes about the basics of AP style really fail to capture the excitement of journalism. But I didn’t have any better ideas, so I applied for the program and was accepted.

I don’t know if this is how they still do it, but back then they throw you right into the fire your first semester in the program by making you a reporter for the school newspaper, at the time known as the Daily Universe (may it rest in peace). You were assigned a beat and spent about a million hours in the newsroom for four credits.

I was assigned the science beat, which was kind of funny considering I’m pretty sure the only reason I got a 4 on my AP Biology test in high school is that even though I couldn’t remember how the processes I was supposed to be describing on the essay portion actually worked, I had read that the judges just looked for vocabulary to check off, so I filled the essay with sentences that said things like, “Mitochondria are also involved.”

My very first story published in a newspaper printed on actual newsprint was a story about nematodes, which is a fancy way of saying I talked to a professor about his research on worms in Antarctica. It was not a very exciting story, but my parents sent me flowers congratulating me anyway, and every time I saw a student reading the paper on campus my head swelled with pride at the thought that SOMEONE IS READING SOMETHING I WROTE, even though in reality they were probably turned to the sports section.

I don’t actually remember a whole lot of other stories I wrote that semester, but a few stick out. One was a series of stories for the 200^th birthday of Charles Darwin, in which I interviewed biology professors who were all very, very big fans of Darwin. Another was a story about 2009 being the Year of Astronomy thanks to the 400^th anniversary of Galileo, in which I interviewed astronomy professors who were all very big fans of Galileo. All in all, it was a good year to be a science reporter.

The other was an interview with a professor who was studying rhinoviruses, and it’s ironic that the things that were groundbreaking to me in the interview, like the concept that people could have an asymptomatic viral respiratory infection they passed on to others unknowingly, are things that more than a decade later I would be reporting on again, this time to much more controversy.

The straw that broke the camel's back

This week I got catcalled.

A (young, female) co-worker and I were walking back from lunch downtown together because we didn't want to drive on the ice, when a group of men in a van slowed down, pulled up next to us and yelled things at us out the window.

On its face, it wasn't really a big deal. Not the first time something like that had happened to either of us, and it certainly won't be the last. But if I had been alone, if it had been getting dark or on a less busy road, I would have been thinking about how if the men, just feet away from me, jumped out and pulled me into the van there wouldn't really be anything I could do about it.

You have to think like that when you're a woman, because from the time you hit puberty society tells you don't go out alone at night or you'll get raped. Don't drink alcohol or you'll get raped. Don't leave your soda unattended or you'll get raped. Don't be alone with men you just met or you'll get raped. Don't wear tight clothes or you'll get raped. Don't stay in a hotel alone or you'll get raped. Don't run with headphones in or you'll get raped. Don't park in parking garages or you'll get raped. Don't wear your hair in a ponytail because that makes it easier for a rapist to grab you and drag you into an alley.

It's hard not to let that color everything you do, to sit and wonder if the man on the other end of the phone you've never met will be offended if you ask him to meet you in a public place for the interview instead of his home as he just suggested. You know that probably nothing will happen if you break these "rules" for not getting raped or otherwise assaulted, but you also know that if something does happen everyone will tsk tsk and say "Well what was she thinking, going for a walk by herself at 11 at night? And in that tight of jeans?"

I personally know people who have been raped. I know women who have been stalked, who have been abused. These things really happen. And you know that if they do, the police might say there's not enough evidence to make an arrest, or the jury might not believe you, or the judge might only sentence your attacker to a few months in jail or even just probation because he doesn't want to ruin a young man's sports career or the middle school girl "came onto" her teacher and he's the real victim for having his reputation ruined.

Sometimes, men don't have to yell dirty, suggestive things at you to make you feel small. Sometimes it's the "harmless old men" who "don't know any better" than to treat the men around you with a certain level of professionalism while at the same time calling you "honey" and "sweetheart" and asking why you aren't married yet instead of answering the interview questions. There's a man who sometimes comes into the newsroom to drop off literature about how women's place is in the home, serving her man, and to chastise our almost-all-female office for having jobs.

This is an actual conversation I had a couple of months ago with a customer who came in to complain he hadn't gotten a newspaper delivered that day:

Me: Here's your paper, sorry you had to come in and get it.
Him: That's OK, it got me out of some housework. I hate housework.
Me: Haha I hate housework too.
Him: Imagine that, a woman who hates housework!
Me: ...
Him: Are you single?
Me: Yes
Him: Maybe that's why.

I didn't tell him to mind his own business because I wouldn't want to lose the company a customer. Most women don't say anything when men make them feel uncomfortable. If you "make a big deal" out of someone being sexist or sexually harassing you, you know you'll probably get labelled an uptight harpy or "Feminazi" or special snowflake or skank who was asking for it or gold-digger looking for an excuse to sue.

Sometimes it's not the personal conversations, it's the whole system that is troubling. Did you know that the government didn't require female-sized crash test dummies to be included in vehicle safety tests until 2011? Before then most automakers only ran tests using dummies that were the size and shape of a man, until eventually someone thought that maybe the reason women were 47 percent more likely to be seriously injured or killed in the same type of crash as a man is because seatbelts and airbags were all designed for someone taller and heavier. Or did you know that in 2014 the National Institute of Health had to tell drug companies and medical researchers to stop using only male animals and men in most of their trials, because that habit might have something to do with the fact that women experience much higher rates of adverse reactions to medication than men?

The idea of a "pay gap" for women and men is more complicated than both sides like to claim, but I do know that all of my brothers went to college with more money in the bank than me in part because before I was old enough for a "real job" people at church only wanted to hire me to babysit five kids for $5 an hour, while they would pay my brothers $20 to spend 45 minutes mowing their lawn. And I know that pay ratio continues into adulthood for unskilled workers who are in female-dominated "pink-collar" jobs like home health aids versus male-dominated "blue-collar" jobs like construction. Even though I'm pretty sure a lot of people would rather install windows than clean up bodily fluids all day.

These types of things have always bothered me. They've always bothered lots of women, sometimes from the time they sat in history class in high school and went days without hearing a woman's name mentioned once. But listening to the future president of the United States brag that one of the perks of fame is being able to grab women by the genitals and get away with it, and hearing about the radio interview where he bragged that the best part of owning a beauty pageant was being able to walk in unannounced on the contestants while they were changing into their bikinis and they wouldn't feel like they could complain  ... and *people decided he still deserved to be the most powerful person on the planet anyway* ... that was the straw that broke the camel's back for a lot of women.

I listened to men -- not just distant strangers on the television but also my friends -- defend him by saying that he hires women so therefore he's not sexist. I felt like I was being told that because I am allowed to leave the house and have a job, that's it. Sexism is solved. Everything else is "just locker room talk."

Screw that. I deserve better, and so do other women.

People were so offended by our newspaper writing an article about a planned women's march nearby that they took time to write hate mail and long rants on Facebook about it. They kept talking (in between their really mature, articulate comments such as "Babys.") about how women aren't going to have their "rights" taken away. But a conversation about Constitutional rights completely misses all of the above problems.

If you're a woman and you don't see what the big deal is, or you are a Republican who feel that despite these being nonpartisan issues today's marches are too anti-Trump for your liking, and so you don't want to march or cheer on the marchers, fine, I can respect that. But if you actively go out of your way to ridicule and demean the women who have decided to speak up, I don't respect that.

When I was a kid, I was told that if a strange man did something that made me feel uncomfortable I should loudly tell him "Stop that."  Nobody told me that when I was an adult that would be considered "whining."

Snowpocalypse

Today, it snowed.

Most winters in the dry part of Oregon, this would be news. "Ah, we got a snowfall this winter," people would say. "How nice that the children get to use their sleds this year."

This winter, however, snow is not news. "It did not snow today" is news. Because for the last two months I think I have gotten more experience driving on snow and ice than I have in my last six years of car ownership combined.

It started out fun. My friends and I decided to celebrate the snow by making use of someone's hot tub, sitting in the hot water and steam as snowflakes gently drifted onto our heads, punctuated by the occasional yelps of whoever was most recently dared to go make a snow angel in their swimsuit.

Soon, however, the snow became less fun. People got into car accidents. Important meetings and fun events were cancelled. Pipes burst. Stores ran out of things. Everyone's car got stuck and had to be pushed out at least once.

Mostly, my own car has been trusty and reliable through the snow, despite its lack of snow tires. But two days when the snow was at its highest, I had to rely on others' better vehicles and winter driving skills to make it to such crucial things as work and the premier of Rouge One.

Driving in the snow in Hermiston is at least better than driving in the snow in The Dalles. Whoever designed the roads in Hermiston understood that it's OK if you have more than six inches of clearance between your side mirrors and parked cars while driving. Also, Hermiston is relatively flat, which means that if you are sitting at a stop sign there is much less chance that your vehicle will suddenly start sliding backwards down the hill while you resignedly make "Sorry" faces at everyone whose car you slide into (this can be fairly amusing to watch but not so funny to experience).

So far I've only had to make the "Sorry if I hit you there's nothing I can do please be nice and don't sue me" face at one person, and he got out of my way.

I used to live in this kind of weather all the time, when I lived in Iowa as a kid. But I've discovered that if love of snow were documented in a line graph, for most people that line dips very suddenly at the point in their life labelled "Got job that requires driving to work every day."

Now, I don't know why any adult would choose to live somewhere like Alaska, where it snows constantly and the temperature dips below freezing every winter. There are so many things about winter that aren't as fun as summer. You have to wear so many clothes in the winter, for example. A sweater, jeans, leggings and multiple pairs of socks take up so much more space in the wash than a T-shirt and shorts, not to mention if you don't want to shrink your sweater it will take approximately 4.6 years to air dry. And speaking of winter clothing, nobody's crush has ever said "Wow she looks really attractive in those snow pants."

Of course there are benefits to winter, some will argue. Hot chocolate, warm fires, an excuse to cuddle up with someone under the blankets ... but first you have to find someone willing to cuddle with you after they've seen you in snow pants.

47 texts

Tonight I was included in a group text asking a few people if they wanted to do dinner later this week. Forty-seven texts later I think we are finally done discussing dinner. Someone is going to pick up their phone later tonight and wonder why they have 47 texts, and then be really annoyed when they find out that all 47 texts are about the point of a progressive dinner (which, it turns out, involves progressing from house to house for each course and not, as my more politically-minded friends would assume, inviting a bunch of liberals around to discuss feminism and gay marriage over vegan entrées).

No matter which group of friends you're texting, in each group text you tend to have a typical breakdown. There's the person who sent the text. There's the people who respond with a simple "I'm in" or "Sounds good." There is the person who decides it's a good idea to have an entire conversation with the original sender via the group thread instead of switching to a private thread. There are the people who get pulled into that conversation against their better judgment. There is the person who lurks, reading the entire conversation without ever actually responding so everyone has no idea if they ever saw the message and plan on attending or have actually been eaten by wolves. There is the person who at some point sends a random text in the middle of the conversation that no one is entirely sure what they meant but at this point no one wants to ask and add another text to the growing number of notifications everyone is receiving. And then there is the person who eventually puts a halt to the conversation with an annoyed text about how their phone is almost out of batteries and they're in a meeting and NOT EVERYONE CARES ABOUT THIS CONVERSATION (but you know I love you guys, smiley face emoji).

That's technology for you: With every new advance in technological communication comes new and inventive ways of annoying each other. When Facebook became popular you may have thought you stopped Aunt Bertha from sending you so many chain emails when you showed her how to post memes to her wall. But then she started sending you Farmville requests and that was somehow even worse. And when email was invented you may have thought that you had found a way to cut down on the number of times your coworker called a 30-minute meeting to come up with a schedule for more meetings. But instead those co-workers just switched to hitting "Reply all" and writing "Thank you for sending this" in response to every email, guilting half the office into doing the same thing so they don't look like ungrateful swine for not being thankful enough for getting the agenda for tomorrow's meeting.

Yay technology.

I'm not sure what the equivalent was back in the olden days.

"Sorry guys, we don't have enough wood to get through the rest of the winter because Dave had to send me 13 different smoke signals last week describing what he had for lunch."

"Dang it Dave, I don't have any more room in this cage for one more carrier pigeon about how the liberal media has been unfair to Napoleon!"

"Dave, I hope it was worth another Pony Express pony dying of exhaustion so you could write me a letter saying "Haha same."

"Dear Dave STOP that's not a period at the end of the sentence STOP I actually mean STOP STOP"

I'm sure 100 years from now there will still be Daves in the world, sending one too many holograms to his friend about what he had for breakfast. And since his friends know they have all been guilty of similar technology annoyances at one point or another in their lives, they will forgive Dave after sending him a hologram saying "Some of us are in a meeting right now, Dave!"

I don't know what you're talking about

This week was fair week, which is one of our biggest coverage weeks of the year, minus general elections and the Pendleton Round-Up, which is so important in our neck of the woods that the other day someone asked a colleague how long he had worked for the paper and he answered "three Round-Ups."

There are good things and bad things about being a reporter during fair week. On the plus side, I got to wear jeans to work all week. On the downside, it was 102 degrees in the afternoons.

Like most weeks on the job, it also means I end up writing authoritatively about things that I really don't know much about. Having spent nine years of my life in Iowa and most of the rest in Eastern Oregon I am farther ahead than one of our sports reporters, who is facing the daunting task of reporting the rodeo all week while having never actually been to a rodeo before. But that doesn't mean that it's easy coming up with intelligent-sounding follow-up questions for professional rodeo stock contractors (or even seven-year-old rabbit owners) on the fly.

Being a reporter is actually kind of crazy if you think about it. Imagine you're in college and you get to your English class and the professor says "I'm giving you an assignment to write a three-page paper explaining the optimum conditions for growing asparagus and comparing the quality of this year's asparagus crop in Europe to the one in the United States. You have three hours, after which I will post your paper online and start handing out copies around campus with your name at the top so that everyone can critique your writing skills." Now repeat that every day with a new topic.

It's a lot easier to get away with faking knowledge on a topic when you're in school. When I was in AP Biology someone told me that for the essay portion the test scorers just look for specific words and phrases to check off rather than actually fact-checking your essay. Which explains why I got a 4 on my AP Bio test despite the fact that one of my three essays literally went something like this: "Plasmid DNA is involved in the process. Endonuclease is also important. And don't forget about vectors."

Unfortunately you can't write a news article this way.

Instead you have to research. And not be afraid to ask dumb questions. Sometimes it's embarrassing to admit to someone you have no idea what that word they keep using actually means. But in the long run it's a lot better to look like an idiot to one source than to 10,000 readers. And you can always preface the question with, "For my readers who don't know what that means ..."

The good news is the longer you're a reporter, the closer you come to knowing everything. Eventually you do, indeed, become knowledgeable on certain topics, like the city's general fund or the difference between Common Core and Smarter Balanced.

Of course, no matter how smart you are and how hard you try, in this line of work you will inevitably end up looking like an idiot sooner or later. You just can't publish thousands of words every day on a deadline without something going wrong eventually. Already in my career I've made mistakes ranging from misspelling heroin all the way through an article about drugs to giving someone a completely different last name halfway through an article.

Someday I'm sure I'll make the kind of mistake that becomes legendary in a community. Here it was the infamous "Amphibious pitcher" versus "Ambidextrous pitcher" headline mix-up. When I was at the Daily Universe someone labeled a front-page photo of the LDS church's leadership with the caption "Quorum of the 12 Apostates" instead of "Quorum of the 12 Apostles" after she stopped paying attention to what the spell check was actually correcting words to. And not long before I joined the staff of the Chronicle, someone accidentally undid the shrinking of a photo to fit inside the box, resulting in a front page article accompanied by a picture of just the city's planner's eyebrow labeled with his name.

Most mistakes are much more run-of-the-mill, however. Like one of my mentors used to say, even the best goalies sometimes let in the ball. If we got information wrong, let us know, but don't be snarky about what was clearly just an accidental typo. When people comment on our Facebook page pointing out a typo and ask, "Doesn't anyone there know how to spell?" the only result is that I  have to resist the very strong urge to reply "Thank you so much for setting us straight! Despite all of our college degrees and years of professional writing experience, we just couldn't agree on whether "they" has an e in it or not. Glad you cleared that up for us."

I would rather spend my energy learning about asparagus in case I ever have to write about it.

I Hate My Car, Part 12

This week my car was in the shop.

It happens. Quite frequently, in fact. I believe this is the eighth time so far this year that I've dropped it off at a mechanic. Don't ask me why I haven't bought a new car yet. I don't know. Probably for the same reasons abused women stay with their boyfriends. This time he's really sorry and he won't ever do it again, I'm sure of it.

I met my car four years ago, two months out of college and a fresh job offer in my hand. I was ready to be a Real Adult, and Real Adults drive themselves places instead of hitching a ride with nine other people in their friend's mother's old minivan. I went car shopping and came back with what my friends would eventually come to call the Truthmobile (the journalist version of the Batmobile), a 2007 Ford Taurus (Insert Ford joke here. I've heard them all by now.)

The next morning it wouldn't start. If my life were a movie, Taylor Swift would have been singing "I Knew You Were Trouble" in the background while I blithely ignored the warning signs. There was no music, however, because my life is not a movie. Also the battery was dead so the radio didn't work.

After the dealership apologized and gave me a new battery for free, life was good for a while. And by a while I mean for two months, until some lady came into work one day and told me she had hit my car in the parking lot. I went out expecting a small dent and instead found out my entire front passenger door was smashed inward. To this day I cannot fathom how she worked up that much speed in that small of a parking lot. Or how the state of Oregon granted her a driver's license when she was so blind she could not see AN ENTIRE PARKED CAR.

She had insurance though, so it was all good. And by all good I mean my car worked fine for about three more months before I had the quintessential car repair experience for every American who doesn't know anything about cars: I told a mechanic that my car was making a funny noise, they told me a part was broken, and the name of the part sounded plausible so I gave them a bunch of money and the grindy squeaky noise went away.

Life was good again, at least until about six months later when my air conditioner would only work on the highest setting. I probably would have just lived with that one, but my mom did some research online figured out how to fix it.

Next came the infamous Cardboard Box Incident of 2013, in which I backed over an empty cardboard box in the alley behind my office and it somehow ripped off the exhaust pipe that runs the length of my car.

2014, however, was the golden year for my relationship with the Truthmobile. My car worked the entire year, minus that one time the engine randomly shut off while I was driving down the road. Cars will be cars, however, so I let that one slide.

The whole random engine shut-off thing came back with a vengeance in 2015, however, at the same time the passenger side of my car started flooding every time it rained. The mechanics at the dealership were baffled by the stalling, but they did order me a new rain cowel to stop the leaking and I brought my car back I to have it installed. Then my car flooded again. Then they took an entire day to decide that the part they had installed was faulty. Then the new part came in. Then my car flooded again. Then they told me the same part but on the other side was broken. Then that part came in. Then I decided maybe it was time to get a new mechanic.

The new mechanic told me I had water in my gas tank and I just needed to use a combination of HEET and premium gas for the next month or so. The stalling got worse, though, until this week when I took it to yet another mechanic who cleaned out the throttle body and it has been working fine for two whole days now so I'm optimistic.

I should probably get a new car, but breaking up is hard to do. We have the same friends. It would be awkward if we ran into each other around town. Plus, how do people even meet new cars these days? Tinder? I'm not sure I'm ready for that type of thing.