I_Borgward’s story in the ever-buy-a-car-from-a-bro reminded me of a thing that happened to me as a youngster. thought i’d not jack his thread and post it here instead.
this is why my car advice is usually “hey, why not a nice Civic?” you don’t even have to sell someone a car to be responsible for it. all you have to do is suggest it, and if something’s wrong with it it was your fault for suggesting the wrong one.
when i was a preteen nerd, i convinced my mom to buy another 128MB stick of RAM for our desktop, which was a bit of a laggard. unfortunately, our computer, i later learned, required a special kind of “low-density” SDRAM, which was much more expensive and was not a part of the megasale that made me brave enough to ask for what i got. that same sale meant we couldn’t return the stick, and 12-year-old me felt intensely guilty, though my mom probably didn’t care. a few months later my cousins complained that their computer was slow. they had a single 128MB stick (remember when you had to match em?), so i installed the extra RAM in their computer.
a year later one of them complains that the computer is slow again, and lets slip, “i think it’s that thing you put in it.” i say that’s not possible, and all my cousins just look at each other silently. motherfucker are you shitting me? are you for real right now? no good deed goes unpunished, eh? so i had to go and clean all the garbage out of their hard drive and delete all the goddamn mouse pointers and bonzibuddies, because the moment i helped them out, their shit became my problem. i left the extra RAM in there, but now i just don’t offer things to people if they don’t ask, including fun. want a car? buy a fucking civic.

Spitfire, obviously.