Life's a joke, and the joke's on...

I drive a soft top Jeep. Basically that means I drive a giant Tonka Toy. I can remove the back windows, remove the roof, remove the back seat, remove the doors, pop the hood, and fold down the windshield (not kidding) without the need of the car key. Locking my car doors is only a source of amusement for me when my friends do so out of habit.

My favorite incident of this involved a childhood friend of mine. We had just returned to my car and after I put my bags behind my seat I climbed in. The whole time my friend had been speaking to me. When I looked over to the passenger seat I realized she had been speaking to me while standing next to the car. It was summer, the roof was off my car, and both front windows were rolled down. When I asked her why she was just standing there she told me she was waiting for me to unlock the car.

I paused. My brain simply couldn't compute what she said in the current circumstance. When I started laughing she asked me what was funny. Once I calmed down a bit I pointed out there was no roof or windows! All she had to do was stick her arm inside the car, which I never lock, and open the silly door. I think she was bright red for a good half hour.

The point of this is that I have no way of preventing people from getting into my car. To counteract this I have a club that locks the steering wheel and a removable face plate on my radio. I also buy cheap radios. Investing in a high quality one seems to be an exercise in frustration. Two or three thefts and one death by water balloon (long story) only confirm this. So I wasn't surprised that after two years only half the buttons on the latest model worked at all, those when they wanted to, and even then didn't always do what they were labeled.

Previously my radio used to bring up a number of different options if you press a series of buttons in the correct order. If I were more of a music snob I could have made the radio do all sorts of nifty things. Most of these nifty things were discovered recently when I pressed the button for station two and saw gibberish appear on the screen. Half the time the on button worked when it was good and ready to and not before. Getting the face plate to go on had become a challenge, and removing then replacing it only made the on button crankier. Switching between radio and CD often resulted in switching between FM and AM. Just so you know, AM doesn't work well in the very hilly area of Seattle in which I now live.

Fortunately since it always eventually turned on or did whatever other command I issued I didn't really care. Which is why it didn't really bother me to discover this morning that my radio no longer lived inside my dashboard. Someone had decided they wanted it more than I did and took it. Considering the radio's recent behavior I've decided the jokes on them.