Volvo

I hope I don’t have a lot of Swedish readers out there because I just have to get this off my chest: I hate the Swedes. My animosity toward these peaceful, herring-eating people can be traced, strangely enough, to a Toyota Prius, which I believe is probably the best car ever made.

In 2005, through a nefariously shady business transaction which I won’t describe for fear of incurring the wrath of the Board of Bar Examiners, I acquired a brand new Toyota Prius with exactly zero miles on the odometer. Because I’m both a closet environmentalist and secretly enthralled with technical things I can’t understand, owning a Prius was my dream. I drove it lovingly and proudly, learned all its quirky features, and even got the GPS to speak to me in French. While I don’t actually speak French, I found it very romantic to drive around town completely lost with a Frenchy-french lady-voice commanding me to “tournez a gauche ici!” Too cool.

Sadly, I drive very little in law school and the car mostly sat in my driveway. And then, last year, my mother got a new job that required her to drive a lot, and also got diagnosed with breast cancer. In another sickening display of that nicey-nice shit that lurks somewhere deep inside me and sometimes rears its ugly head, I gave my beloved Prius to my mom in exchange for her ancient, teal green Volvo.

This car enrages me on so many levels. First, it’s not just a little bit teal, it’s aggressively, violently, nightmare-inducing teal. Sometimes small children cry when I pass by, and every day I ask myself, who would make a car in such an offensive color? And why? For the sole purpose of embarrassing me? Then, the automatic window controls are located between the passenger and driver’s seat, so you can’t actually open a window while driving without taking your eyes off the road and craning your neck to peer under the cup holders to find the right button. That, of course, is because the cup holders are located, in typical Volvo fashion, DIRECTLY ABOVE the window controls. The slightest quiver of your hand while rolling down the window results in third-degree double-latte burns, and the smallest drip from aforementioned double-latte results in permanently sticky window controls.

The car nicely displays the outside temperature - but only in Celsius. The clock nicely displays the time - but only military time. If you open the hood, the radio disables and requires a code to turn back on. But the code is not published anywhere. It’s a secret. And you practically have to take the goddamn car to Sweden to get the secret code put in.

The windshield wipers work perfectly, except for a six-inch square spot directly in the driver’s line of vision. And don’t suggest that I change the wiper blades, the wiper arm, the electronic mechanism that runs the wipers or the entire flipping windshield, because I already tried that. At great expense.

While each of these things cause me daily rage, what really pisses me off about the Volvo is its performance in cold weather. Isn’t Sweden kind of a cold place? Then tell me why the rear window defroster automatically turns off every ten minutes, necessitating that I jump in the car to turn it back on six times in the sixty minutes it takes me to scrape ice off the car. And tell me why the locks constantly freeze on the Volvo, when people parked directly next to me never have this problem no matter how cold it gets. And why my windows have been completely frozen shut for over a month, preventing me from taking a ticket at a parking garage or ordering coffee at a drive through. And why my doors froze shut on the day of my Thai final, requiring me to crawl into the backseat through a tiny hole in the trunk that was clearly not designed for seven-month pregnant women. And why my electronic radio antenna is frozen in the down position (as if I could listen to the radio without the secret code anyway).

Yesterday was the final straw in my war against the Swedes. Let me set the scene for you. The weather channel said it was “six degrees, feels like minus three.” Uncharacteristically, I had let my gas tank run very close to empty. But when I went to fill it up, the mechanism that locks the little gas tank door had frozen shut. No amount of lock de-icer, hot water, or effort from the unbelievably nice guys who work at the Shell station could open the door. After standing in the cold for over an hour trying to figure it out, we came to the conclusion that I had no option but to break the door open. They got a screwdriver and did it for me, I filled up the tank, and went merrily on my way, wondering what the Volvo has in store for me next.

I’m picturing the Swedes laughing their asses off at me and asking myself, why, Sweden, why?