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Autofocus disabled by heated leather seats

As it is with Pique columns, so it is with conversations. There are good ways to begin and there are not-so good ways to begin. This concept, simple as it is, is perhaps best illustrated by an old joke.
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As it is with Pique columns, so it is with conversations. There are good ways to begin and there are not-so good ways to begin. This concept, simple as it is, is perhaps best illustrated by an old joke.

Having reluctantly moved out of state to attend college, Jocelyn called home. Her younger brother answered. "How's my darling Fluffy," she asked. "Your cat's dead," her brother answered. Shocked and outraged, she lit into him. "How can you be so cruel? You can't just come right out and tell me something like that. You have to break it to me gently, you moron."

Dumbfounded and disinterested, her brother pleaded ignorance. "Well, what am I supposed to say?"

"Tell me Fluffy was out playing on the roof and fell off. Tell me she was hurt and you took her to the vet. Call me later and tell me the vet did everything she could but Fluffy's in heaven. Jeez, you're such an inconsiderate brother. So, how's mom."

"Mom was out playing on the roof...."

While the content of bad opening sentences has changed over the course of my life, the chilled-to-the-bone feeling they trigger has remained constant. "Share your toys with your cousins" gave way to "Everybody put away your books; we're going to have a pop quiz," as opening lines I hated hearing when I was a kid. A couple of years later they paled in comparison to the heart-stopping, "I think I missed my period," which, ironically, was the first time I fully grasped that old chestnut about watching your life flash before your eyes. I like to think the shock and sadness I felt at the brevity of its flash had more to do with youth than with a pathetic lack of content.

For most of my adult life, that aching feeling of impending doom has accompanied the opening line, "We have to talk," and its workplace variant, "Close the door; we have to talk." There's an ominous, Mobius-like redundancy to beginning a conversation - a talk - by saying, in effect, we have to have a conversation. Nothing good ever followed, not that I heard half of it, having gone into survival mode, scanning all possible escape routes and wondering how much of a career/relationship-limiting move projectile vomiting might be and whether blaming food poisoning would really get me off the hook.

That old, familiar feeling began gnawing away like a ravenous badger the other day when my Perfect Partner said, "I think we should get a new car."

"We just bought a new car," I replied. "Don't you remember, we drove down to Squamish to save a buck a pound on a Thanksgiving turkey and bought a car instead?"

"That was 1993," she said, giving me a pained look as though she half expected projectile vomiting to follow. "We don't even have that one any more."

"We don't?"

Turns out she's right, of course. We replaced it with one remarkably similar. The same, in fact, with the addition of a couple more doors so we could stop torturing visiting relatives who'd grown too old and inflexible to crawl into the back seat. But winter's coming on and it's suddenly begun to do things that give me an uncomfortable feeling I need an exorcist even more than a mechanic. Mechanics prefer to fix cars that easily reveal their shortcomings, not ones that'll only vomit pea soup when the devil takes charge and no one but me is around to witness it.

Buying a car in the past was always an easy thing; I knew exactly what I wanted. Air-cooled Westfailya, no older than '81, no newer than the first half of '83 when the devil took charge of VW and commanded it to add 20 feet of plumbing and a radiator. World's smallest, most underpowered four-wheel drive. Same again with extra doors.

Now...? Bewildering doesn't really begin to describe the terra incognita of car shopping. Selecting a car makes Freudian psychoanalysis seem like a picnic. Probably reveals a lot more about a person too. Mental note: Pitch Psychology Today on this story.

Part of me wants something that'll burn very little gas. Part of me wants something that'll hasten the inevitable Armageddon of a carbon-choked biosphere. All of me wants something that'll climb Cardiac Hill in a wicked snowstorm. None of me wants to put the time and effort into car shopping it'll take to reach a "rational" decision.

Perhaps that's the problem. If you've grown up in a car-crazed North American culture, there are no rational decisions when it comes to cars. Already, after only a brief exposure to car salesmen, I've begun to develop irrational fixations on things I only recently discovered existed.

Xenon for example. Several of the cars I've looked at have xenon headlights. Xenon is a noble gas, whatever that is. Xenon powered the first laser. For all I actually know, xenon headlights may well be precursors to a feature I've often wished for in a car - a death ray. How cool would that be when some a#&hole zooms in to pass you on the last 20 feet of a vanishing lane on Highway 99? Hit the high beams, dissolve 'im. I don't think they work that way but it wouldn't surprise me if there isn't an aftermarket product that'll at least bounce off his mirrors and scorch his retinas.

Bluetooth-enabled "music systems" are another thing I'm beginning to obsess over. New cars don't have radios, they have music systems. Salesmen take great pride in whipping out their cell phones and showing prospective customers how those systems get all buddy-buddy with each other, communicating together, inviting each other over for dinner, having semi-anonymous sex, whatever. Once the introductions are made, all you have to do is press a button on the steering wheel and your radi... music system, will dial whatever number you speak to it. This has become a very desirable feature to me for reasons I don't understand... particularly since I don't have a cell phone, let alone one with blue teeth.

Fortunately, lacking a Y chromosome, my Perfect Partner is immune to auto-irrationality syndrome. "It needs to get us through the snow and get decent mileage" were her two top priorities.

Until she met heated leather seats.

Admittedly she does have a posterior prone to chilling and no desire whatsoever for death ray headlights but her must-have list has begun expanding toward creature comforts, particularly ones that heat up. I wonder if I should mention the heated steering wheels I've noticed on the extended options list?