Here's something that is making the rounds of some other car mailing lists.
I thought it was amusing. (I changed a few things to make it LBC-specific.)
--Phil
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"Nice car! Is it for sale?"
"Well, sure it is for sale, everything has it's price."
"How much are you asking?"
"Well, it'll cost you $11,312 in cash, plus you'll need to give me 8-years
of your spare time, roughly 6 hours per week, I'd say. After that there is
another 2 hours per week of time in front of the PC, surfing vendor sites
and asking questions on newsgroups. Then I'll need another $233.17 for long
distance phone charges to parts suppliers and private sellers, gas to and
from British car shows, parts I broke and wrong parts that I ordered (but
you can
have those, I saved them). You will also need to fix the broken window in
the garage and assorted other damage from flying tools. You will have to get
the acetone burns off the kitchen table and those grease stains off the new
family room carpet (near the fireplace). Then you will need to somehow get
my kids to unlearn six or seven swear words that they are starting to repeat
when they think I'm not around, and then you will need to pay my wife. You
will owe her about 77 nights renting a movie and sitting on the couch
(watching but not listening to the movie, gossiping about friends instead),
14 "quiet" dinners after the kids are in bed and some kind of compensation
to her for the time we drove halfway across Maryland on the way back from my
parents after Christmas to find that guy selling the set of barely-worn,
Michelin redlines (the time the kids were screaming after
being in the car for 12-hours and I refused to go straight home; ask her,
she'll remember). You will need to paint the house and take my kids to the
McDonalds Playplace 23 times. You need to shoot hoops with my son for about
7 hours total and go look at least 44 drawings that my daughter made. You
will also have to call at least a dozen friends of ours and rearrange the
dinners and cook-outs we missed (I think one event was actually a wedding,
you may need a suit). And you will have to go to my in-laws on 38 Sunday
afternoons for dinner (food is actually pretty good though). You probably
should also apologize to my neighbors for the times I was running the
compressor well past midnight. You will have to replace roughly 8 square
inches of skin and subdermal tissue on my body, mostly from my hands, but
one big chunk right above my eye. At least one skin graft for a severe
post-welding burn will be needed. You need to re-pay 3 of my friends somehow
for favors involving: sweating and swearing, and loan them at least 6 of
your tools, 2 of them you may never see again. I'll need 19 T-shirts, 2
pairs of jeans, 5 pairs of shorts and one nice collared polo shirt
(shouldn't have been working in that one anyway!). You'll need to come by
and disassemble the "cold storage" bay that I made for the car across the
back of the garage, and take down the rack above the garage door that is
used to store the "show" wheels off season. You'll have to explain to my
kids that they can now ride their bikes in the garage again and the garage
doors can be opened when daddy's car is out of the storage space and their
friends are over.
"Still interested? Let me know. If you are, I'll stop on the way home and
buy the paint for the house."
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