Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Bought A Giant Mech As My First Car

I won't exactly call it buyer's remorse. Not yet, at least. I'm just starting to realize that a sentient 80 foot tall murder robot comes with more baggage than I had considered.

Sure, I knew it would be sort of pricey. The dealership's "Zero Interest For Six Months" offer made it seem like a real bargain, though, even if the price of the mech still came out to 2.3 billion dollars. Let's say I scale back on entertainment and stick to ramen instead of eating out, freeing up enough room in my budget to hand over twice the minimum monthly payment. Even then, this mech won't be fully paid off until I'm in my early forties.

It's more than that, though.

Keeping this thing powered up is turning out to be more costly than I anticipated. When I was narrowing down the options for my first car, the decision eventually became a toss-up between the mech and a Mini Cooper. The Cooper averaged a respectable 30 miles per gallon. My mech consumes the equivalent of a day's worth of power for the entire city of New York while standing idle for one hour. I assumed those were roughly the same. Of course I was wrong, but in my defense converting gallons to gigawatts can be pretty confusing.

The internal nuclear reactor is also rather fiddly. I have to refer to my owner's manual practically every time I exchange one plutonium rod for another, which is more often than I'd like. That probably seems pretty dangerous, doesn't it? I suppose it is, but to be fair so is pumping flammable gas into a normal car's tank. All things considered, the risks are probably about the same.

Technically speaking a giant mech isn't an automobile. Even if was, it would be entirely too big to be street legal. No one told me about this before I made my purchase. It's kind of a big deal. You wouldn't believe how difficult it can be to find sidewalks in this town that are large enough to accommodate a foot the size of giant foot.

Parking is a nightmare. There are simply no spots available for my mech, so I wind up having him sit on whichever building I happen to be visiting. The good news? I haven't received a single parking ticket. The bad news? I have discovered eighteen loitering tickets stuck to my windshield.

Don't get me started on ammo. It runs out so much faster than you'd imagine. I go out for a quick trip to the grocery and come back with an empty laser-guided missile chamber. The waiting period on nukes is so unreasonably long that I often hesitate before launching one, just to make sure I want to go through with it. That's no fun at all.

Now that all these issues are laid out before me in black and white I'm starting to regret my decision just the tiniest bit. Maybe I'm being overly critical. After all, if I had bought a car I'm sure I'd be complaining about its lack of a holographic heads up display radar, or its underpowered cockpit ejection system. What I'm going through is perfectly normal. In a few weeks all these minor problems will fade into the background and I'll come to appreciate my mech for what it is.

Then again, the cup holder is a really weird size. It's too big for a small cup, so little drinks bounce around and spill all over the cockpit. It's also slightly too small for a normal cup, so I try to cram the very bottom of a drink into the very top of the cup holder and hope it stays put. That never works. I wind up having to hold the cup in place with my free hand while I pilot. When I hit a bump or take a blast from a plasma turret, the liquid from my precariously balanced drink splashes up into my palm.

I've made a horrible mistake.

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)