Popular Mechanics for Broken Hearts

I'm a little behind, so I think an end-of-2006 post is in order.

In Feburary of 2006, a kind person to whom I had loaned my passat decided to inroduce my trunk to a tree. They bought me a trunk lid to replace it, but no one (i.e. them or me) seemed to have time to replace the dented trunk lid.

As the year went on, people began to recognize me as I drove around, and even my employees knew when I was in the office, or elsewhere, due to the dented lid on my more common place car.

But, I was determined to ring in the new year dent-free. So together, my Dad and I removed the dented lid and corresponding wiring and interior panels. My Dad, who works with old jaguars for a living, became frustrated with what he called "typical German Enginering" -- meaning an overkill securing things and including unnecessary parts. So, after the two hours it took us to deduce how to remove the lock from my former trunk (which matched my car's key) and place it in the new trunk, we put the trunk back on. And Voila! we closed the trunk. We went to open it, this is when my Dad, who typically likes to parade around as the all knowing type of Dad, began to panic in a way I had never seen before. He tried strenuously to open the lid, but to no avail. He was envisioning having to rip out the back seat and cut a hole in the steel to access the trunk compartment (to brits / jag users we should appropriately call it the Boot).

This is the point at which I decided to tell my Dad that the seats conveniently fold down from the interior to access the trunk. It will be the first time I've had a body in my trunk, let alone my Dad's. You'll be glad to know during a 15 minute stint in the Boot, we fixed the problem, I have a prestine working trunk.