The Tragic Life of My Protegé

Here's a fun story from 1998, about a year into our marriage. TJ never liked my Mazda Protegé, but I had picked it out by myself using my usual method of finding a car salesman who doesn't bug me. It sounds like a simple concept, but it's harder than you might think to find a car salesman that fits my standards. I'm super picky about my car salesmen. Not so picky about cars.

This isn't my actual car, but this is exactly what it looked like.

We had just bought TJ a brand new 1999 Dodge Ram truck. We bought it in about 15 minutes without test driving it because we were on our way to a wedding. When you're looking at new cars, there's no reason to mess around with a test drive because you know it's going to drive nice. Even though I'm not picky about vehicles, even I had to admit that it was a big beautiful truck! It was white like an angel. You'll see the irony in that in a minute.

Our driveway was only one car wide, so we had to park one car in front of the other. Luckily, our neighbor's driveway was right next to ours, so we could cut through their driveway to get either of our cars out. Do you know where this is going?

I was still sleeping when TJ left for work one morning. I heard a BIG crash. I hoped it wasn't what I thought it was, but it was. The bed of that white truck was sitting on the hood of my little black car. TJ was laying face down, spread-eagled in the grass. At first I thought he was hurt, but he was just trying to make it un-happen. I've done a lot of dumb things, so I was very nice and supportive. Insurance covered all the repairs to replace my hood that had been crinkled up to the windshield. In TJ's defense, you absolutely could not see that little ninja of a car parked behind the truck. I no longer parked behind the truck.

This is not the end.

A couple weeks after my car was fixed, TJ had parked my car behind his truck. When he left for work, that next morning, I heard another big crash from the driveway. . I didn't get up. This time, I was mad! I didn't want to call insurance again, so TJ made plans to fix it with his dad. TJ wasn't looking forward to that. But before he could fix the car (it wasn't quite as bad this time), I was driving my car through a McDonald's drive through. I said to my coworker, "Hey! That truck in front of us is exactly like TJ's new truck!" Just then, the guy driving the truck realized he'd driven past the first drive through window. So he suddenly backed up, right into my car! Yeah! The poor guy's eyes got big when he saw that I was hugely pregnant and there was a lot of damage to my car. So I say, "Don't worry about this. My husband actually did this to my car, and he's not getting out of it." I convinced the guy to go, and away we went! Eventually, TJ and his dad came through and made all the repairs.

This is not the end.

One day, TJ drove my little Protegé to an out-of-town jobsite in order to save gas. It hailed there so badly that the Protegé was totaled! We got our check and I moved on to a newer car.

This is not the end.

We sold that dimpled, totaled out Protégé to a kid that worked construction with TJ. A couple weeks later, that unludky kid parked the Protegé behind TJ's truck on the job site. And TJ backed into it one final time. I'm not even kidding.

This is the end!

P.S. Mazda heard about this story and stopped making the Protegé in 2003.