Nobody needs to ask if IATA, do they?

I’m crossing the street with two of the grandkids when some jackass blows through the stop sign and head towards us. I pulled the kids back to the curb and, in a moment of pique, I chuck my water bottle at his car.

One of my better throws, too, because he’s about 100 feet down the street and the bottle hits his rear hatch with a resounding thud. Not accurate enough to reach home plate from center field, but absolutely good enough to grab his attention. And it does, too, because he suddenly remembers that his car came with brakes (standard equipment these days) and he screeches to a stop. He gets out of the car, leaves it in the middle of the street, and heads toward me—and the grandkids—while traffic backs up behind his SUV.

I’m right at my building, so I shuffle the kids in to a safe spot and turn to face the guy. He is furious, yelling, and extremely angry that I damaged his MERCEDES. Not his car. His MERCEDES. He reminds me many times that he is a MERCEDES owner and he will not tolerate some guy throwing a water bottle at his, did I mention, MERCEDES.

Eventually, he notices that a crowd has gathered to watch the MERCEDES OWNER screaming at an old guy wearing a U.S.S. Nimitz hat. He’s bigger than me and younger than me, and much angrier. I checked my surroundings and I already know how he’s going down, but I’ve got two frightened kids waiting for me and I don’t need the aggravation. Finally, he storms off and I go inside to restore some sense of safety for the children.

As I calm myself down, I’m thinking about guys who think their cars give them some sort of special license. Mercedes is a status car, like Beemers and, in ancient times, Cadillacs. They’re the cars that get vanity plates like, UNVME and BIGTIME and YESIATA. “Never in my life,” I said to myself, “will I ever be one of those guys.”

Full disclosure: I had a couple of Trans Am models that I referred to by brand name and I had license plates that said, “DADSV8.” That said, I was compensating for my lost youth, while my new friend was clearly compensating for, um, something else.

At the time of this incident, I was driving a 21-year-old Lexus sedan that I was determined to get past the 200,000-mile mark. I was close, too, until a fine young man drove his fine old car into mine and ended that quest. Back in the car market after well over a decade, I spent more than a month on the hunt and ended up with…you guessed it…a Mercedes.

It’s used, not new, although the price I paid at Autohaus on Edens got me much closer to new-car smell than I think was reasonable. Maybe the extra bucks were penance for all the times I’d mocked MERCEDES owners in the past. Who knows? As of now, I am a MERCEDES OWNER.

Now that I’m really, really special and a few levels above all the rest of you, I’m blowing through stop signs all day long. I wait for lights to turn red before I step on the gas. I take up at least two parking spaces in every parking lot I enter. It’s good to be the king.

JK. Nothing has changed inside the car, although I know people are making assumptions about me the same way I have done (almost 100% correctly) about status-car drivers in the past. Maybe I need to get a vanity plate that says, “NOTTA.”

That’ll work, right?
 
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