[Leica] car painting fiasco

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

sweet barking cheese --  
  i recently found myself in posession of a cute little '64 corvette with 
the factory paint job and largely origional interior (though for some 
reason, someone had installed a holly hobbie tape player and bubble horn 
where the tachometer should be). i decided that it would be nice to have it 
spruced up a bit but i nearly fell off my chair when i found out how much ye 
local highway robbers wanted to repaint it. while chatting this out at the 
pub one night over noctilux's and stouts with a few P-LUGgers, one mentioned 
that he had a friend who refinished leica cameras and, well, cars and 
cameras both being made mostly of metal with a few leather bits, he could 
probably paint my car for me. 
  i called him up and a bit of back and forth and a few masonic handshakes 
later (the son from the north had to eventually ask for the brother from the 
east to make a three fingered elkshorn for the great and silent moon river, 
but it got settled, so i'm happy), he agreed to do it. 
  i dropped my car off on friday and was pleased to hear him say it would be 
done by the following monday. much to my dismay, when i arrived to pick it 
up, it had been transformed into a fake gold and black luftwaffle 
volkswagen, complete with garish eagles and a swastica it's going to take me 
a month to get off with a belt sander.
  i was dejectedly sitting at a traffic light considering just driving the 
whole thing into the schulkill when a man riding past on a vintage1947 
Triumph Bombast skidded to a stop, spilling his latte on my right front 
fender, and remarked "great jangling bells of hades! is that a luftwaffle 
volkswagen?" -- i made a hasty judgement based solely on the look of utter 
amazement covering his face like a wet towel over a dead hooker and assured 
him that it was. 
  he was a software engineer recently made millionare by some dot com or 
other escaping chapter 11 and dumping their shares on the market at tragic 
prices while the execs puffed up their earnings by simply adding a bunch of 
zeroes before the decimal place. he offered me four times what i'd paid for 
it, including the crappy paint job, and i handed him the pink slip on the 
spot.
  on the whole, it wasn't a bad experience but it's learned me to be wary of 
what luggers say after a few warm beers.
 
kc
 
i'm finding it absolutely impossible to get the exchange web client to send 
an email in freaking ascii. i apologise for the html. i'll send bill gates 
hate mail when i get home.