Last First Date

Do you know what happens when your daughter’s new boyfriend accidentally fills your car’s six-cylinder, fuel-injected gasoline engine with diesel?

Because I do.

The car continues to run just fine. But only briefly. After a few hundred yards, it will start sputtering. The sputtering then turns to clanking which quickly degenerates to violent shaking. It also begins spewing daunting plumes of black smoke into the atmosphere. It’s best to pull over and turn off the engine at this point, but if the car is equipped with a premium sound system the driver can opt to turn up the radio and keep lurching down the road for about another mile, which is when the engine will seize up completely. This will be very late at night.

Next, you’ll get a phone call that goes like this:

You: Hello?
Daughter: Your car is broken.
You: Who is this?
Daughter: It was smoking and making horrible noises and may have briefly caught on fire and now it stopped running and won’t even start and you need to come get us because the radio isn’t working and we’re stuck in the middle of the road in a scary neighborhood and we’re probably going to be murdered because it’s dark outside and there’s nobody around except me and my boyfriend.
You: The boyfriend with the tattoos?
Daughter: Yes.
You: I’ll be right there.

Then you’ll have to spend the next several days rehashing the entire story with your insurance company, the tow-truck dispatcher, the tow-truck driver, the auto garage receptionist, the mechanic, the mechanic’s friend that didn’t believe him, and your therapist. Each of them, in turn, will proceed to tell you that it’s almost impossible to put diesel in a gasoline engine nowadays because the nozzles are totally incompatible and that whoever did this must be “very persistent” which are pretty much the worst words that anyone could use to describe your daughter’s boyfriend.

So, yeah. 0 out of 4 stars. Will not let daughter date anyone again. Ever.