AUTO BUYING ADVICE REQUEST

[Pat]

Gee, fivestring, If a VW full of girls would have made you nervous this would have made you pass out...

When immediately after graduating high school, I registered for summer school at EMNU (Portales, New Mexico) and put my name as Pat, I was asssigned a room in the freshman dorm, the freshman girls dorm, that is, as someone had a mindset that Pat implied female. I was unaware as the dorm was just referred to as Xxxx Hall. I show up with my luggage ready to check in and the dorm mother says, "name please?" I reply, prefaced with Pat and am informed of the room number AND the fact that MEN are only allowed beyond the reception area to assist in moving in/out and that during the regular semester are not allowed "inside." I may have been young and naive and a bit slow but I wasn't stopped... I did detect an incongruity, something that wasn't quite right, a small nuance of disconnect, a mere trace of... well, you get the idea. As my head was spinning through the options, including cheap drugstore wigs, I was assigned to another dorm, one for the married students in summer school... but that is a different story.

Pat

[fivestring]

That's a good one...

[egon]

Pat:

Back from my youth.

If'n I recall correctly The men's dorm was connected by a utility tunnel to the Womens Dorm. It is reputed that a friend of mine [ now a PHD ] broke his right arm while jumping from a first floor womans dorm room.

It was just at final exam time and he was definetly not impressed when I landed beside him and didn't even fall down.

Egon

[Pat]

Egon, I should think any young adventurer worth his salt should be able to make a spider drop from a first floor winidow without breaking anything but his fall.

I can recall when Dykstra Hall at UCLA was very advanced in its policies. It was the first ever co-ed dorm I ever knew of, and this was back in the 1960's. Of course co-ed and their actual arrangement requires an explanation. The first x floors were men and the next y floors were women. The elevators opened into alcoves on each floor. These alcoves had windowless lockable doors with emergency bars on the girl's side of the door.

The actual mingling of the sexes was in the cafeteria and the lounge areas of the common spaces (a shared grand piano). Moving to California after highschool and freshman year of college in Oklahoma and New Mexico, I thought Dykstra hall was pretty wild stuff. My then girl friend, now wife, was a resident of Dykstra Hall.

OK! About auto buying... Seems in a year or three there will be more hybrids from among which to choose, Dodge/Chrysler included. I was chatting with a Dodge/Kubota salesman and commented that if Jeep Liberty hadn't been downrated by "Consumer's Reports" that I would be interested in the Mercedes turbo diesel powered version. He replied that the diesel Liberty only has a 2 year window of opportunity and then its diesel wouldn't make the air quality standards.

Pat

Pat

[egon]

Pat:
It was about 12 feet and my friend was not of the athletic type.

One can meet very interesting people when living in residence.

Egon

[Pat]

Egon, Roger on the strange people, I was probably one of them. After they reassigned me away from the freshman girls dorm it turned out the dorm I was sent to was the married sutdents dorm (for the summer session). I kept seeing some girls in a different wing being escorted back to their rooms by different guys on different evenings and eventually found that the other wing was UNMARIED girls, just not Freshmen. Things got more interesting then, even before a buddy stretched his stereo speakers wide apart and played a sound effects record of a car crash that brought half the dorm to the parking lot to check their cars.
Pat

[bgott]

I would have probably ruined a beautiful relationship. I'm just a little claustrophobic. [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

[bgott]

I got my GED through a migrant farm workers program at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. in 1976. I lived in Carter Hall for the duration of my "University" experience and what an experience it was. The dorm was full Co-Ed. The first morning I went to the shower and there was a couple of girls in front of the mirror brushing their teeth, stark naked! I became a firm believer in higher education right there. I managed to milk the situation for a month or so until they made me take the test. I could have passed the test the first week but with free grub, plenty of old cars in the parking lot to fix and pick up bucks on and Co-Ed party digs, they almost had to run me out at gunpoint! [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[fivestring]

<font color="red">"there was a couple of girls in front of the mirror brushing their teeth, stark naked! I became a firm believer in higher education right there." </font color>

I bet! [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

[Pat]

BGOTT, Claustrophobic? I don't think I have much of that. Only certain circumstances bug me like in close quarters where I can't turn around in a cave underwater. I get real interested in leaving. My mom is a little claustrophic but not enough to send her running out of the house. I have a touch of acrophobia, I think. Not enough to keep me from climbing towers and such but enough to make me feel really weird sometimes when I get close to a railing with a big drop. It never stopped me from being a pilot, doing aerobatics or whatever but it sure makes me tingle when I get next to a cliff edge or whatever.

I find that distractions eliminate most symptoms. I bet your experience in the dorm proved that. You probably didn't have a problem being in a small space while distracted by nude girls. You could have made an experiment by getting in a small space (shower) with as many as would fit in with you to see if the distraction would overcome your claustrophobia.

Oh, by the way, congratulations on your successful pursuit of education.

Pat