The raptor chronicles!

Gang,
I wrote this over a period of several months as I struggled with the notion of buying a Raptor. Do not put yourself through this. Just buy the thing. It's the most capable vehicle you will ever own and you will not regret it.
Enjoy the craziness I put myself through....


THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES
A case study in adult lunacy


And now for another spine melting installment of...

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES

When last we looked in on our madly drooling would-be buyer of a Ford SVT Raptor 4x4 truck, he'd just returned from a test drive. The truck was Molten Orange inside and out so that it made him feel hot just to stand next to the truck, and it was equipped with stuff that he didn't want. It was an exercise of supreme personal fortitude, but he managed to not buy the thing on the spot. His wife was suitably impressed with his willpower, of course.

The same young salesman who made the test drive possible called several days later to advise that the dealership in Huntsville had taken delivery of a black Raptor, but he did not know how it was equipped. Our drooling auto consumer was about to run over to the dealership to look at the window sticker on that truck when the salesman e-mailed with the news that it was a pre-ordered vehicle, and that somebody already owned it. "Oh well," the consumer thought to himself, "It saves me a trip up town."

Almost immediately thereafter the salesman called to say that he's found a white truck just like what the overeager consumer has in mind, but it has a $1,000 "graphics package" in addition. The so-called graphics package is plastic stickers applied to the back of the truck. Our hero remembers his daughters playing with plastic stickers and wasn't very enthused. Then comes the news that this white truck is in Illinois and will be driven, not trucked, down to Alabama if he wants it. That's not the way he wants the truck broken in, and that's really not the truck he wants.

Points to the young salesman, though. Our would-be Raptor owner visited Ford dealerships in Huntsville, Decatur, Athens, and Arab and was on the phone several times with the dealership in Scottsboro. This young man was more informative and more helpful than everyone else he talked with combined.

So as things stand today, the consumer can order the truck he wants and Ford will start building it the day they receive the order. It'll take 3 to 6 weeks for the truck to come in, but it will be exactly what he wants. Additionally, Ford is treating this vehicle like an F-150 and not a specialty truck, so there is room to negotiate on price. The drooling and badly overeager consumer will spend the weekend contemplating whether he can hold off on this purchase to save some money or to simply act on a decision that's already been made.

Will he exercise his will power in a mature, adult fashion, or will he cave in to simple adolescent vehicular lust? Tune in next week for the next excitingly mind-inverting installment of...

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES

(c) Copyright 2010, Fly-by-Nite Productions

Stay tuned, kiddies. After the next commercial break for a sugar laden breakfast food substitute that will rot your teeth and eventually give you diabetes, the second nose hair tingling episode of...

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

Ah, the poor drooling (but very intelligent!) Ford SVT Raptor owner-wannabe! A second night of poor sleep as his inner adolescent wrestles uncontrollably with the demons of vehicular lust! The previous night he woke up at 2AM, and this morning he's slurping coffee before 6AM and it's a Saturday. Will he ever get his manic subconscious under a modicum of control?

Today will be a day of vain number crunching for the prospective buyer. He's realized (insert gonzo grin here) that should he wait a year to buy the Raptor of his pathetically adolescent dreams, his current truck and trade-in will be worth less. How much less is the question! By how much will it offset the cost of ownership of the new truck? This is the question mark that burns in his fevered mind almost exactly, although not entirely or precisely, unlike the signal lamp that sent Paul Revere on his famous midnight ride.

Calculator in one hand, mileage records clutched in the other, he slurps his coffee (you can't have very nice table manners when you're drooling like a madman) and stabs his bureaucratic forefinger at the little keys. Will his calculations support the desire of his heart? Will he short out the calculator with drool? Will his wife slap him upside the head in a righteous fit of mature adult disgust? Stay tuned for the next navel tweaking episode of....

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

(c) Copyright 2010, Pull-My-Finger Productions

And now, another blackboard and fingernail installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

The courageous would-be Raptor owner has feverishly completed his calculations, and oh what marvelous calculations they are! He has determined that his average yearly mileage is 12,500 miles, which include a yearly pilgrimage to Colorado to climb in the Rockies. Consulting the Kelly Blue Book site he has learned that with 101,000 miles currently on his 2004 GMC Canyon, were he to wait a year to buy the Raptor of his sweaty, adolescent dreams and rack up another 12,500 miles, his truck will decrease nearly $1,000 dollars in value. “Eureka!” he cried with a triumphant grin. This figure goes a long way toward offsetting the first year’s cost of ownership of his prospective Raptor. Plans began to immediately form in his mind: “I’ll need to get the cargo bed sprayed with a bed liner. Oh, the rear wheel wells, too! I’ll need this cold air intake, that exhaust, and oh I’ve gotta get some pre-runner bars. And why don’t they put fog lights on this truck? I’ve gotta fix that, too!”

And then reality avalanched on him in precisely the way that employees at a feather pillow factory never fear: The Raptor will depreciate more than $1,000 the moment he signs the paperwork. Oh, the pain! It was like being trampled by a herd of hysterically estrus Triceratops. Horrified, he turned off his calculator, laid down his stubby pencil, and bitterly wept. It was horrible, I tell you, horrible.

But time heals all wounds. Well, most of them, anyway. If they’re not too severe. The following morning he has in his mind the new layout for the garage. Oh yes, it will be necessary to completely redesign the garage in order to park the Raptor in it. He’s not going to spend $40K on the truck of his slaveringly adolescent dreams and then park it outside. Uh-uh, not going to happen. So on a Sunday, his only thought is to work like a rabid dog in the garage in order to park a truck that he hasn’t quite decided when to buy.

Will our pathetic hero come to his senses? Will he get off the fence and make a bloody decision? Will pigs finally learn to fly? Stay tuned for the next spine pulverizing episode of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2010, Seat-of-the-Pants Productions

Stay tuned, boys and girls! Another hair shriveling installment of THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES! is coming right up!

Saturday found our data-addicted hero driving down the main drag, and there in the front lot of the local Toyota dealership was a desert sand colored FJ Cruiser. As this was once an option that competed with the Raptor for his attentions and affections, a fast u-turn was engineered and the FJ was quickly under inspection. It had an option or two that our hero would not order, but the sticker price was very instructive: $36K. For A Few Dollars More, Mr. Eastwood, you can have a real truck. That little visit was the final nail in the coffin for the FJ. It’s the Raptor or the city bus for our hero.

Back at home, the would-be Raptor owner set about the process of reorganizing the garage so that a Raptor would fit. The first task was to lug some bags of potting soil and landscape lime out of the garage and put it under the house in the crawlspace where he’s poured a concrete pad for under-house storage. Upon opening the door to the crawlspace he was greeted with a face full of water. “Well, this doesn’t happen every day,” he mumbled, and found that the housing of his whole-house water filter had cracked and a fine mist of water was spraying 15 to 20 feet under the house. It’s a very good thing our hero is so nutso over the Raptor, because he didn’t have a reason to be under the house except to reorganize the garage. As this was the second of these water filters to fail, the solution was to sweat in a piece of pipe and have done forever with the trouble associated with water filters.

The plumbing repair was a one-beer, multi-cussword job, and then our intrepid hero turned his attention once again to the garage task. Several hours later the garage will barely swallow a Raptor. It’ll involve turning the vise on the workbench sideways, and hopefully the left side mirror of the Raptor will clear the right side mirror on the Buell. So the garage is good to go! But is our hero ready to write the check? Indeed, is our hero ready to do anything but suck down another cheep beer?

The answers to these flaming questions as well as the truth about bureaucracies and bureaucrats may or may not drag their filthy carcasses out of the shadows in our next retina quivering installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2010, Bald Heads are Freudian Productions

And now! Boys and girls! Truck fanatics of all ages! Another perilously self-flagellating installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

When last we looked in on our heroically intrepid would-be Raptor owner and part time plumber, he had fortuitously stumbled upon a potentially disastrous water leak in the crawlspace of his home only because he was cleaning out the garage in preparation for the future arrival of a truck he hadn’t yet purchased. A convoluted, altogether too coincidental, and far, far too beneficial turn of events, it put him into yet another cycle of “raptored” (not to say “ruptured”) thinking. For if he had not been so around-the-bend over the Ford SVT Raptor, he would not have been cleaning out the garage. And if he had not been cleaning out the garage, he would not have been in the crawlspace under his house. And finally (deep breath) if he hadn’t been in the crawlspace, he would not have discovered the water leak. It must be patently obvious to any logically thinking person that the as yet unpurchased Ford Raptor saved his home from certain destruction. Can it get better than that? Yes, it can!

Sometime in the wee hours of Monday morning (not usually the time of day he does his finest thinking, but this is surely an utterly remarkable exception) it dawned on him in a way it can only dawn at 2:00 AM that he had been approaching the entire subject in an unnecessarily complex way. In true Occam’s Razor fashion, our hero boiled it down to this: Do you want to keep writing a whole year of THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES! or do you want to actually, you know, own a Ford SVT Raptor? It was like being unceremoniously splashed in the face with a bucket of refrigerated gerbil *****. Somehow he managed to go back to sleep anyway, but in the morning he knew what he must do.

After work he drove across state lines (Stop that! This is serious!) to the Ford dealership in nearby Fayetteville, Tennessee. The young salesman was expecting his arrival, and even came out of the dealership with an umbrella to ****** our hero inside. (Good thing it was raining, or the deal might have been off right there.) Our checkbook-in-butt-pocket hero soon discovered that Ford had a better idea for 2011 and lumped the way cool backup camera in with a thing called a trailer brake controller and called the combination the Raptor Plus Package. For a man who hasn’t a trailer, it simply added $145 to the cost of the camera. But the camera is worth it, so our hero forged on. The sticker price of the truck with only the tailgate step ($375) and the Raptor Plus Package ($595) as options came to $43,495. (This does not include taxes, or title fees.) The sales manager offered $41,430 as a reasonable price – a savings of $2,065. This seemed a good start to our now excitedly drooling hero and he counter-offered a nice round figure: $41,000. Handshakes all around. It’s a deal.

As he left the dealership he noted that the rain had stopped and that there was the most magnificent 7-color double rainbow he’d ever seen in the east. It followed him home, too. When heaven smiles on a $41K purchase, it’s a very good day indeed!

The sales manager’s best guess at a delivery date was sometime in January. Can our hero reasonably be expected to wait that long without doing permanent or irreparable damage to his stomach lining? Can he wait until after delivery to start ordering modifications, or will he break down and get something sprayed with bed liner material? Will we ever learn the truth about bureaucrats and bureaucracies? Tune in for the next paradigm busting installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2010, The Department of Redundancy Department Productions

And now, another blitheringly insightful installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

Having made the madly impetuous leap from being a hand-wringing Raptor owner-wannabe to snarling and frothing future Raptor owner, our courageous hero now turns his attention to a subject that has intrigued him for several decades. And what, you might ask, might that be? It might be the truth about bureaucracies and bureaucrats. And in fact, that’s exactly what it is! This has been a topic of considerable interest to our hero because, as you might have guessed, he is himself a bureaucrat. With the uncertainty of the purchase of the Raptor now behind him, he now sees clearly that the truth about bureaucracies and bureaucrats naturally organizes itself into five phases:

Phase One: “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” invariably and often inconveniently falls short of the unabridged and exhaustive truth in many important – and nearly infinite unimportant – respects. If you happen to work in a bureaucracy, these may all be blithely ignored. Except, of course, for the one that gets you fired. As this particular eventuality is entirely unpredictable in a true bureaucracy, no one bothers much about it either. Bureaucracies never fire anyone, except, of course, when they do. Hence the unpredictability.

Phase Two: But despite their seemingly well deserved reputations for playing fast and loose with the truth, true bureaucrats are in fact Truth Experts. For truth, being the second most important and powerful created thing in Creation, is an immensely nuanced thing. There are variations, shadings, subtleties, phases, nuances, etc., etc., of the truth, and an infinite number of perspectives on each. This, of course, makes truth a rather slippery thing to get hold of. What is the difference, for example, between the comprehensive truth and the exhaustive truth, or between the painful truth and the inconvenient truth? (Yes, there are differences.)

Phase Three: Through this nearly infinitely torturous labyrinth of genuine – if not honest - complexity confidently strides the seasoned bureaucrat. Able to successfully navigate the warp and woof of the fabric of truth, he is a paragon of subtle, complex analysis of all things touching on verity. And he knows it. And this merely apparent arrogance is, of course, the problem. Well, to be truthful about it, it’s really only one of the problems. To be painfully truthful about it, it’s actually only one of the many problems. This is to say nothing about the comprehensive or indeed the exhaustive truth about the problem.

Phase Four: For all of the problems fairly or unfairly associated with bureaucrats, the core truth of the matter is that they work in a bureaucracy. Since bureaucracies necessarily have a hierarchical structure, all bureaucrats – regardless of title or position – work under other bureaucrats. The inconvenient and inescapable truth (Both – these confluences in the subtleties of truth turn up all the time) is that no one ever likes to work under anyone – least of all a bureaucrat. Now think about working under layers of bureaucrats. Truth be told, this is what makes life in a bureaucracy so, um, challenging, and is at the root of why bureaucrats are the way they are.

Phase Five: In practice, it goes something like this. Once the seasoned bureaucrat gets the subtleties of a matter well and thoroughly worked out, in order to get approved it has to navigate umpteen multiple layers of the bureaucracy and meet with the approval of innumerable other bureaucrats, all of which are unhappy with the fact that they work under another bureaucrat, each of increasing importance and impressiveness of title. So, of course, approval is obtained with cosmic infrequency and not inconsiderable pain. Some say that this is the unavoidable nature of bureaucracies. Others argue that this is the nature of the truth. A small minority holds that this is in fact due to what the truth does to bureaucrats. Still others argue that the problem is due to the fact that bureaucracies subtly select for two important characteristics in bureaucrats: intelligence and masochism. The truth, it turns out, is that they’re all quite correct.

Our hero’s bureaucratic ruminations are complete because he’s run out of cheap beer. This is not tragic because bureaucrats are natural ruminators and cheap beer is, after all, cheap. Given the cost of his yet-to-be-delivered Raptor, cheap beer is all our hero is likely to be drinking for the foreseeable future, anyway. And what might he ruminate on in the future? Raptor modifications! Stay tuned for the next exhaustive, comprehensive, and exquisitely detailed installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2010, Rapturous Verities, Unlimited

And! Now! Boys! And girls! Another horrifically enlightening and discomfiting installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

Our hero has yet to receive anything official that documents his long and painfully contemplated purchase of a Ford SVT Raptor. All he has is a handwritten receipt on dealership letterhead for his $1000 security deposit, with the purchase price of the truck, signed by the Sales Manager. This is, of course, insufficient to keep his consumption of cheap beer at a minimum. He’s been told that an official Ford receipt is going to be scanned and e-mailed to him, but that hasn’t happened. He’s been told that the order has been sent to Ford, but he has seen no record of it. It’s driving him irretrievably bazonkers. (Don’t worry about it, if it isn’t a word it ought to be.)

What to do, what to do? Yesterday he stopped by Cycle Gear to buy an American flag sticker. No joy. He looked three places for the right fog lights. No joy.

It’s crazy-making!

But finally today he connected on the fog lights. Wal-Mart didn’t have them. O’Reilly’s didn’t have them. Advance Auto didn’t have them. But Auto Zone did: Blazer Ultra White crystal rod fog lights. They’re just the thing to peek out from the trapezoidal holes in the Raptor’s front bumpers. Of course there’s nothing he can do with them at the moment except put the brackets on them, but it’s something. A very small something. The cheap beer has been replenished, but it’s disappearing fast.

Will our hero receive the paperwork that documents his order of the off-road truck of his adolescent wet dreams? Will he indeed ever take delivery of such a vehicle? If he doesn’t, where will he install his fog lights?

Stay tuned for the next gastrointestinally destructive installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2020, Sow’s Ear Productions

Thank you for your patience, boys and girls, but the wait is over. And now, direct from a location not of your choosing, another blitheringly insightful episode of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

Our hero remains not only Raptorless, but also sans any evidence from Ford, Inc. that the ground-pounder of his socially unacceptable dreams is actually on order. All he has is a pair of receipts, one hand-written and the other machine-generated, acknowledging receipt of his security deposit. A frustrated man, he has found it necessary to take the edge off some other way. No, no, no, he hasn’t taken to frequenting stripper bars or drinking himself senseless. He’s done something much more directly applicable – visiting Ford parts counters. He can now drink his morning coffee from a Ford coffee mug while wearing a digital camo ball cap with the Ford oval logo on the front. Well, it’s something.

In the intervening period he has done a considerable amount of research, and has learned several useful things. One is that the so-called cold air intakes (CAI) available from a number of aftermarket firms may not be in any way superior to the factory intake, and indeed may not intake cold air at all. There are those who have the strong opinion that the factory intake is the only true cold air intake available for the Raptor, and that the aftermarket units are the equivalent of fancy fishing lures that catch more fishermen than fish. The smart ticket may be in intelligently modifying the factory intake rather than in spending hundreds of dollars on a gamble.

Not being a great fan of expensive blind hope and change, our hero has undertaken a cheap experiment on his GMC Canyon pickup. He has long since replaced the cylindrical pleated paper factory filter with an oiled foam filter. With tens of thousands of miles and mileage records on every fill-up, our cunningly clever hero has the means to make incremental modifications on the factory intake and measure the results. Accordingly, he has opened up the cold air horn of the factory intake and drilled several half-inch holes in the sound baffling partitions in the interior of the airbox of his truck. The idea is to increase airflow internal to the airbox without completely gutting it and defeating its engineered sound deadening characteristics. Having made these modifications coincident with a fuel fill-up, he has the means to readily measure the results.

Will our hero’s cheap experiment produce measureable results, or should he stick to cheap beer? Will he ever receive notification from Ford that the truck of his sweaty desires is going to be built, or will the only thing he ever gets from Ford be the truck itself?

Stay tuned for the next brainstem liquefying episode of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2010, Blind Faith Unlimited, Ltd.

Friends and neighbors, boys and girls, fans of esoteric and convoluted sagas of all ages, please psyche up for the next blood pasteurizing installment of...

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

Our intrepid hero finds himself 2,000 miles from home base and has the time, energy, and, well, audacity (GASP!) to contemplate the nature of, um, contemplation. Why, he wonders, do they only put fruit in yogurt? Why not asparagus or rutabaga yogurt? Why not kung pau chicken yogurt? And the ultimate – and therefore last question – why not cheap beer yogurt? Huh? Why not? (You don’t know either, do you?)

As of this writing our thoroughly frustrated and Raptorless hero has nothing from Ford Motor Company that would convince him that his order for the off-road vehicle of his feverish dreams has registered in any particular way in Dearborn. His dealer assures him that they check on the order every day. This is positive news, of course, but our hero is a bureaucrat and bureaucrats need data. No data, no joy. No hint of mild amusement, in fact. It’s enough to make a man want to drink more cheap beer than he already consumes. A lot more.

In the mean time he has taken to tallying the number of SVT Raptors he encounters on the road. It’s not taxing. It’s not terribly entertaining, even. It is, in point of fact, blitheringly, mind-numbingly boring. He has seen but one Raptor on the road – the very same Raptor that awoke him to the realization that the vehicle of his dreams wasn’t a dream at all. One, just one, Raptor has graced his retinas with binocular imagery. Evidently there are other prospective Raptor owners who, like him, have not yet taken delivery of a Raptor.

It is said that misery loves company. This is not normally true. Think of it. When you are miserable, do you want somebody around who is cheerful and happy? When you are so low that you have to unzip to see daylight, do you crave the company of someone who is in love with life, has a marvelously healthy self-image, and who ***** joy nuggets? Hell no. When you are soiled with self-pity, what you want is somebody who is at least as miserable as you are. If you dared to be perfectly honest with yourself (dare! DARE!), you’d fairly kill to have the companionship of someone twice as miserable as you.

And there, unfortunately, lies our hero’s problem in an ugly, oozing heap. For there is no one, not a single living human soul of his acquaintance, more miserable than a man who has plunked $1,000 of his hard earned American pocket lettuce down on the ultimate anything that can be bought, rented, or filched but does not yet have that ultimate thing. So, no company for our hero, miserable or otherwise. But, there is the solace of cheap beer of which the world seems to provide an endless supply, thank God.

Will our hero develop the need for long term psychiatric care before he hears from the manufacturer of his dream truck? Will he need to crawl through the front doors of the Betty Ford Clinic before he finally and ultimately takes delivery? Will he, indeed, run out of clever phraseology before he buys the first tank of gas for his as yet nonexistent Raptor?

Digest your own innards until the next hopelessly convoluted installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2010, Yo Mama, Ltd.

Friends, neighbors, and fans of cheap experiments of all ages, yet another cowlick plastering installment of THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES may, or may not be, coming up next. (A little doubt and uncertainty is character building, don’t cha know.)

Back home from his sojourn to the left coast, our impatient hero has in hand the results of his cheap experiment to open up the intake tract of his 3.5 liter L5 GMC Canyon. All he did was open up the intake horn and drill several half-inch holes in the sound baffling partitions in the air box. Using the same gas from the same gas station and the same diving habits, the results of this experiment are now in. And they are amazingly favorable. Two post-modification fill-ups vs. 102,000 miles of no-modification running reveals that very modest modifications to factory intake tracts can lead to measurably positive results: One-half mile per gallon improvement. This is a two percent improvement in fuel economy in return for 5 minutes worth of grinding with a Dremell tool. Perhaps the Raptor will be similarly amenable to such modification. Time will tell.

Or will it? A full month has elapsed since he wrote a check for $1,000 and ordered his truck, and still our intrepid hero has nothing but receipts from the dealership to show for it. Our hero is doing everything imaginable to maintain his sanity and prepare for Raptor ownership, but his impatience has cancerously metastasized and replaced the naturally benign functioning of his synapses with feverish and flurried flashes of frustration and emotional funk. (Do you like alliterations? Our hero does!) The only thing he can do is e-mail his salesman and ask for the status of the order. It isn’t much, so of course the cheap beer is disappearing at an astounding pace.

In the mean time, he had the opportunity to drive his daughter’s Porsche 911 for several days while she was recuperating from arthroscopic knee surgery. It was a horrific, awful, horrendous experience. Having 350 hp under his foot in a vehicle that weighs half what a Raptor weighs was just awful. But dads are stoic and of course will do anything for their children, so he sucked it up and soldiered on without complaint. And then, then came the realization of what owning a Raptor might be like when he returned home in his 5-cylinder GMC Canyon. Compared to a Porsche 911, the Canyon handles like a stagecoach. Pulled by nag plow horses. Old ones. With arthritis. And gout.

Now, that’s really horrible. (You are supposed to shed a sympathetic tear here, in case you didn’t know.)

Will our hero learn anything from Ford concerning his order? Will nag arthritic plow horses populate his previously vehicularly oriented dreams? Will he get filthy rich by saving a half-mile per gallon? Stoically reserve judgment until the next spleen pulverizing installment of…

THE RAPTOR CHRONICLES!

© Copyright 2010, Will Mated Porshes and Raptors Produce Viable Offspring?