Dear Chevrolet

Dear Chevrolet,

I appreciate that you have manufactured a car that has essentially been worth the almost $20,000 I paid for it new. At 70,000+ miles and almost six years, I have zero complaints about its reliability and besides a hybrid, I have yet to see car that gets better gas mileage on the highway than my Willard (my car's name). The car tells me when the roads will be icy, its tells me when I need to start planning my next oil change and what that song is I like on the radio. While my neighbor cusses at her Ford, that she bought a year later than my Chevy, I pat my Willard on the dash with pride.

Now that Willard is getting on in years, his light bulbs are beginning to burn out. First the left blinker and now the right. This leads me to one complaint: I need a special certification to change the bulbs. I don't possess said certification.

I'm the kinda girl that has always been able to pop in some fluids, change some fuses, clean out an air filter and change bulbs as needed on my cars. All the sudden, I feel entirely helpless. I don't even own the appropriate tool to get at my cars bulbs. Even if I did, I would have to disassemble the whole confounded headlight casing after removing it from my car!

What the hell were you thinking. For $20,000 I should be able to buy my $3.00 bulb and insert the thing in my damn self? NO! I am not going to a dealership for them to charge me $50 for some space-age light bulb and $100 in labor for your Master Mechanics precious 5 minutes of sacred, car-god time. I'd rather pay some 18 year old peon to charge $10 for his time  and $5 for the bulb that cost his ship 50 cents. Or maybe $20 for some small town shop to laugh at me for not being able to figure this out.

Or maybe they'll laugh at how badly Chevrolet tricked its buyers into thinking that changing a light bulb couldn't possible be a huge fucking production.

I really wish I would have thought to wrap my car-payments in super, strong material, so that they would have had to call in a specialist to get to my money.

Really? You want professionals to have change a light bulb? Really? There was no easier way? Or do you over pay your designers? Did you they get drunk when conceptualizing this model? Stoned? Was it an office prank gone bad?

The next time I buy a car, I am going to make the salesman demonstrate how to change the oil, add all fluids, change a light bulb and a fuse or its no sale.