1976 Mercury Comet
The Vomet Comet. I think everyone I know either had one of these cars or their parents did. Mavericks and Comets have a bad rep for being breakable and being not a very good car. I won't argue that they weren't exactly an inspired or inspiring car. They had their quirks, though and the one I had had more than most.The one I had didn’t have an undented panel on it and it even survived an off-roading episode or two. I got it for free from a buddy and I ended up giving it to someone else a couple of years later. It delivered pizzas non-stop for at least 4 years until someone dented the underside of the front suspension. Did that kill it? No. A guy would just have to go to the service station and get a used tire about once every other week for $10.00. Slap it on and the Vomet was good to go.
What made this car a bit different is that it had a column shifter. Servicing this shifter taught me a very important lesson about dealer parts departments. They mostly suck. The guys at the one I went to for the shift tube didn’t even ask me if I needed one of the ten or so plastic spacers and grommets that should have been replaced to do the job right. Nope, they just sold me the shift tube to replace the original one that had broken at the bottom. I fought and swore at that thing for about 2 days and when I was finished, the only thing that was better was that it shifted into 2nd and 3rd again. The action was sticky and it jammed quite often. This was due to reusing the spacers that I could reuse and not bothering to replace the spacers that were destroyed. You would think that the guy at the dealership would have wanted to make a bit more money on terrifyingly overpriced little pieces of plastic, but no, no offer to sell them was made and I didn’t know any better. Jerks. No doubt I'm going to catch hell from people who have a dealer guy who knows what's what, or from parts dudes themselves. I'm okay with that. If you're a parts guy and know which end of a screwdriver is the sharp end, email me and chew me out. I might go to you for parts. We'd both win. What a deal!
I had some good times with this car and made a ton of money delivering pizzas in it. Because of this, it always smelled like pizza.
It was also a cop magnet. The sight of Pizza Guy in a car that looked like a piece of used chewing gum was just too much to
take for some officers. I probably got stopped once a week on duty. This was kind of a pain, but I always had my insurance,
cab card and license with me. I was always courteous and respectful, and if it looked like I was going to get a ticket, I
mentioned that I knew a couple of officers, and dispatchers. I never got a ticket driving pizzas around, but the second I
left my home town in this car, I got stopped. I think I got 2 or 3 tickets real tickets in this car and probably 15 warnings:
"Your tail light is out..."
"Your license plate light is out..."
"Your windshield is cracked..."
"Do you know how fast you were going?"
"You didn't come to a complete stop behind the line at that last stop sign..."
"You didn't yield to that white car..."
"You didn't blah to that blah..."
I never did find out what happened to this car. Given the preceeding screed about cops and this thing's attraction to them, it probably went to the impound lot after a traffic stop and was probably junked.
