Im an international student. Please check my essay. Thank you.
Topic: "Tell about a time when you thought an experience would take place in certain way, and instead it turned out to be very different from what you had expected. Make sure that you support general points and specific examples and vivid details"
We tend to believe in professionals in a certain field because we tend to assume that they have professional knowledge in the field. However, some of them will abuse professional knowledge to cheat people. However, not only is being cheated their fault but also our fault, for unless we are familiar with a certain field, we cannot judge whether what a cheater says is right or not. On the other hand, if we have plenty of knowledge for a certain field, we can judge that. For me, I had expected too much from a car dealer. I assumed that he could be trusted because he was an expert in automobiles. I completely believed in what he said. However, I eventually ended up realizing that he deceived me. All I learned from that is that I had to acquire knowledge to avoid being deceived.
Two years ago, I finally got a driver's license, and I could not wait to buy a car. However , the problem was that I was not familiar with a car at all. Therefore, I asked one of my friends if he knew a car dealer, so he introduced a Japanese dealer who seemed friendly and helpful at that time. Hence, I decided to have the dealer look for a nice car. Since then, we had kept contact about a car. After a month, he found my ideal SUV, Honda Passport 1997, 6,000dollars. I thought it was a bit expensive, but as I looked at the Blue Book, where we can make sure whether a car price is valid or not , it was a reasonable value. Then, He sent a photo of it via email. It was a grey SUV which was big enough to carry two couches. It looked strong. It was as if it was an army tank . I loved that. Therefore, I decided to buy it and asked the dealer to bring it to my house. Two days later, he brought it to my house. As I looked at the car in reality, the interior was wide, so I thought that I was going to be able to go to Big Bear to snowboard with my friends. Everything was great with that car. I definitely did not know at that time that the car was going to have a lot of troubles later on.
First of all, a problem started one month after I purchased the SUV. All of a sudden, strange smoke came out of the engine. I was so scared because I did not know what happened. I was afraid that the car would not run anymore. Therefore, I called the dealer and asked what happened and why it happened. He said that it happened because a coolant oil leaked. However, I did not know what he was talking about and what a coolant oil was, so I made him explain it for a while. I finally understood what was going on after we talked for a couple of minutes . According to him, coolant oil is supposed to cool the engine. It is running in a tube all the way from coolant oil tank, which is located at the right side of engine room to engine itself. Obviously, if the tube breaks, coolant oil leaks. Thus, the oil will not reach to the engine, and as a result, the engine overheats. If we let it go for a while, engine is going to be ruined. Moreover, the dealer explained that the reason why it leaked is that the tube was very old. I asked him whether or not the tube in a car which had run only 10,000miles could be called "old". He said, "Yeah, every part of a car is supposed to be consumable." He said it happens to all cars. I believed in everything he said. At that time, I never had a doubt in his comments. I completely trusted him and believe in him as if he was Jesus.
After the tube broke, he and the mechanics repaired the tube of my car. I waited for my car for a week. When it came back to me, I was relieved because life was inconvenient without it. I could not even go to grocery store or starbucks where I usually studied. When it came back to me, I was driving and enjoying it for about a month. However, smoke came out of engine again, and I realized that a green coolant oil was leaking out of the bottom of the engine room. As a matter of fact, this leaking problem had happened six times during one year, although the dealer and mechanics always said that it was completely fixed. The funny thing is one of my friends put a nickname on that car. He called it "an old man who leaks pee."
I had a steering problem as well. One time, after I got off the freeway, I was heading back to my apartment. After a while, I just got to close to my apartment However, although I tried to pull over my car, I suddenly could not handle the steering of my car. It was extremely terrifying, but I barely pulled it over. Then, I went back to my room, and I crawled into my bed and kept thinking until I slept about what problem my car had and that if the steering had been broken on the freeway, it must have been nightmare. In the next morning, once I woke up, I gave the dealer a call and told him to come to my car to see what happened to it. He said that it was a steering belt worn out. He said again that every part of a car was consumable, which was only his excuse about several problems of my car. I thought that his excuse was weird.
Since the cars had had continuous problems, I decided to purchase a new car. Then, I searched for a car using Yahoo Auto, which provides information about what car is sold. It took months to find a reliable car, an Avalon Toyota 2002, which always has good reviews on Edmand.com in which there are a lot of comments and reviews about a car. At that time, I had never depended on a car dealer in terms of looking for a car. I found it by all myself. Then I called a dealer who was selling Avalon, and I met her. She was a Chinese woman who moved to America to do Auto business. I asked her how much Honda Passport was going to be. She said that it was going to be 1,000dollars because mileage was unknown. I was surprised, I asked " What do you mean by UNKNOWN? I purchased it with price like 6,000 dollars!" She said that mileage was not written on the pink slip, which means exact mileage was unknown and the car must have been running over 20,000miles because it looked much older than a car which has run only around 10,000miles, although the car mileage meter showed 10,000miles... I was so surprised that I couldn't help but open my mouth, and I asked her, " That means I was deceived? " She said, "I am sorry.." As a matter of fact, the mileage meter seemed to have been manually modified. The Honda Passport must have run much more than 10,000miles. That is why the Honda Passport had had a lot of problems.
Overall, although it was the most humiliating thing in my life that the car dealer deceived me , I learned that ignorance is a terrible thing, for he was able to deceive me because I had never known about automobile. I could not judge whether he was right or not because of that. At least, I should have known that unknown mileage on the pink slip was weird. I did not even look at the pink slip because of ignorance about cars before I purchased it. Besides, if I had been familiar with a car, I would not have completely depended on a car dealer, or I would realize something wrong with him or the Honda Passport. Thus, I realized that I have to be armed with knowledge to protect me from cheaters.
