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Those of you who may have assumed that I am, by now, the possessor of a spiffy, certified pre-owned 2001 Honda have reckoned without Murphy's greedy grasp. He forgets about me for months at a time, but when he decides to harass me, he makes the experience memorable.

As is my practice, I refused to purchase the car until my mechanic had checked it out. The earliest time my mechanic could do so was 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday. If all went well, esrblog and I would meet Sales Guy that night to seal the deal.

While Sales Guy was driving the car to my mechanic's garage, the "Check Engine" light went on. My mechanic later told me that he discovered that the car had a technical bulletin out on it concerning the torque converter. A torque converter, it turns out, is a key component of an automatic transmission; it performs essentially the same function for an automatic transmission that a clutch does for a manual transmission, namely, it regulates the transmission of power to the car's wheels.

It is, in short, a very bad part of the car to have problems with.

Sales Guy told me that he had his service techs replace the transmission fluid, but he wanted to drive the car a bit more that day and see whether the problem reappeared before going further with the transaction. I agreed. My mechanic told me, privately, that except for the torque converter problem he thought the car was great, but that I should get a written warranty that the dealer would fix any transmission problems gratis for at least a year or refuse to take the car.

I talked to Sales Guy again and he said that the car has the remains of the original power train (read: engine and transmission) warranty: 7 years from the original purchase (which he thought would mean until November 2007) or 100,000 miles, whichever came first. The car has about 49,000 miles on it now. I said that, subject to actually reading the warranty, I'd proceed on Wednesday night with the deal if the car was showing no relapse and the warranty was as claimed.

Wednesday morning, Sales Guy called me back and said the "Check Engine" light was back again. This time they weren't fooling around; they were going to replace the torque converter themselves, but that would take a few days. He expects the torque converter to be replaced Friday, and he wants to drive it some more over the weekend. If there are no problems and I'm still interested, we could proceed on Monday night.

I thought about it. This was the only real problem my mechanic saw, and the dealership has been backed into fixing it with no cost to me.

So I told Sales Guy that I may well still take the car then, if I haven't found another car I prefer in the meantime. He agreed to leave things that way till Monday.

In the meantime, I have three or four prospects (most at other dealerships) that I want to check, an $84 bill from my mechanic for checking out the car, and a slowly growing bill for my rental car.

We'll see what happens Monday.