[masraum]

I used an '88 Carrera for a 25 mile commute daily for 3 years. If it breaks and you don't have time to fix it and have to take it someplace it can be very expensive. If you do the work yourself it's not that bad, but then you have to have time to do the work. Mine was very reliable for my 3.5 years and 50K miles.

Depending upon how I drove during the summer I got 17-19 mpg and the winter was 15-17 mpg. I'm a fairly aggressive driver, but not the most aggressive here. I did probably average 70-90 mph most of the time. On long trips running 90 I got about 23 mpg. The AC is good enough when it's in good shape, but it's not as good as 95% of the other cars out there.

Oh, I know how you feel. I worked on the Cisco TAC in Houston, we were already an outsourced company from Cisco, and now they have more outsourcing in Manila, Mexico, India, Costa Rica. Fortunately Cisco's customers have *****ed enough that they have pulled back a tiny bit, but not before half of the people that I worked with were laid off (40-50 people) Fortunately many of the people who were laid off were slackers who should have been fired a long time ago anyway, but there were still plenty of good people who were let go.

Good luck with the new job.