The man standing before us with the tie and the cheesy grin is not trying to sell us a car so much as he is trying to scramble our brains. That much is obvious. He is telling stories about his kids, about his nephew’s soccer game, about his wife’s obsession with cup holders.

This is all so unnecessary.

And my heart goes out to the guy. I wish there were a polite way of telling him that way high on my list of car salesman do’s and don’ts is: Don’t tell a lot of boring stories about relatives. But there is no way, so we’re just standing here in this showroom smiling and nodding, which brings me to another one: Don’t mistake politeness for stupidity.

In fact, it’s probably a good idea for car salesmen to let go entirely of that The Customer Is Really Stupid thing they apparently teach in car salesman school. The last car we looked at, the white car, would have been ours had the salesman not gone into the very long story of the car his cousin traded in, which, as it turned out, in reality, was worth less than half the Kelley Blue Book value, which he said is how it works sometimes. Yes, indeedy.

He told this story as he prepared the number he would offer for our trade-in, which, as it turned out, in reality, was a little more than half the Kelley Blue Book value, which, he said, was such a deal.This is how we ended up over here with Mr. Storyteller, who is leaning on the blue car. “Heh, heh,” he is saying. “So then I told my wife that more cup holders just means more sodas for the kids so then we’ll have to stop at every rest stop on I-5!”

“Heh,” my wife says.

“Listen, Evonne,” he says.

“Dah-vonne,” I say.

“Evonne, I want to be honest with you, I want to ask you what it would take to get you in this car right here today,” he says.

Oh, brother. He’s putting the squeeze on Devonne because, of the two of us, she’s always a harder sell when it comes to cars.

But this is way too early to go in for the kill. I don’t think this guy was paying attention in car salesman school. At least not in that session they have that’s borrowed from cult leader school: Scramble the brains of the customer with a lot of boring stories about relatives before you go in for the kill. Present the blue car to them as if it were the very thing, the only thing, that could set them free.

Why do they teach this? If car salesmen were so good at being cult leaders, wouldn’t they have taken over the world by now?

Here’s another thing. The test drive. Must they really ride along? And if he is an Extra Tall person, like this car salesman, don’t you think it’s a mistake for him to sit in the back there like that, demonstrating how very little headroom the blue car has?

“Doesn’t this car come in a six?” Evonne says to the man, referring to cylinders.

“A six!” he says. “The lady wants a six! Guess we can tell who wears the pants in this family!” He winks at Evonne. Evonne stares back with the same cold stare she gets when I tell her I want to watch two football games on the same Sunday. I can see a headache moving in.

“Okay, folks, let’s sit down and have a look at what your options are. And have I told you about our rebates? No? No! Oh, I could lose my job if I didn’t tell you about our rebates. So, let’s all sit over here and let me tell you about our rebates. Because you don’t want me losing my job! HA-HA-HA!”

Just then, another salesman shows up, as if the first has pushed a button on some hidden panel. Devonne and I are looking at the door. All we want is the door. There is no way we are going to continue with this transaction. I know that, she knows that, the only thing we don’t know is which of us is going to come up with the exit strategy. Devonne goes to the tried and true.

“Cramps!” she says. “Oh my God, honey, I’m getting cramps!”

“Well, do you have your pills?” I say.

“We have to go home!” she says. “I need my pills!”

“She needs her pills,” I say to the salesmen. “It’s, um, personal.”

We get outside, wondering why we need to resort to things like this. We just want to buy a car.

When we get to the next dealership, we like the white car. It costs much more than we want to spend, but it’s a great ride. Jim, the salesman, hands us the key.

“Take it for a ride,” he says.

We come back half an hour later. “Did you like it?” he asks. We tell him yeah. We tell him the sticker price is padded with $ 1,200, as per the Internet research we did before we set out on this car-shopping journey. Jim says yeah and subtracts the $ 1,200. He calls up the Kelley Blue Book on his computer, shows us what our old car is worth, a number we already know. We all say yeah.

Jim probably flunked out of car salesman school. Poor Jim.

We drive home in the beautiful new white car, not only having spent more money than we ever intended to spend, but feeling a very definite urge to send the guy flowers. His days as a car salesman are just about over.

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