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Uschi and Christoph Niklas are just the finest people.

They’ve worked all their lives to put their kids through school and into good jobs, they’re 5-fold grandparents (with another 2 on the way) and they’ve never owned a new car.

Until last Thursday, that is.

Their old car had a minor disagreement with a deer a couple of months back and – although still just driveable – was an economic write-off.

The “Cash for Clunkers” was in full swing, but they both had a phenomenally bad conscience about spending ALL THAT MONEY on a new car.

I did the numbers with them at one stage and with the insurance money from the old car, the €2500 from the state and the trade-in price from Mercedes, a new B-class was pretty viable.

(Which involved talking them out of some of the sillier ideas that the Mercedes sales rep had. Such as a combined radio/satnav for €1700..)

Stephan, their architect son, was all for it, the girls (Suzie and Sonja) were – how shall we put it – somewhat reserved about the whole thing (girls – say no more..) and it’s probably going to turn out to be my fault anyway.

So they picked it up last week and came around at the weekend to take us for a spin.

Still lamenting “All that money. All that money. Oh woe is me”

And good on ’em, too.

If anyone deserves it, they do.

05 Oct This entry was published on 5 October, 2009 at 11:00. It’s filed under Mainz, People and tagged good guys. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.