Ok, I confess. I did something stupid that I shouldn't have done and it almost damaged a very expensive guitar.

In a previous post, I wrote about how I'd gone to guitar class only to find out from my teacher that my guitar was defective. It turns out it wasn't defective... It was 'overheated', which was my fault. That guitar class was the first class of the new semester. It was also the first class since I'd changed jobs. Previously, since I lived so close to work, I could easily sneak out of work a few minutes early, stop by my house, pick up my guitar, and head to class. This meant my guitar never spent eight hours sitting in a hot car in the middle of South Florida summer. I left it in the car because I knew I wouldn't have time to stop by the house and pick up the guitar. I did my best to cut down on the heat in the car. I put the guitar in it's case. I covered the case with several towels, and I bought one of those reflective window shades for the front window and made sure that was in the window the whole day, in order to reduce the heat in the car. Apparently, that wasn't enough protection. The heat of the car still ended up warping the neck of the guitar.

After the teacher (mistakenly) told me my guitar was defective, I took it by Guitar Center to get it exchanged. They brought it back to Tom, the guitar tech. He took one look at it and told me the teacher was wrong and it was not defective. The only problem was a slight bow in the neck caused by the weather - no doubt caused by eight hours sitting in a hot car. He made a slight truss rod adjustment to the neck and it straightened out perfectly. Disaster averted.

The sad thing is, I knew that heat was a bad thing for guitars, especially for fairly thin acoustic guitars. I just figured that my attempts at protecting it from the heat of the car were enough. Apparently not. When the teacher told me it was defective, I trusted his judgement over my own, under the assumption that since he'd been doing this stuff for 20 years, and me only 1, he knew a lot more about it than I did. What I never told him that night was that I'd left it in the car all day. I think had I told him that, he would have told me the same thing the guitar tech did - don't leave it in the car! He had warned us before not to leave it in the car but I did it anyway. *sigh*

The next guitar class is coming around fast. Wednesday is the day. This will be my first day sneaking into his advanced class at the other school. Hopefully I won't have any problems there. The question is, how do I handle the guitar issue? Yeah, I could just bring the guitar into work and leave it in my office during the day and just take it with me when I go. Why didn't I do this before? I guess because I'm still very self concious about the whole guitar thing. I am not a good player, so I guess walking through the office carrying a huge ass guitar would be pretty obvious. There's no way I could smuggle it in. I already carry enough crap in every morning - a briefcase, a cooler containing my lunch, sometimes a bag of apples, and now a guitar! What am I doing? Moving in? Damn, you are carrying a lot of crap into work every morning, buddy! I doubt anyone would give me a hard time over it, but I'm still the 'new guy' around there, so I'm not quite comfortable there yet. Gotta suck it up.