Scheduled Maintenance

Let me start by saying the whole car industry is evil. Well, maybe not entirely evil, but at least corrupt, greedy, dishonest, disgustingly obese, and possessed of poor personal hygiene. There's the whole issue of being in bed with the oil industry, destroying the environment, and keeping prices artificially high while suppressing emergent technology, but no one cares about that. I'm talking about the lies they tell you regarding scheduled maintenance.
The biggest money getter is the oil change. Apparently oil is some magical fluid that makes your car run, and here I thought gas made it run. Whole countries have gone to war, reportedly over that very substance, oil. It seems that it has to be imported from some crazy desert place in order to pour it into my car. The high cost of oil seems to be ruining the whole economy, even the price of gas is affected by oil costs. I don't see how one is related to the other, one being clear and the other being brownish black. But why do I have to change the oil. I don't change the gas when it gets used up. I just add more whenever the light comes on. I save money and stick it to the oil companies and the car dealerships by adding my own oil. It's the same as the gas, just add more when the light comes on. You know it's full when you see excess oil coming out around the edges of the dipstick thing.
The next big kicker is rotating tires. Supposedly tires need to be rotated every 5,000 miles to make sure they wear evenly. I'm no dummy, but I think I know what my tires need. Rotation is what they do every time I drive. You see, tires are circles, and as they spin they rotate themselves, and the wear is distributed evenly around the circumference of the tire. Right now the tires on my car are getting good and worn down, just like the tires the Nascar guys use. For a while the right side of the tires was wearing a little faster, but I fixed that problem by taking more left turns, and by driving backwards on alternating days of the week. Now they are getting extra traction from the steel belts that really grip well on muddy roads and in ice. That's one of the benefits you won't get if you keep shelling out money to the man and pay to have your tires rotated for you.
The worst thing that I do have to pay for, however, is the battery. You'd think that with all the new technology in electronics that they would figure out how to make a rechargeable battery. I hate having to change the battery every time my car dies. It's a good thing I have a lot of trunk space, I like to keep five or six batteries on hand so I only have to buy new ones once a week.