AAA can suck my cock!

The BBQ Pit
1

OK, so last Thursday night Dr. Boyfriend’s hospital has a little dinner to welcome its new residents, and I, being a residency widow, attend. Good time was had by all.

Now, on the way in, I noticed the battery light was on, and the indicator was just at the very top of the low red zone. Figuring it wasn’t anything to worry about, I went in just fine. But, as I start to head home (from center city Philadelphia, mind you, to a half hour outside in the 'burbs, in the next county over no less), I notice it’s still on. As I’m driving out of the city, I then notice that my headlights are starting to dim. Right before I get onto the main highway out of the city (for those who know, 23rd and Walnut just before the Schuylkill Expressway), the engine starts sputtering - I quickly pull over into an empty parking space (thank God it was before I got on the highway), let it sit for a minute… then it dies. Dead. Kaput.

This is all at 1:00 a.m.

Being alone in a place so late at night and being way wicked tired, I call up Dr. Boyfriend and hop a cab back to his place to crash.

So I get up around 8:30 Friday morning and call AAA. Heaven knows I’ve done this before, and after I tell them exactly where I am and exactly what happened, they say fine, they’ll dispatch someone, should be there within the hour, and will call me 5 minutes before the truck will arrive. I eat a quick breakfast and hop another cab to my car, arriving just as they call and say the truck will be right there (around 9:30)

20 minutes later I get another phone call, this time from the dispatcher telling me they can’t find me. I tell them precisely where I am, and she says, “Oh, you’re on the east side of the river? We can’t help you - that’s not our territory. We’ll dispatch another driver.” Now, why the call center couldn’t figure that out when I called them at 8:30 I don’t know. So now I have to wait another hour.

A AAA car (not a tow truck) shows up around 10:30, and I explain what happened. “Oh, well, that’s your alternator,” says the man. “I could jump you, but no telling if you’d make it home or not.” Well, blessed be, Mom and Dad had just upgraded to AAA+, meaning I get 100 free miles of towing. Since it’s going to go to my mechanic anyway, it seems a safer idea to have it towed there. “No problem,” says Mr. AAA, “I’ll call in and have them dispatch a tow truck. Should be 30-45 minutes.”

Two hours later I call AAA to find out where the fucking tow truck is, and they tell me the guy had never phoned in the dispatch. They’ll send one out now.

:mad:

Now, please be aware that the previous night’s festivities had been suit jacket atmosphere, so I was wearing dress pants and shoes with a t-shirt borrowed from Dr. Boyfriend. We are also currently in the middle of the first summer heat wave, so it was like 96&#176 F and way wicked humid. Fortunately, I had just enough battery power to put the windows down, but I was also sitting on what amounts to a highway on-ramp, so the carbon monoxide smelled bad and made me feel quite slimy. Thank heavens I had my Visor with me so I could play solitaire - I had no other form of entertainment (well, I was parked right in front of a gym with all windows in front, but no cuties worked out the entire time I was there, so even that wasn’t amusing). And, of course, this whole time my mother’s calling me (this was her car that I had borrowed), I had to call out from work, and Dr. Boyfriend is worried sick.

So a few minutes later I get another phone call, this time from the tow truck driver asking me exactly where I was. “OK,” he says, “I’m coming down from the northeast - should take me 45 minutes.” He finally gets there around 1:30 (and tells me he wouldn’t normally have come all the way into the city, but he was bored and asked AAA for whoever was next on the tow list), loads up my car, and drives me the half hour back to my mechanic near home, and leaves. Knowing it was the alternator, my mechanic attempts to fix it, but realizes he needs a part, so it has to wait until Monday. I then have to call my Dad to pick me up.

I finally arrived home at 3:00 p.m.

Ever sit in a hot car on a muggy day wearing the remnants of a suit next to a busy highway with nothing to do for about 6 hours on a Friday?

Fucking AAA screwed up not once, but twice. It’s bad enough it takes them for-fucking-ever to get to you when your car breaks down, but it took triple the amount of time then it would have normally - I might have even been able to put in a half day at work (and yes, I’m hourly at the moment and really need the money, particularly since my mechanic call this morning and said the whole thing was going to cost $300). Why didn’t they get my location right the first time? Why didn’t they send a tow truck instead of just some guy with a spare battery? Why did forget to dispatch the tow truck? Why did they have to get someone from the far northeast? (OK, I know the answers to all those questions except for the idiot who doesn’t know how to make a phone call, but it still peeves me off.)

And yet… what would I have done without them?

{SIGH}

Thank you for allowing me to rant.

Esprix

2

Sorry, that should have been “96° F”. Forgot to preview the post first.

Esprix

3

They pulled the same shit on me. Vacationing in FL, I locked the keys in the family rent-a-car. Luckily, we were at the beach, so the family skipped to the sand to sun, while I sat next to the car in back of a convience store. After attempting to convince the woman that I WAS indeed a AAA member (“What’s your membership number?” “That would be on my card, correct?” “Yes.” “Ok, the card is in my wallet, which is locked in my car, right next to my keys, which is the problem.” LONG PAUSE. “Ok…so what’s your membership number?”)under my mother’s account, and that I AM my mother’s daughter (Mom kept her maiden name. My Dad’s name and my Mom’s name are too similar to hyphenate, it would just sound funny, so I have my Dad’s name. This causes chaos) she eventually agreed to send a locksmith. “I am in BACK of XYZ Convience store. Not in front, in BACK. There is a parking lot in BACK.” After an hour and half, I call them again. “We sent someone, but you weren’t there.” I WAS IN THE BACK!!! 45 minutes later, the guy comes with a modified coat-hanger and pops it. All in all, the fiasco took 3 hours of AAA bullshit, and literally 30 seconds of lock-picking.

Esprix, that sucks. If it happens again, take it from one who knows, call the tow company directly. Let THEM bill AAA.

4

It sounds like you’ve got an Esprix Sandwich going on.
Esprix:

Triple-A is blowing you while your mechanic is fucking you.
What kind of car do you have? As I was reading your OP, I was thinking, “alternator gone to hell; get a replacement at Pep Boys - ~$120; pop it in; no problem” $300?!?!? Maybe it’s the make of car, but that really seems steep. There may be some other things going on.

And, yes, I have run into some dumb mother fuckers when dealing w/ a situation like yours, which is why I hate to have anyone else work on my cars. I feel so violated. :), or, actually :mad: I’m sorry that you had to deal with that crap. And the bastards at AAA don’t give a rat’s ass and there’s nothing you can do about it, unless you’ve got a lot of extra time on your hands and a case of Tums.

In the location and time that you broke down, you’re lucky that you’re not posting from the hospital. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

5

I know because I have been sub-contracted by the bastards.
When I lived in Gadsden AL the company I worked for did AAA work. AAA had us cover a rather large area.it was not uncommon for us to travel 60 to 80 miles to go unlock a vehicle or go make keys. Needless to say I heard quite a bit of bitching. It seems AAA would wait anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes to call us for a call after they had talked with their customer.
They paid well under standard rate for us to go to the calls. They were always late in paying us. It was no suprise when the boss dropped them as an account atfer our 6 month contract. I have gone and unlocked cars here in huntsville where AAA did not send anyone at all or the customer was tired of waiting for hours.
I alwasy give a receipt and tell them to check with AAA and see if they will reimbuse them for the charges.

Yeah the fucked ya Esprix, they fuck alot of people.
Osip

6

Why has no one sued them? Turned them in to the Better Business Bureau? Why the hell do we LET them do this? No one has EVER had a GOOD experience with them! Why the fuck do they have no competition? We PAY them to fuck us!

7

That’s my goddamn job!

8

Well, yes and no. Let me tell you about my roadtrip from Hell…

I was driving from Albuquerque to New Orleans with two friends. Okay, a soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend and some guy she invited along on the spur of the moment without asking me first. Anyway, we got as far as San Antonio with very few problems, but somewhere between there and Houston the engine temperature started moving into the red zone. I put some oil in. This held us for about thirty miles or so before it started happening again. Before long, we’d used all the oil I’d brought. And it kept getting worse. I had to buy a whole case in Lake Charles. No sooner would I put in two quarts and get back on the freeway than a huge billowing white cloud of smoke would start coming out the tailpipe. After a while, it would die down, and the engine would start heating again. All the oil I had put in was now a fine cloud of smoke hovering over Interstate 10. Around this time, we also stopped being able to make speeds of over sixty-five miles per hour. Then fifty-five. Then forty-five. We stopped frequently, hoping that the rest would do the car good, but it didn’t, and we practically got chased out of one of the towns we stopped in for looking like suspicious characters. Night fell on the bayou, and found us puttering along at forty-five miles per hour. We limped into Baton Rouge, and emerged going thirty-five. I put the hazard lights on. Finally, right before an exit, the engine gave out entirely. We coasted down the exit-ramp and came to rest in a gas station. It was almost midnight.

Fortunately, I had my AAA-Plus card. I called, and they said a tow truck would be out within the hour. Since I had Plus service, I could get a tow to anywhere within 100 miles, and we just happened to be less than 100 miles from our final destination. The only fly in the ointment was that the dispatcher neglected to ask how many of us there were. When the tow truck came, the driver had his wife with him, and all five of us had to cram ourselves into the cab. Fortunately, everybody was skinny. Unfortunately, the driver couldn’t really tell us what was wrong with my car, other than that it sounded like an exhaust problem. (You Car Talk types probably have it figured out already, but it was still a mystery to all of us.) We decided to leave the car overnight at the nearest Midas we could find. I lived just around the corner from a Midas location, and they always did reliable, honest work on my car. I later found out that I lived around the corner from the only reliable, honest Midas in the universe. After some walking around, we found a motel. I called them in the morning, and they said they’d looked at it, and it was the catalytic converter. They could give me a new one for $600. After choking down a gasp and telling them “thanks but no thanks”, I set about finding another muffler/exhaust repair facility. I was in a strange city, and had no idea who to call. Finally I hit upon a strategy. I called an engine place and told them what my problem was. They said “Well, we don’t work on exhaust systems, but we recommend you try Supreme Muffler.” Hoping that it wouldn’t turn out to be run by the guy’s brother-in-law or something, I called Supreme. They said they just happened to have a heavy-duty converter they could let me have for $300, including labor. “I’ll be right over!!!”, I said.

Bear with me, there really is a point to this. Now that I had found a place to get my car fixed, I just had to get there. After calling my bank and getting funds from my savings account, I called AAA and asked for another tow. The dispatcher asked me where I was. I explained. She said “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t do point to point tows. Only emergency tows are covered…”. I begged. I pleaded. I would be completely and one hundred percent fucked otherwise. Finally she said “Well, we don’t usually do this, but…” So, I got towed over to the muffler place. They weren’t busy, so they got started right away. While they were working, a mechanic friend of theirs happened to wander in and decided to take a look at the engine. So, I finally found out what had happened: One of the cylinders had developed a leak in an O-ring. Oil was getting into the cylinder and being burned with the gas, and the resulting smoke had poisoned the converter. He recommended using a very heavy oil. SAE 50, if I could get it, or 40. This, I am ashamed to admit, would never have ocurred to me. Well, when they were done, my car ran, and my wallet wasn’t as light as it could have been. I even got to see some of the sights before it was time to go home. I found some SAE 50 motor oil, and got back to Albuquerque without needing to put any more in for the rest of the trip. All thanks to some dispatcher who decided to do something she wasn’t supposed to do. It definitely made up for all the times they couldn’t find me when I locked my keys in the car.

P.S. If you are ever in the New Orleans area and need exhaust work, go to Supreme Muffler in Metairie. Tell them I sent you.

9

Experiences like that with AAA are why I now carry an alternator, starter, solenoid relay, clutch cable, belts, filters,and about 4 gallons of various fluids. Really doesn’t take up all that much room stuffed in all the crannies of my car, and so far has allowed me to get back on the road at least 5 times I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.(even carry an extra set of work clothes cause I had the suit problem myself once).

10

Never had a problem with AAA. You must understand that AAA usually contracts out towing companies in your area. The towing companies here are fine (my working partner sells them their wreckers). However, i’ve heard some horror stories about towing companies in other areas. It honest to god, really sucks! when you’re headed somewhere and you end up breaking down in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone.

11

Several years ago I read an article about AAA service in the D.C. area.

Some guy called AAA and was told the wait would be between 30 minutes and an two hours. The AAA dispatch told the tow truck company the same thing. The tow truck driver showed up one hour and 45 minutes later, and told the driver that since he knew he had a 2 hour window he figured he might as well finish watching the game.

12

Several years ago I read an article about AAA service in the DC area.

A driver called AAA and the dispatcher told him a truck would be along within 30 minutes to two hours. The dispatcher told the towing service the same thing. When the driver showed up one hour and 45 minutes later he told the driver that, since he had a two hour window, he decided to finish watching the game!!!

13

Umm, esprix, is that a BAD thing or a GOOD thing? :smiley:

14

Don’t get me wrong - I know how AAA works. But first dispatching a car from the wrong zone and then forgetting to dispatch a tow truck is just inexcusable. They don’t know their own fucking city and they’re lazy. Harumph.

Myndephuquer, my mechanic is actually very reliable and trustworthy, unlike others we’ve had in the past. It was both the alternator and a housing for some pulleys that some belts ran around, so I think the price is fine. Keep in mind, tho - I know nothing about cars, and can hardly barely put oil in mine when necessary. I wish I was as handy as wolfman (or had a lesbian {not NTG, either!}) in my trunk for just such emergencies!

Surgoshan, when they’re the only game in town, it’s kind of hard to spit in their eye when you need them - the bottom line is that they did take care of my car; it just took them all fucking day to do it. I will say, though, that I’ve been getting more and more mailers for roadside assistance plans, like from my insurance company and such. I ought to check into 'em…

matt, please, let’s keep our private life out of The Pit! :wink:

And daniel, it’s bad for them but good for me. Turnabout is fair play, after all…

Esprix

15

Jesus wolfman, maybe it’s time to get a new car? :slight_smile:

16

I used to have AAA eons ago, but haven’t had it close to 15 years. Didn’t miss it one bit. For the number of times I had to be towed (can count on one hand), it was simply easier and faster to call any local tow (they have numbers posted in every gas station and convenient store) and pay the going rate (usually $50 plus $3 per mile in NY). In major cities, the towing business is VERY competitive and they will respond very quickly. The state watches very carefully and they don’t tend to screw you. What they can do is maybe tow you to a buddy’s station for a cut. So unless you have a specific destination, you are at their mercy for that. Try towing to a car dealership for service the next day unless a station is open for immediate service. On highways, its even more competitive, particularly if the tow is called by the state patrol. They are up and up and usually is related to a service outfit that they will tow you to. They really do not want to lose their license for the highway work, so they will treat you nicely. Keep all receipts!

17

We used to have a basic coverage on AAA until they changed the benefits without notifying us. In our package we were allowed up to 50 miles towing. Now it’s 3 miles. We switched to Shell Auto Club. Haven’t had to use it yet, thank God, but the discounts on the hotels are better (50% versus 35% off) and more hotels seem to be on the Shell list than AAA’s list. Let you know how they turn out if we ever actually need them for towing.

18

What the hell are you people doing? If your alternator is broken, drive the freakin car to Pep Boys, or if you are not a DIY kind of person, a mechanic. Do NOT use your headlights or you won’t get very far. Sheesh.

And you, NTG, did you not make the association between burning 18 barrels of oil per hour and ‘engine problem’?

It may be that there is nothing either of you could have done to prevent the problem - cars sometimes break. The trick is to not keep driving them after they do.

19

douglips wrote:

Um, doug, honey? Go fuck yourself.

Perhaps I didn’t make it clear in the OP, but I was on my way home at the time - it was about 1:00 a.m., center city Philadelphia. I had driven about 15 city blocks wondering why my battery light was on (which had also been on on the drive into the city) when I first noticed the lights were dimming just before I got on the highway, which was when the engine started to sputter, and just after I pulled over it died completely. And how the hell was I supposed to know it was my alternator? I know zip about cars. I certainly don’t drive cars that don’t work, but then, if they don’t work, how exactly does one drive them? :rolleyes:

Kee-rist. Stuff a sock in it, boy.

Esprix

20

You realize that these are directly contradictory pieces of advice, don’t you?

Truth is, when my alternator blew a few weeks ago, I didn’t know that that was the problem until the AAA guy came. I suspected it, but I didn’t know for sure. When he got there and confirmed my suspicions, I let him tow it to the shop–it was free, after all.

I would do it myself, if I even knew where the damn alternator was. I gave up on self-auto repair when I tried to change a dead battery in my girlfriend’s car, which, thanks to modern GM design, requires total removal of the engine, all four wheels, the steering wheel, the warp core, and full saucer separation.

I’m not proud of my automotive ignorance, but I did decide that if mechanics will refrain from diagnosing and treating their own illnesses, I’ll refrain from fixing my own car. I think that’s fair.

Oh, and I paid $250 for the alternator job. I probably got slightly taken, but I didn’t really mind since they were able to do it right then. Besides, it’s the first repair I’ve had done to the car in the 5 years I’ve had it.

For the OP–I have never had any trouble whatsoever with AAA. I’m sure it varies from place to place.

Dr. J