Oooh! This is perfect, 'cause I’ve got some complaining to do. So here we go, last week I have to take an entire day off to have some electrical doo-dad replaced on my car, as part of a recall campaign. It’s a two hour drive at the crack of dawn so that I get to the dealer early enough, since I don’t want to have to leave my car over night. While my car is being worked on, they graciously offer a ride to the local mall, which I accept. During the ride over, the ride-guy keeps having trouble remembering he’s not driving a stick shift and keeps ‘accidently’ putting his hand on my knee. Once we get to the mall and I escape Oliver the Octopus, it takes a grand total of ninety minutes to check every store in the mall. About ten shops, all selling Grandma clothes, except for the GNC and one odd little pace that sold used shoes, mainly boots. I made my way to a book store accross the highway and checked every single book at least twice, which took nearly as much time as walking over there, considering the pathetic selection. After lingering over a cup of vile brown liquid, that I must assume was at one time coffee, I assertain there is nothing else to see or do in this neck of the woods. Finally I gave up and decided to face Handsy the Ride-Guy for a trip back to the dealership. This time he kept to himself since I talked about what a lovely wedding ring he sported.
When I get there, nearly five hours after I left, I’m told they haven’t even started yet! Good news is I only have a two hour wait before they’re done and I drive my little baby off the lot. After a bit of driving, I find I’m a bit parched, so I stop and buy a nice iced tea, yumm. Only the damned drink holder is now broken (it was fine when I got up this morning) and I have iced tea spilled on the carpet. Fine, just fine; I reach over and unlatch the glove compartment door to get some napkins. The stupid thing fell completely off onto the floorboards! Damn me, but how did they break the phoochin’ glove compartment? I’m too far away to go back at this point.
I take a big breath and decide to change the cd to something more soothing. What do I find but a wobbly face plate, where they did something funky when they replaced the stereo. Great, it looks as bad if I’d installed it myself, but it still seems to work and it can be fixed, I’m sure. So I search for my little soft-sided cd case, open it up, and pieces of jewel cases fall out onto the passenger seat. Some jackass crushed it somehow and now I have a handful of plastic shrapnel instead of cd cases. It’s only a few bucks lost, since they were travel copies of my originals, but dammit!
A few more miles down the highway I notice a rattling coming from the dash in front of me. With my heart in my throat I feel around to see what’s wrong. I just know, the way things are going, that the stinking stearing wheel is going to come off in my hands at any moment. I’m going to veer off the road and after the fireball consumes my car, all that will be left is a little pile of BadBaby ashes. Naw, it’s just that plastic hood thing that covers the instruments on the driver’s side. Seems somebody was a tetch distracted and didn’t bother to replace it properly. They just set it in place, so it’s completely free and I can see into my poor little car’s brain!
That seems to be the last of what they screwed up and/or broke. I gave their quality assurance follow-up person an earful, the next day. Good news is that they’re very happy to repair everything they broke. Since I can’t take a day off for another two weeks, I’ve got to drive around with all of these things broken, dangling and fallen until then. I’d ask somebody to shoot me, but knowing those screwups, they probably left a loaded handgun wedged in one of the seat cushions and it’s only a matter of time before they do the job themselves.
Oh, and did I mention this all happened on my birthday?!
