So... Friday at quarter to five, my wife picked me up from work to FINALLY go get her Toyota Rav4 from the body shop. It had been there for SIXTEEN FLIPPIN' DAYS!
[You might remember my rants... I mean posts... about it before this... I don't recall if I posted about the 2nd accident or not:
One night about a week or so after my son's accident, my wife heard the distinct sound of someone slamming into a car on the street outside of our house. Sadly, this is a sound we are VERY familiar with. Our cars have been hit on numerous occasions, many times by the neighbors, twice by city snow plows, and a few times, like this one, by hit and run drivers... We can't claim that we haven't hit our fair share of our neighbor's cars either, though I would say that we've gotten worse than we've given. It's a narrow road with driveways that are spaced such that it's hard to park on the street without being across from someone else's driveway... It's also a dead-end road and there is another section of the road a few blocks away after drainage ditch and green space that are at the end of the street, so people frequently come down the street looking for an address in the 2300 block and need to turn around when they figure out that this section of road ends in the 2000 block. (There is no 2100 block and I believe there is all of one house in the 2200 block, which is a house that I consider to be the ideal "Free Pizza" house from the 30 minutes or free era of pizza delivery, because there is practically NO WAY to tell that it is actually on our street, since the street doesn't actually continue on their side of the street. It is just a little pull-in area next to the green space, but their mail box is on that side and their address is our street instead of the one the other one that they are on the corner of... It's weird! There's also only one or two blocks of the road before it ends after it starts back up again on the other side of the green space... It's kind of strange that they didn't just change the street name in the other neighborhood... anyway... I digress...)
When she looked out she didn't see any cars, so she thought maybe it wasn't on our street. She drove the Rav4 up to Aurora to take my daughter to an appointment that day, having decided it was road worthy several days after the initial accident, and when they got out of the car at Walgreens to pick up her meds, my daughter walked around the car past the rear driver's side and asked, "What happened to the back end of the car, Mom?" I got a call telling me to call in another insurance claim for a hit and run the night before and they gave me a description of where the damage was. We already had an appointment set up for the other repair so we just piggybacked it on to that one...]
So we took the damned thing in to get it fixed and the original estimate was that it would be done on 01/31. On 01/29 they changed the estimate to 02/02. On 01/31 they confirmed that they were on track for the 02/02 date.On 01/01 they sent a message saying that they were nearing completion and if they encountered any delays they would call at 9:04 am, then at 10:08 am, they sent a message saying that they had updated the completion date from 02/02 to 02/06. Around the same time, we got an email saying the estimated completion date was now 02/09...
SIDE NOTE: Now, this is something that I call COMPLETE AND TOTAL BS! Why? Because if the car was going to be DONE on 02/02, they would have needed to be PAINTING IT before 02/01. It takes at least a day for the paint to cure. When they ACTUALLY FINISHED THE JOB, they called two days before the delivery date and told me it was going in to be painted and that it was still on track to be ready by the delivery date...
So, having the conflicting information, and being fed up with the BS, I called. The guy sounded a bit confused that there was a difference in the dates, but said that it should be 02/06. He said that there was more damage than they thought when they got the parts off and they needed to order another part and they were waiting on that. That was understandable, in a way, but still annoying...
Then, on 02/02, I got the call from our daughter's school that we needed to come pick her up and bring her home for the weekend because of... well... the issues she's been having... I've mentioned them before... (everything's fine...) My wife was working that day, and luckily had a ride home from a coworker, so I left work early, called her at work to let her know what was going on, and drove up to Aurora to get my daughter. We came home, spent Friday night and Saturday together and her issues were resolved by then. (Most likely we're looking at medication change effects. It was two weeks after a dosage change to one of her meds... I hate the way she gets side effects from EVERY MED SHE TAKES! But I can't say she doesn't probably get it from me, so... But I'm not THAT BAD!!! ...sigh...) So, anyway, we had tickets to a play in Chicago on Sunday. ( staring Richard Thomas who played John-Boy on "The Waltons" way back when on TV.) I tried to buy an extra ticket for my wife, since we only had two... SCREWED UP MAJORLY and bought one for the 7:30 show instead of the 2:00 show, because I appear to be an idiot despite the fact that half of my genes have produced at least one certifiable genius, but when we checked the 2:00 show there weren't any tickets that we would have wanted to buy available anyway, so my wife wasn't that upset. She decided that we would take the ticket and she'd either try to give it away to someone or trade it in at the box office if she could. The tickets that WERE available were all in the $80 per seat plus range. I'd bought a nice, reasonable $22 seat for the 7:30 show... If I'd looked at the 2:00 show instead, i wouldn't have even tried to buy any...
We got to Chicago with plenty of time before the show, went to the Starbucks at the corner near the Theater, and had some food and coffee while we waited for to be able to go in. When it was time to go, my daughter and I went in with our tickets and my wife said she'd see if she could get a ticket and text us to let us know if she was watching the show or meeting us somewhere after the show. She ended up giving the 7:30 ticket to the girls behind the counter at Starbucks, making some barista's night on Superbowl Sunday. Then she went to the Box Office and gave them our subscriber number and asked if there were any available seats. They sold her a MAIN FLOOR SEAT for $25! They said she didn't even need her subscriber number. That's SO MUCH LESS than I paid for the flippin' ticket she gave away (with TicketBastard Fees included, that is) that it's painful! After the show, which was FANTASTIC, she told us about it then looked over to our daughter and said, "So, next year when you're going to Loyola," (which is the college she wants to go to, even though she hasn't made her final decision yet) "If you feel like you need to blow off steam on a Sunday afternoon, Give Cameron a call and come down to the Theater district and see what shows you can get cheap tickets for." Sounds like a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon to me!
(Cameron one of her best friends and a theater geek, who is going to be going to Illinois Institute of Technology, which is a bit further south in the city than Loyola... It's actually directly across the freeway from Comiskey Park, where the White Sox play, which is, generally, not considered a particularly great part of town, but the campus seems fine... as long as you stay within the few square blocks that are the campus... The EL actually runs THROUGH one of the building on the campus, so you can hop on the EL from the comfort of a campus building there... That school is her second choice... At this point, her boyfriend is planning to go to Loyola as well... Cameron is also pretty much her boyfriend's best friend. If he isn't with her, he's with Cameron... So I expect they'll spend most weekends together next year...)
After the show, we drove to our hotel in Naperville. This time around, the school decided that our daughter needed to do a "re-entry meeting" like she did last year, even though they didn't require last semester when this same basic thing happened. First she had to see her doctor and be cleared by him, so if we could schedule an appointment early enough with him, maybe we could get a meeting with the school on Monday and be done? But there was a storm coming that evening anyway and we didn't want to drive home in it, so we were already thinking about extending our stay at the hotel, but this meant that we wouldn't be home on 02/06, when the car was supposed to be done... Then I got a text at 7:01 am that morning: the completion date had been pushed back from 02/06 to 02/09... I told my wife that we didn't need to worry about being home to pick up the car on 02/06...
She had her appointment with her doctor on Monday in the early afternoon. We called the school to see if they would be able to fit us in before 5:00, because we had no doubt that her doctor would clear her to return... They were in meeting all afternoon and couldn't fit us in before Tuesday morning at the earliest... The school nurse was telling us not to drive that night because of the weather anyway... It was BAD. The people that came into the hotel said the roads were horrible and they were really glad they had 4-wheel drive. We just stayed around the hotel after we finished lunch at the pancake place that my daughter likes did nothing. I read, a ton, she worked on homework as much as she could, and we waited until morning to find out what time our meeting would be...
Anyway, eventually they called and said the car was going in to be painted on 02/07 and it was on track to be done on 02/09. We picked it up at 5:00 on 02/09... They were STILL CLEANING IT!
The real kicker:
When we pulled into the parking space in my Volvo S80 to pick the damned thing up, my wife pulled too far up and hit the (far too large) curb. This is something that we both do frequently with this car. (And my son does when he drives it as well.) It is VERY low to the ground and has a longer hood than any of us are really used to, even after years of driving it. This time, it seems to have done something though... On the drive home, I was trying to decide if there was a problem with the driver's side front tire. It sounded like I was driving on a tire that was going flat, if you know what I mean? I turned off the radio to listen to it and it just sounded wrong, but the car didn't DRIVE like there was a problem. I looked at it in the garage when I got home and didn't see anything wrong, so I went inside and didn't think anything more of it.
On Saturday, I was spending my usual kind of lazy weekend day, which meant I was still in my pajamas and hadn't bothered to leave the house, when I got a call from my wife around the time she would be leaving work. She was scheduled to work again, for a co-worker whose husband is running for some office in a nearby town and has a lot of campaign functions that she needs to attend (which results in my wife working extra hours for her, which is nice because we like overtime...) starting at around 1:00 the next day. We were supposed to be getting an ice storm that night and my wife decided she wanted to leave her car at the parking garage at work, under a roof, instead of outside at home, which meant that she needed me to come pick her up and then take her to work on Sunday afternoon... On the way there, I heard the noise again, but noticed that it wasn't as bad on roads that I could drive 35 mph or more... strange...
I got there to pick her up and drove toward her and she stopped me and walked over to look at the front end of the car, then said, as she got in, "You're dragging something underneath the front end!" I told her about the noise and when it started. She felt awful and said she shouldn't be allowed to drive the damned thing because of the hood length. I told her that it wasn't her fault and that I hit things as often as she does, etc...
We planned to take it by our mechanic and have him look at it, but first we used some gorilla tape to tape it up before I took her to work the next day. On my way back home (and running one errand on the way) it fell down again... Driving along, the sound changed and I decided I needed to look at it because it sounded like it was further under the car. So I pulled off the road onto a side road with a bunch of businesses on it. I made my way to an auto parts shop parking lot to look at it, figuring I could ask one of the guys in the shop for help if I decided to try to take it off and... it was GONE! So... I retraced my path and found the part, put it in the trunk and am hoping it isn't important!
![Innocent :innocent:](./images/smilies/innocent.gif)
[WOW... that was a wall of text...]