Sunday, November 28, 2010

week 13 small to big

My car needed an inspection sticker so we made an appointment at the local garage. I was hoping the tires would pass but got to thinking they really weren’t that old and wondered why the tread was so worn. I finally found the Sears paperwork and took the car back to them to find out what the warranty was. Come to find out these supposed 70,000 mile tread tires I paid big bucks for were junk. According to the mileage, I had only 16,000 miles on them over the past 3 years; needless to say they replaced them.

Another issue I was concerned with for the inspection besides a little rust was the inside of my car smelled of gas sometimes. It was very faint but still made me think I may have had a bad line or something because I never saw a spot in the driveway where I parked. But I was using a ton of gas just to drive under 10 miles round trip per day so I knew something was up.

The day my car went into the garage after the tires were replaced my engine light suddenly came on. Oh great I thought another expense to get this car legal. They put my car on the lift and found the rocker panels under the doors of the car were pretty much rotted away and I had holes in my gas tank and the break & gas lines all needed replacing. This was going to cost me around $600.00 and they’d have the car about 4 days so I gave them the ok.

Three days into my car being in the garage, I’m called to be informed that not only were my rocker panels gone the rear quarters were rotted as well and they had no place to attach the new metal. My hear t sunk. They already had the car torn apart, what choice did I have? When I asked how much more it would cost me, he said about another $1000.00 that was a tough pill to swallow but I had to justify it was cheaper than buying a new car and having a payment.

2 weeks later and no car, still, I called to find out what the holdup was; they had ironically run into another snag. How much I asked. I was sick to my stomach….total was going to be just over $2000 because I needed ECG/EGR valves to make the engine light go away and have the car run right.

Hard to believe I addressed a simple spot of rust on my car to get a $15 inspection sticker which ended up costing over $2000. This will go down in the books as the most expensive inspection sticker I’ve ever purchased. I’ve decided I’m going to keep this hunk of metal for a couple more years, like it or not.

1 comment:

  1. Definitely the story of a snowball turning into an avalanche. So, that's the assignment in a literal sense. Conceptually, this is all about car repair--if it had developed into a "bigger," more general piece touching on our dependence on cars, our inability to fix our own things, the need for specialization in civilization, the slowness of 'service,' or the tyranny of the state and its inspections, then it would have gone from small to big in a more week 13 sense.

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