Screw-head, to be precise.* Sort of a funny story. Not funny in the "ha ha" sense. Mostly funny in the "shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque" sense.
A couple months ago, I renewed the registration on both of our cars. You know how that goes. Proof of insurance. Proof of inspection (in some states, including ours.) Send in your check. Once you've done that, you get a new sticker to put on the license plate with one more year incremented. I'm sure it's mostly the same in every state.**
We've got license plate holders that wrap around the plates themselves (and proudly display the name of the dealership where we bought the cars so many years ago, which begs a whole new question), and in order to properly apply these stickers, you've really got to take off those holders. They cover the edges of the sticker ever so slightly. But no problem; I do this every year.
This year, however, K's car was in a bad mood the day I went to apply her new sticker. One of the license plate screws wouldn't come off. I hosed it down with WD-40 and tried again: nothing. So, since the screw head had a hex shape to it, I got out my socket wrench and gave it a good hard tug.
And tore the head right off. Damn. There wasn't enough of the screw itself sticking out to grab hold of and try to twist out (even if it had been loose, which it definitely wasn't). And when I took apart the back panel of her car (she's got an SUV so it's screwed into the back door) it wasn't accessible from that side, either.
Temporarily defeated, I put the sticker on the plate and the plate (and holder) back on her car, held on by the one screw only. Every time we shut the back door, it rattled. Every time we hit a decent bump in the road, it rattled. I figured it was a matter of time before that one screw came loose and the whole thing just fell off.
So finally last month when we called the dealer and asked if they could fix it (figuring that someone, somewhere, much have special tools for removing stubborn, headless screws, if the "right tool for every job" motto is accurate).
"Sure," they said. "Fifty bucks."
Fifty? Bend me over, why don't you. But, as the man says, what're you gonna do? Needed to be done. So we dropped her car off in the morning, asked if they could do an oil change at the same time, and gave them all day to do those two things. They said it would be ready by the end of the day.
We got there at 5:45 that night (they close at 6:00) and noticed, sort of a peculiar thing, that they were just pulling her car into the garage as we got there. (Yeah, they had all day and didn't start until the last 15 minutes.) Could be taken as a bad sign, but we remained optimistic. We waited. To well-past closing time. Eventually, our sales/service guy came out and said it was finished, but they couldn't fix the screw. They didn't have the right tools to get it out and suggested we take it to a body shop. Great. Trip wasted. But all things being equal, it could have been worse...
Yeah. Things get worse.
When they pulled the car around, they confessed that they hit one of the yellow concrete pylons in the garage. Hit it with our car. Or, to be precise, as this doofus got out to show us the damage, he claimed that the yellow post "jumped out and hit him as he was pulling out." Sure. Way to put a positive spin on it. I guess it wasn't your fault at all.
To their credit, they said they would, of course, fix the damage for free down at a body shop they use. It wasn't much more than a yellow scrape down one of the back quarter panels. And we asked if they would get us a quote for some other minor repair work that we needed at the same time. (Both K and I have put some small dents and scratches into the front and back of her car over the years. I shan't elaborate.) And we insisted that they throw in the screw for free which was the entire reason we came there in the first place.
All told, our end of the bill was $1900 (yeah, "minor" repairs). They did end up charging us for the screw, which, yes, got fixed. It took almost two weeks, but they gave us a loaner car (similar to K's SUV) for the duration, so that was nice. And her car is back to pristine condition once again. Except for the seatbelt inside which B.B. has nearly chewed through.
So there you go. The story of the $1900 screw.
I'm going to keep this thing as a reminder. Of what, I'm not sure, but the next time I can't get a screw out, I'm not going to apply as much torque as humanely possible, that's for damn sure.
* Makes me think of this scene in Army of Darkness, which, if you've seen it, you'll understand why and if you haven't you'll wonder what in the world is going on in this 2 minute clip.
** Back in Missouri, those stickers were amazingly easy to peel off, so much so that theft was a problem, so we were instructed to apply the sticker then take a razor blade and cross through them so if anyone did try to peel them off, all they'd get was pieces. Not a bad strategy. Out here in North Carolina, these things are damn near impossible to peel off. I suspect they use Gorilla Glue as adhesive.
0 comments:
Post a Comment