Thursday, February 05, 2009

Quite a coincidence

I meant to share this story when it happened a few weeks ago, but I forgot until now.

About three weeks ago, on a Friday, Darby took our car to get some minor repairs done. We chose the shop because it was close to our house, cheap, and they could do the work in one day (really important to us now that we only have one car). So we got the car back Friday afternoon, and everything seemed fine. We're driving on the Interstate Friday night, and I notice that the cruise control isn't working. It will turn on, but when you press "set acceleration," it doesn't regulate the speed. Now, I use cruise control every day on my way to and from work, so I knew it had to have stopped working sometime between Thursday evening and Friday night. Hmmm...

Darby called the shop on Saturday morning and (very diplomatically) asked if it was possible that the mechanic could have inadvertently jostled some wires when he was doing work. The mechanic got on the phone and said that he wasn't working anywhere near the box that controls the cruise control, so it had to be "just a coincidence." But we could bring it in and he would give us an estimate on what it would cost to fix it. Ummm...no thanks.

Thankfully that seems to be the only thing wrong, and it's not like the car is undriveable or anything. Our friend, who's a mechanic, is going to fix it for us at a discount. (We didn't ask him to do the work in the first place because we knew he wouldn't charge us fairly, and we didn't want to take advantage of him.) I know we could have probably made a big stink to the first shop and gotten it fixed for free, but I'm thankful that I don't have a husband who's willing to get mean and angry about small things. Life's too short. And I guess there is the small possibility that it really is "just a coincidence." :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The exact same thing happened to me in September! I took my car in to get something worked on, and I got it back with the cruise control no longer working--took it back in, and they said they hadn't done anything that could have changed it, and not only that, but they're also unable to fix it. My dad looked at it, too, and couldn't figure it out. I do miss my cruise control!