Category: Car

Tire Issues

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Well that stunk. We ended up at Firestone last night to get the tire patched but they said they couldn’t do it because of where the screw was located. Luckily the Jetta comes with a full-size spare, so we had them put that on along with the regular rim. However, they almost didn’t give us back the old tire (which Joe said can be patched with a kit from the store since it’s done differently than Firestone would have done it), but we caught that before driving away.

This morning when Joe went to rotate the tires, he found that the guy had put them on way too tight. One of them wouldn’t come off and now a screw is striped. Note to self: Firestone sucks.

In fact, it seems to me like no one can properly handle changing tires on the Jetta other than Volkswagen. As you may recall, Walmart ruined my rims two years ago when I bought new tires from them and let them install them.

Ineffectual

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The United States Postal Service is holding the Scrubs DVD set I ordered on Wednesday hostage. The place I ordered it from is 10 miles away, but because I selected the free 5-10 business day delivery, they are going to make sure I don’t get it for at least the 5 day minimum. You just know it’s sitting at the post office down the street right now when it could be in my hands.

I have to go to the dreaded DMV on Friday because we realized today that my license plate registration expires this month. For whatever reason, the DMV did not send me a renewal notice. They sent Joe one, however, and his doesn’t expire until next month. Of course, they sent it to the old address. Why? Who knows? You’d think the same database where they store your driver’s license address information would also use that address for your registration, but I guess it doesn’t. Because that would make sense and we don’t want the Department of Motor Vehicles actually doing something right for a change.

We’ve been renting Season 1 of Dead Like Me from Blockbuster over the past month and we’ve made it to Volume 4, which is the last few episodes of the season. Every time we visit BB, which is at least once a week, we check for it but it is NEVER there. Finally today we asked the guy ringing us up when it’s due back, and he told us they don’t carry it. When we pointed out that they have Volumes 1-3, he said it was probably stolen. Joe suggested they take the box for Volume 4 off the shelves, but you could tell from this dingbat’s response that he really didn’t care and won’t do anything about it. So much for customer service. The least he could have done was pretend to care. Now I have to call all the other nearby BBs to find this disc. If it wasn’t for the fact that I never pay for rentals (thank you, Discover card), I’d sign up for Netflix.

Dead like a Jetta

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God, do I love Fridays! On Monday morning when my alarm goes off, it’s the single worst moment of the entire week. In stark contrast, the moment I leave work on a Friday afternoon is the single best moment of the week. Even though at least two of my co-workers are asleep at this very moment (of which I am aware only because they told me they still follow the same sleep schedule regardless of what day it is), I am enjoying the freedom of knowing I have nowhere to go or any responsibilities to attend to for the next two days. After five days of “Oh shit, I better go to bed or I’m going to regret it in the morning” it’s nice to have a break from that stress. I’m just relaxing at the computer, reading some blogs which I haven’t had the time to do lately, and listening to Nine Inch Nail’s new album via someone’s radio blog (it’s pretty damn good too).
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Punks

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I think I irked the local police today. Oh well, so be it.

When I got home from work after 6 pm (worked late) today, I was inside my car, cleaning the windows, while three 10-year-old boys rode around the parking lot on their bikes. I overheard them talking about “getting this car” or something. Then as they passed my car, single file, I popped my head up just as the last kid in the line threw something that bounced off the car next to me with a loud ping.

So I went inside and called the police.

Was I overreacting? Perhaps. But keep in mind that about a year and a half ago my car, as well as several others, were vandalized in the same parking lot and it cost over $400 out of my pocket to get my car repaired. So if I feel that some punk-ass kids are acting disrespectful around other people’s property, I’m going to try and stop it.

After talking to the kids, the officer came to my door and pretty much treated me in a condescending manner. He tried to make me feel bad for telling on kids that were, as he put it “just ten years old.” Um, wasn’t it a 10-year-old boy who shot his own father this month? Uh yea, it was. So don’t try to treat me like I’m being ridiculous.

The officer informed me that the boys claim they were throwing crabapples at one another and hit some cars “by mistake” and that they were sorry and wanted to apologize. One of the kids’ parents was outside as well. I told the officer just to tell them to be more careful. He asked me if I wanted him to string them up by their ankles and beat them. He was totally poking fun at me. You had to be there. It really pisses me off thinking about it. I just explained to him what had happened with the cars getting keyed in the past and that these kids needed to respect other people’s property. It starts out innocent now, but who knows in a few years.

If it was even ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have done anything. But the world today is different, and when you read in the news about gangs of kids who jump people just for the “fun of it” and some of those kids are as young as 7-years-old, you don’t think of 10-year-old little shits as innocent kids anymore. A man was shoved into the street by a group of kids and now he’s dead. So I didn’t really appreciate the way that officer treated me.

I really can’t wait until we move and I can put my car in the garage and stop worrying about it all the time. Now I’m going to have to check it carefully tomorrow. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but I worry those kids might do something to my car to get back at me. That’s the primary reason I didn’t go back outside to talk to their parents; I’m hoping they don’t think it was me that called the cops on them. And if they really were innocent and I misinterpreted the situation, at least now they might watch their actions more carefully.

Window goes “crunch”

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Almost a year later, the window reglator clip in the passenger front window of my car broke. We had the windows down and when we rolled them back up, we heard the same sick cracking noise. It being a Sunday, the dealership was closed. Joe was able to get the window back up manually, and we’ll be taking the car in for servicing to get that fixed. Their work is guaranteed for 12 months / 12,000 miles, so that should be a free fix. Thank goodness it broke now and not on Thursday when we’re at The Cure concert!

I guess since we have to get that fixed, we might as well find out why I keep getting these warning lights on my dashboard. Joe did some investigating and we’re thinking it relates to an issue with the mass air flow sensor in the car. He was able to find out that I should have received a letter from Volkswagen in November of last year to say they extended the warranty on that part due to issues in several vehicles, including my make, model and year. Of course, I never got that letter even though my correct address is on file and I have received other notices in the past. Their correspondence is quite inconsistent.

What I still don’t get is why I’ve been to the dealership at least twice since last year and they didn’t do anything about the known issue, especially since I mentioned the warning lights to them. I wasn’t about to pay $80 just for them to run their little computer to tell me I need to replace a $500+ part and pay a ridiculous fee for labor. And it’s a good thing I didn’t since it seems like they should be doing this for free. Can they not put two and two together?

Would it be SO hard for someone over there to design a system that tracked recalls in the system so if an owner brought in a vehicle with pending recalls that hadn’t yet been addressed, they would be taken care of right away instead of after something happened? Some of these, like the most recent one dealing with the car’s brake lights, could have serious consequences if not caught in time. In addition, we wouldn’t have been stuck with an open window last year when the faulty clips broke off in the window. There had been a recall prior to the incident that no one ever made me aware of. Why do we have computers if not to (supposedly) make our lives easier?

I think I’m going to have to be more pro-active in trying to find out what’s going on with my car since these fucks can’t keep me properly informed. I just spent fifteen minutes going through VW’s website and I wasn’t able to find anything related to recall notices. I was able to find recall info on this site, however.

Luckily there are a lot of Jetta owners on a well-known forum called VWVortex who post about this kind of stuff or who knows how much unnecessary money I might have spent on my car by now.