Tag: Jetta

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.

Leaky car

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Earlier in the week I called my dealership’s body shop to tell them about my leaking car since I suspected it’s a direct result of my car not being repaired properly when it was hit back in January. Luckily this shop agreed with my assumption and has a lifetime guarantee on their work, so I dropped my car off this afternoon and they are going to fix it for free. Originally it was only going to take a few hours, but after realizing they have to take out the back glass and reseal it, they need to keep it overnight. Joe has to be at his parent’s place super early tomorrow to get ready for their garage sale, and my office building doesn’t open until 7am, so we were trying to figure out what to do short of paying for a taxi to get to work. Luckily my friend and former coworker came to the rescue. Her office isn’t very far from mine, so she’s gonna drive me to work. She’s going a bit out of her way to come get me, so I feel bad, but I’ve done favors for her so I’m sure it evens out.

Did I mention this has been one of the worst weeks I’ve had in a very long time? I can’t wait for the weekend!!! One more day! We’re seeing three more townhomes tomorrow. As much as a part of me wants to just forget about looking, I know that doesn’t make sense and we could miss out on something good, so we’re going to forge ahead. I’ll let you know all about it once we’re actually moved in so as not to jinx it again.

Weekend Update

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Ever have so many things happen in the span of a couple of days that you just don’t feel like writing all the entries to cover it all? Yea, me too, so here’s the longish cliff notes:

Friday we enjoyed some nachos, fried ravioli, baby chocolate covered frozen bananas, etc. at the Taste of Chicago. Once we got home, my copy of the new Cure album had finally arrived, so I listened to it from start to finish. First impression – the songs I hadn’t heard yet don’t move me, and the ones I have already listened to are better live. Around 4pm we went to a barbecue Joe’s friend was having at the house he just bought three weeks ago. Despite it being an older home, I still fell in love with all that space and it just depressed the hell out of me after coming home and looking online at what we can currently afford. On top of that, I just started thinking about all the negative/sad things that have happened to me, which included me really missing my deceased grandparents, and I ended up crying myself to sleep.
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Sunday Brunch

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Lookie here, I remembered to do the Sunday Brunch ON Sunday. Wow!

An Auto-biography

1. Who taught you how to drive? My mom.

2. How old were you when you got your driver’s license? 16? Whatever is the youngest age you can get a license.

3. What kind of vehicle(s) do you own? 2000 Atlantic Blue Volkswagen Jetta GLS VR6 w/ moonroof, 6-cd changer, Monsoon system. Yes, I had to “pimp my ride”. ;)

4. Is it an automatic or stick shift? Automatic.

5. Do you keep the inside of your vehicle sparkly clean, fairly clean or pretty much messy? Well, I’d like to keep it sparkly clean, but unfortunately I’m too lazy, without the means, and have two step-kids that prevent that. So I’d say fairly clean. Although right this moment my car is very clean after two hours of detailing inside and out. Joe also changed the spark plugs.

Dumbass = Me

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Do you want to laugh your ass off at my stupidity?

Well awhile back, I was looking at the payment coupons for my car loan, and noticed the last coupon was for December of this year. So I told Joe, “Check it out, only a year more of payments and the car is paid off.” He suggested we use his company bonus, which got paid out on Friday, to pay off the loan so we’d have that extra money monthly to add into our Money Market account.

So a couple of days ago I called the bank to see what the pay-out amount was on my loan, and the girl told me $10,006. Before I made a complete fool out of myself, I asked her what the length of my loan was. “It’s 60 months,” she said, and then, “You have 33 payments left”. Doh! So I said, “Oh, so that means at the end of the year I will receive another coupon booklet?” “That’s right,” she replied, “Would you like the address to send the payoff to?” I told her no thanks.

I don’t know what either one of us was thinking. I had just taken that loan out in January of 2002. What made me think I was almost done paying it? It would have been nice to have that money for our future mortgage, though. Now it’ll be another three years before it’s paid off.