In which second opinions are a very good thing - mostly........

"So this is what they wrote up?" Fawn said.

"Apparently," I said. "They were trying to pressure Maddy into leaving her keys and taking a rental car. They kept saying it wasn't safe to drive. I think she finally convinced them that she had to go talk to the bank about getting the money for the work. With parts, labor and tax, it would have probably been over two thousand dollars."

"And may I add that she totally did NOT state any of this - stuff. She didn't mention anything other than it needing the oil change the appointment was for."

Maddy had a pretty ugly little thing happen at the dealership when she took the Rogue for an oil change. (I need to add that this isn't a Nissan dealership - it's a Jeep/Dodge/Kia/Hyundai place.) The mechanics sent the poor girl at the counter to tell her that they had done a 100-something-point inspection and found all this stuff wrong with the Rogue and she needed to leave it and make arrangements for a rental because it "just isn't safe to drive." Maddy, however, kept politely saying she'd need to go to her bank and speak with them about getting the money BEFORE she agreed to anything and (finally) got the keys back and got out of there. Before we'd gotten a mile, the "check engine" light was on. So Maddy pulled into the Walgreens lot and - hello, loose gas cap. (It wasn't loose before they started messing with her car. Just sayin'.) A few clicks and - no more light.

"It was making a funny little whirring noise every now and then. Like a baseball card in the spokes of a bicycle. Except I hadn't mentioned it or asked them to check it," Maddy said, coming in.

"Is that why you took it to Hyatt's?" Fawn said.

Maddy nodded. "Guess what it was."

"A baseball card?"

"Nope. Mud flap. It had gotten bent and was hitting the wheel. Problem was, it wasn't where I could see it without crawling under the car. They just bent it back into place. And the vibration when I hit the brakes really hard - which I also had NOT mentioned - that they claimed was the "worn bushings" or whatever - that was because the brake rotors hadn't been replaced when I had the brakes done and they were in really bad shape. The pads had worn down just enough for it to be noticeable."

"Didn't the dealer do the brakes?" I seem to remember going with her for that early in my blogging career.

She nodded. "So Hyatts redid the brakes and did the inspection. I actually had been expecting them to tell me that something really horrible and expensive was wrong with the Rogue, but it wasn't. Not that brakes are cheap, but it was a lot less than the two thousand the dealer was trying to charge me. So no more dealer. It's Hyatt's from now on."

"Did you tell them what the dealer said?" Fawn asked.

"No. I didn't want to come off like I was trying to play them off of anyone else. If something was wrong, they'd find it. But you know, when things started going really wrong with my little black Saturn, it wasn't like someone coming out and telling me "oh, by the way, your transmission's shot." I knew something was weird before that. Every time something's gone wrong with one of my cars, there were symptoms. And the symptoms the Rouge had just didn't match what they were telling me."

"Like how?"

"Well, they were saying the torn boot was on the passenger side, but the noise supposedly coming from it was coming from the driver's side. Kind of a clue that something wasn't right...."

"So what are you going to do?" I said. "You should tell someone. Report them. Dutchess Cars, I mean."

"To who?" Maddy looked at the writeup. "And I don't think I have a case with the way they phrased it. I think the best I can do is warn everyone to get a second opinion if something like that happens to them."

"Something like what?" Hawthorne said, coming over to look. "The heck?"

"The dealership's explanation for a bent mudflap." Maddy explained.

"Losers. They saw a female walk in and their eyes lit up with dollar signs - ka-ching! - like in an old cartoon or something." Hawthorne looked disgusted.

"And oddly enough, the Rouge was just out of warranty by about fifty miles," I added.

"Hmmmm..." Hawthorne looked thoughtful. "I'd say it's time we opened up a nice big can of whoop--"











"Hawthorne, stop. Every time you take matters into your own hands that way, something bad happens."

"Yeah, to the idiots who deserve it. Tempest, these morons can't go around thinking that just because a customer is a woman, they can rip her off. It's not right!"

"You also don't know that was what happened. Maybe they just made a mistake."

"That's a pretty big mistake for someone who's supposed to know what they're doing." Hawthorne retorted.

(For the record, I'm with Hawthorne on this, although I don't think I'd trust her taking matters into her own hands either....)

"I say we go all gladiator on them. Fa-tang! Fa-Tang! I tell you, I would make an awesome gladiator, wouldn't I?"

"Nefoedd helpu ni..." I'm not sure what Tempest said, but I think it's Welsh for "Oh crap..."











Maddy's note: It's "Heaven help us," according to Google Translator. I think the devic facepalm says it all, though....

In which Maddy donates her car....

"What on earth is all this stuff?" I looked around as Maddy brought in a milk crate full of car supplies - deicer, Fix-A-Flat, snow brush, that kind of stuff.

She sighed. "I'm donating Scaramouche to the local fire department. They're coming to pick her up today or tomorrow."

"Scaramouche? The little black car?" Well, not so "little." I think that Saturn is about three inches longer than the infamous Red October.


She nodded. "I'm not sure I feel so good about it."

"But they'll use it for training, won't they? Like in saving lives?"

"Well, yeah, but - you know me. If something breaks, you don't toss it, you fix it. But the transmission is pretty much shot and even if I could spare the money to fix it, they don't make them anymore - and haven't for years - so there's the problem of parts. Plus, it's eleven years old with 103,000-something miles and really - it doesn't run all that well anymore even without the transmission. The handling's shot, too."

I followed her back out to the garage. "Isn't this the one that you hit a rock with that time and destroyed the wheel?"

"It was that or t-bone the trailer of the landscaping truck that had just cut me off. I didn't have a whole lot of choices to work with right then. But yes, it was. I bet Sears really regretted that $74.95 flat-rate alignment special after they had to spend four hours realigning it. It was so far off that I had to hold the wheel in almost the four-o-clock position to drive straight. I destroyed a new set of tires in less than three weeks."

And yes, that car looks almost new. Unlike her father, she can be trusted to take care of nice things like cars.

Saturns were apparently nice things in their day, too. I love this funky little backwards door.

"They call those suicide doors. Don't ask me why," Maddy said. "I couldn't open it in a parking lot without someone coming over and saying how freaking awesome it was."

"Was this your first car?"

"No, my first was a little Geo Storm. Bright turquoise. I always used to describe it as blue, but then everyone would look at me funny and tell me it was green. So I finally just started saying turquoise. That one was eventually sideswiped by a huge Suburban and totalled. Took out the entire drivers' side. I walked away without even a scratch. I ended up getting almost three times the Blue Book value for an eight-year-old car just because I'd taken care of it. I got Scaramouche three days later."

"What were they? A different kind of car, a different kind of company?"

"That's it. I remember when I picked her up, the sales rep actually spent about half an hour with me showing me where everything was under the hood and where all the controls were and all. That was nice. They even had a bunch of balloons tied to the antenna and a big red bow around the rearview mirror. I got to keep the balloons, too. It was actually kind of fun. They made a big deal out of it - in a good way. I kind of felt like a little kid with my first grown-up toy. For 2001, she had a lot of really nice features - and a lot of power. I very quickly learned not to floor the accelerator going up the hill unless I wanted to be doing ninety." (For the record, the "hill" is a just-over 1,000 foot tall mountain that's part of the extreme southern Taconic range. We're about nine hundred feet up it. And no, we don't have a view of much of anything except trees, trees, trees and the house next door.) "She also had cup holders."

"Since when are cup holders an optional feature?" For me, they're seating. I'd call that required.

"The Storm didn't have them. It made trying to get lunch back to work kind of interesting in the bad sense if I had a drink cup. Storms were about the same size as the smallest Mini Coopers. They did have some amount of cargo room, though. I managed to fit thirty twenty-two inch pizzas into mine once. Of course, this meant pizzas in the back piled to the roof, pizzas on the front seat and pizzas on the floor. And did I mention it was way below freezing that day? And these were hot and steaming right out of the oven? It took about five seconds for the windows to fog over like - uh - well, something else was going on. It was a good thing I only had to go back across the street, because by the time I got back on the IBM site, I had my head out the window trying to see where I was going. Then, when I got them back, me and the manager who'd ordered them for his all-hands meeting got busted by the cafeteria manager trying to sneak them in. We weren't supposed to use "outside food vendors" for anything on site - but the cafeteria, well - sucked. The next day a nastygram went out to the entire site reminding everyone of the policy. A very nasty gram."

Oopsie.....

"So how did you end up with two, then?" I looked at Red.

"I inherited my father's Saturn Vue after he died. That Vue was - well, ugly. And a piece of crap. And it had his bad mojo, because something was always going wrong with it. I traded it in for Red and never looked back. Of course, at the time Scaramouche was still more or less running, so I thought I'd keep her, too. But now - oh well." She sighed. "I always thought I'd put a million miles on that car. I wanted to set the record for the most mileage on a single vehicle."

I think Red October has a shot at that one....