For those of you who are familiar with our car story, you can somewhat imagine our joy when we finally got our car!! For those of you who don’t know, I’ll do a quick recap of the last 3 months…
So, towards the end of June, I, Cameron, got in a fender bender in our trusty Volvo. The car was deemed totaled, but anyone with car accident experience knows that nowadays not much damage has to occur for the car to be considered ‘totaled.’ In our case, everything worked fine, but the whole front side was smashed in(I hit an suv, so instead of bumpers colliding, their bumper rose above ours and went right for the body panels and anything else in it’s way). So, since the car worked fine and had been so loyal to us in the past, we wanted to get another one exactly the same to be able to use the wrecked one for parts and such. Understand? So, I get on-line and find one in Illinois for a pretty good price. I talk it over with Becky, and we agree that even with the cost of flying out there and driving it back, we will still come out on top. So, on Friday of Memorial weekend, I take a red eye flight to Chicago, test drive the car, and deem it a good car worthy of the Porter name on it’s title. I buy the thing and head for home. This is where the fun begins. Not more than two hours later, while I am on the phone with Becky telling her about all the things that work in this car that stopped working on our old one, I hear a noise, and the car won’t accelerate anymore. I pull over, and get this, I am in one of the only spots where my phone doesn’t get reception. So I end up using that cell phone emergency SOS call(yeah, the one you unknowlingly pay like $.99 a month for…worth it in my case) to call a police officer. In a quick minute he is there, and through him I am able to arrange a tow truck to haul me to the nearest town. to keep things fun, it was memorial weekend, and by he time I got to where I could do something, I couldn’t do anything. It was late, I was somewhere in Illinois, alone, on Memorial weekend, and without a car. So the next morning I was able to arrange the tow-truck to take me down to rent a u-haul so I can tow my own car back to the dealer where I bought the car. I demand my money back, but he isn’t going for that. He is a nice guy and feels bad for me, and was very willing to help me out with this situation.
So, the next morning I flew back home, under the agreement that the dealer would get the car fixed and ship it out to me. If the warranty covered the repairs, then the dealer would cover the shipping expense. If the warranty did not cover the repairs then the dealer would cover the repair cost and I would pay to ship it out here to Portland. Needless to say, it took a month of calling adjusters, getting quotes, following up, etc., only to find out that the warranty company would not cover it. So, briefly put, Ed fixed it and shipped it out, and…three months later we can now get groceries at our convenience. Wow! That was longer than I thought, and that’s the edited version.
This will be a story that I am sure will be passed down through generations, for it’s absurdiness, coordination, dumb luck, and for being one of those Murphy’s Law stories where everything that could have gone wrong did, but miraculously ended up ok.