Apparently, Emailing is Difficult
**To avoid a defamation lawsuit, this bodyshop shall remain nameless.
Back on July 13th I got into an accident. It wasn’t bad, in respect to I walked away without a scratch and my car was still completely driveable, but regardless, I still had damage to my car. I was driving south bound on the 101, I had left work early as Brooke and I were going to attend the Incubus concert being held at the Hollywood Bowl, and we wanted to get a jump on traffic that afternoon. Somewhere around Tampa, out from under the car in front of me shoots out a LARGE piece of tire. This looked to be approximately a full tire that had split laterally, There were cars both to my left and right ( the 101 ALWAYS has cars on it ) and while I was able to slow down somewhat ( I probably hit it going 45 or 50 ) it wasn’t much or much time. It hit my bumper, it bounced around my under carriage and shot out from under my car. The car behind me also hit it and probably several other people. I pulled over, but nobody else did. Noticed that the damage seemed to be cosmetic and drove to my sisters house, who I was house sitting for.
I called Mercury Insurance, who was my insurer at the time, and reported the claim. I took pictures with my new iPhone and even a video or two just for record keeping of the visible damage. Mercury told me that an adjuster would call me in a day or two to go over my claim, and the following day I spoke with Ashley from Mercury and we went over the details. She then faxed me a list of places to go to have my car repaired. Yay, too bad I have a $1000 deductible, but so be it. At least my car is going to get repaired.
I took my car to “the repair shop” for an estimate, it was near closing on Friday so the guy taking the pictures and all my information said that he would send me my estimate via email on Monday. Perfect. Monday comes and goes, no email. Tuesday, 11am and still no email. So, I call and tell the person that answers the phone my issue and he says he’ll take care of it and to just watch my email. 12:30pm and low and behold, still no email. Getting frustrated now. I call back and a woman answers, says everyone is at lunch but she’ll take my name and number and someone will call me back after lunch. Tick tock. Tick tock. 2:45 and still no call. So, I call. It appears that someone there has problems sending emails, and it just hasn’t gone through to me. They couldn’t have called me to tell me this? Apparently not. I guess that’s too difficult. He says he will save the attachment to a new format and get the email out, and that when he sends the email he will call me so I know when to look for it. Well, guess what? 5pm rolls around and no phone call, no email, nothing. I called them Wednesday at 11am, and the guy I spoke to the day before answered. He apologized profusely and offered to fax me the estimate. Wow. Why didn’t he offer this the day before? I was skeptical that he’d be able to dial my fax number right after having such issues sending a single email, but apparently numbers are far easier for slow folk to grasp and the fax showed up.
I now have an appointment for Friday at 9:30am to drop my car off for repairs. Initial estimate said 2 weeks of repairs. Not sure I want to go 2 weeks without a car, so I’m going to rent a car for probably 1/2 of that time and then borrow my moms car the other 1/2. Ugh. Oh, and the initial estimate claims the damage to come out to just under $980. Yup, I get to cover all of it. Great. They still have to look at the under carriage and I know some things got bent under there and we’ll see about the air conditioner unit, as it also got a little beat up.
Hopefully they fix cars better than they email. Here’s hoping.