Monday, November 01, 2004
me 2/3, hideous dent 0
Yes, okay, I can't really declare this to be a complete victory, since there is still a hideous dent in the side of my Saab. But the dent is now approximately 66% less hideous due to my own cheapness/lack of money/love of home remedies.
Thursday after work I took the car to my trusty Saab dealer to see if they had any ideas about how to fix the thing. The woman who works there didn't know, but she took some digital photos of my nicely damaged Saab and sent them off to the lab for processing. Okay, she emailed them to the dent guy at their other location. Still pretty cool, this modern technology of ours.
The next day I got a call from the dent guy. He told me that he couldn't get a good idea how serious the dent was from the pictures, and that I'd have to take it in to get it checked out in person (so much for the modern technology). Unwilling to accept this explanation, I pressed him for more information, describing the dent in full gory detail, only to find out that his thinking is that I needed to replace the entire body panel for around $600 (!). However, there is still a chance that they can fix the dent and it would only cost around $165. And this is the cheap method! I promptly had a cow (man, I haven't heard that expression in a while!). The people at the Saab dealer seem pretty nice, but I think they might just assume that all people who buy Saabs are made of money. Haven't they ever heard of GM employee discounts?
I just graduated from business school in December. Already broke and hugely in debt, I had the joy of being unemployed for 5 months, then I got a job paying far less than the "average" pay MBAs are "supposed" to bring in (I'm sure that MBA career centers inflate their numbers heavily, but I'll rant about this in a future post - it deserves its own post). I could barely afford to treat myself to this nice car, but I surely can't afford to shell out hundreds of bucks just because Babe Ruth decided to move in. One of the ways I justified buying this car is that it has a nice fresh warranty and free maintenance for three years. Is it a coincidence that all of the symptoms of the curse are things that are not covered by warranty and are not part of any maintenance schedule? I think not.
It was at this point that Rachel and I decided to take the law into our own hands, using a, gulp, plunger to pull the dent out. And why not? The plunger can unclog a toilet about once out of every 25 tries, why shouldn't it be able to undent a fine automobile with one try? This was my mom's idea, and I can't say that I was really excited about taking a bathroom appliance to my new car. But neither was I excited about paying $600 to a "professional" who was probably going to do the same thing. We waited until late at night for a few reasons: 1) Carter will be sleeping, and will not be running around in circles while we plunge the car (2 year olds like to run around in circles, you ever notice that?), 2) it gave us more time to talk ourselves out of this crazy idea, and 3) there was less chance of being spotted by the neighbors. Let's face it, I am not proud of fixing my car with a plunger, and being caught in the middle of this process would not be my proudest moment in life, especially if I got the results I expected and the dent ended up worse than before. "Oh hey, neighbor, I saw you plunging your car yesterday, pity about the results. Did you ever think about maybe taking the car to a professional?"
So we waited until nightfall, retrieved the plunger, and headed for the car, nervous with anticipation. We grabbed the flashlight, which amazingly had relatively fresh batteries (Why is it that flashlight batteries are always dead?). We sprayed the plungy part (forgive me for not knowing proper plunger terminology) with water and I carefully applied said plungy part to the dent. After assuring a proper suction, I began to pull with all my might. To this day, I cannot believe what happened. I heard a "pop!" and the dent came out. Rachel and I were equally shocked. We froze, looking at each other in amazement. Our ugly dent was now reduced to a mere ugly ding. Now I look more like I am a victim of a careless, humongous-doored Ford F-350 owner, and less like Jackie Chan decided to use my car for kick-boxing practice.
Do I dare claim success? Yes and no. Sure, the dent is vanquished, another victory for plungers everywhere, but the ding lives on. I'll call it a two-thirds victory. But the plunger may have just saved me hundreds of dollars.
¶ monger187 wrote this on 11/01/2004
Thursday after work I took the car to my trusty Saab dealer to see if they had any ideas about how to fix the thing. The woman who works there didn't know, but she took some digital photos of my nicely damaged Saab and sent them off to the lab for processing. Okay, she emailed them to the dent guy at their other location. Still pretty cool, this modern technology of ours.
The next day I got a call from the dent guy. He told me that he couldn't get a good idea how serious the dent was from the pictures, and that I'd have to take it in to get it checked out in person (so much for the modern technology). Unwilling to accept this explanation, I pressed him for more information, describing the dent in full gory detail, only to find out that his thinking is that I needed to replace the entire body panel for around $600 (!). However, there is still a chance that they can fix the dent and it would only cost around $165. And this is the cheap method! I promptly had a cow (man, I haven't heard that expression in a while!). The people at the Saab dealer seem pretty nice, but I think they might just assume that all people who buy Saabs are made of money. Haven't they ever heard of GM employee discounts?
I just graduated from business school in December. Already broke and hugely in debt, I had the joy of being unemployed for 5 months, then I got a job paying far less than the "average" pay MBAs are "supposed" to bring in (I'm sure that MBA career centers inflate their numbers heavily, but I'll rant about this in a future post - it deserves its own post). I could barely afford to treat myself to this nice car, but I surely can't afford to shell out hundreds of bucks just because Babe Ruth decided to move in. One of the ways I justified buying this car is that it has a nice fresh warranty and free maintenance for three years. Is it a coincidence that all of the symptoms of the curse are things that are not covered by warranty and are not part of any maintenance schedule? I think not.
It was at this point that Rachel and I decided to take the law into our own hands, using a, gulp, plunger to pull the dent out. And why not? The plunger can unclog a toilet about once out of every 25 tries, why shouldn't it be able to undent a fine automobile with one try? This was my mom's idea, and I can't say that I was really excited about taking a bathroom appliance to my new car. But neither was I excited about paying $600 to a "professional" who was probably going to do the same thing. We waited until late at night for a few reasons: 1) Carter will be sleeping, and will not be running around in circles while we plunge the car (2 year olds like to run around in circles, you ever notice that?), 2) it gave us more time to talk ourselves out of this crazy idea, and 3) there was less chance of being spotted by the neighbors. Let's face it, I am not proud of fixing my car with a plunger, and being caught in the middle of this process would not be my proudest moment in life, especially if I got the results I expected and the dent ended up worse than before. "Oh hey, neighbor, I saw you plunging your car yesterday, pity about the results. Did you ever think about maybe taking the car to a professional?"
So we waited until nightfall, retrieved the plunger, and headed for the car, nervous with anticipation. We grabbed the flashlight, which amazingly had relatively fresh batteries (Why is it that flashlight batteries are always dead?). We sprayed the plungy part (forgive me for not knowing proper plunger terminology) with water and I carefully applied said plungy part to the dent. After assuring a proper suction, I began to pull with all my might. To this day, I cannot believe what happened. I heard a "pop!" and the dent came out. Rachel and I were equally shocked. We froze, looking at each other in amazement. Our ugly dent was now reduced to a mere ugly ding. Now I look more like I am a victim of a careless, humongous-doored Ford F-350 owner, and less like Jackie Chan decided to use my car for kick-boxing practice.
Do I dare claim success? Yes and no. Sure, the dent is vanquished, another victory for plungers everywhere, but the ding lives on. I'll call it a two-thirds victory. But the plunger may have just saved me hundreds of dollars.
¶ monger187 wrote this on 11/01/2004
