Missing, smooth

My wife has a lot of great things about her, but being observant is not one of them. The other day we dropped the car off at the tire place because one of the tires was almost flat due to a screw being in it. We dropped it off and then agreed Ali could pick it up later since it was only a couple blocks from her work. Well she picked it up and all was fine, until this morning when I asked her where my key was that I gave the garage for the car. She had no idea, in fact she realized that they never gave her it back when she picked up the car and she instead just pulled out her set of keys to drive away. This struck me as incredulous but hey, no big deal, we will stop by the place on the way to work and pick it up.

So I stop by the place and explain the car was there Tuesday but we didnt get a key back. The guy looked and looked and found nothing, great. He said he could ask some other guys when they got in and call me if they find it. I was annoyed but still figured I could just run to the dealership and drop 5 or 10 bucks and have them make me another one. Ali apologized for her oversight and all was fine.

So I go to the dealership at lunch to get my key. The parts guy was unsure but thought that maybe 2003 Sentras had “smart keys”, meaning they have a chip embedded in them as a security measure. He asked 2 or 3 people if the 03’s had these chipped keys and some thought they did, others said no. However the final vote was yes, it needed a smart key which costs 30 bucks! But that isn’t the best part of it, in order to get a new key, you have to take the car into the shop, where they give you 2 new keys after they program them to work with the car which surely they would not do for free. To make things better, they didn’t have time to do it now so I would have to schedule an appointment to get it done. Now I was pissed that Ali’s oversight could wind up costing me 50 bucks or more, plus another trip to the dealership.

Well I had time left on my lunch hour so I thought I would save myself car washing time this weekend and go gas the car and run it through the car wash at the station. I fill up and notice that it never gave me the option to purchase the car wash at the pump, wtf? Then I get more angry as I see the pump doesn’t have a working receipt printer so I have to go inside to get a receipt. Then I had to buy the car wash seperately, grrr. It was one of those shitty, touchless car washes that never really get your car clean so I came out of that with just a less dirty car and 7 bucks poorer.

On the way back to the office I was digging through every compartment I could find in the car to see if either the tire place or Ali dropped the key inside and forgot about it. No luck but I did find some used ink cartridges that must be a year old at least. I still had some time to kill so I decided to go to Office Max and turn in the used cartridge to get a ream of paper, a cool trade in program Office Max does. I was still bent out of shape about the whole key thing. I ran through my head how I was going to call the tire place again and ask if they found the key. How they would say no, and then I would inform them that their f up is going to result in me having to pay a wad of cash to get it replaced. I wondered if they would do the right thing and offer to pay for it or if I would have to argue with them and just wind up getting more furious. I did some emotional buying while I was there, I grabbed a 5 pack of DVD-R’s and then dropped 80 bucks on a sweet laser mouse. I didn’t care that we probably have a 5k hurricane deductible bill coming from insurance and a 500 dollar medical bill from getting the cancer cut out of my head, not to mention the holidays around the corner, f it, a new tech toy would make me feel better.

So I get back to the office and make the call to the tire place and ask if they had any luck finding the key. Someone different answered the phone than whom I talked to this morning. After a long hold time he comes back and said he found it. I was happy to hear it and told him I would pick it up later. After I hung up I realized that I should have been pissed off because obviously the guy from this morning didn’t follow through and look for it more. I’ve had several bad experiences with this place but keep going back because it is conveniently located. Maybe I will learn this time. Ali is off the hook.

3 days ago, they finally opened 2 westbound lanes in the area by my house that has been the source of my traffic nightmare for the last year or so. It has made a DRAMATIC difference. The 3 miles that used to take us 50 minutes to clear can now be done in 5. It is almost to good to be true. Even though this happened almost a full 3 months later than it was supposed to, now that the relief is here it hardly matters. I got to work in 45 minutes. I may actually be able to move that alarm clock up a bit past it’s current 5:36am setting.