2/18/09

I do believe that we have cultivated a decent appreciation for irony on this blog. Try this one on for size. Someone hit my truck yesterday. I took it to the shop yesterday. I assumed that, at the very least, it would take a day for the repairs to be made. Since the truck was going to the shop anyway, I asked the CTL road service guys to authorize the repair of my windshield wiper motor. It stopped working correctly on its own, independent of the collision situation. The wipers work on high speed, but the sprayer and the lower speeds don't work at all. Not a critical problem, clearly, but it is a bitch when you get a little grime on the window and all you can do is smear it around or try to see through it. If I'm going back into a snowy area, for example, I would feel a little safer if I had the sprayer to wash the salt off of my windshield. Why not tack an extra hour onto the process and deal with the thing while I was there, right? So the Kenworth dealer got authorization and ordered a new wiper module for me. Good deal.

I awoke this morning and called the dealership to see if I should check out of my motel or stay for another day. The convoluted explanation was as follows; My company's road service department told them to do what needed to be done in order to make the truck drivable. Id est, they didn't fix the fiberglass fender, but moved the bumper back where it belongs and seem to have secured the light fixtures. Whatever, fine. It's not my truck. They ordered the part for the wiper motor and expected delivery tomorrow morning. They were instructed by my company to put the dashboard back together and give me the truck, then have me bring the truck back tomorrow so that they can take it back apart and install the new wiper module.

"So basically they don't want to pay for another day at the motel?" I asked.

"Yeah, that's about it," the gentleman on the phone replied.

To be quite honest, I think I enjoy having a vehicle to drive around town more than I enjoyed staying at that motel anyway. I'm not much of a TV guy and there wasn't a whole lot to do nearby. It was a little bit of a cheapskate move on my employer's part, to be sure, but I know cash is tight for these companies lately. No skin off my nose. The irony comes into play when we consider that, had I known that they would be calling for a half-assed repair of the collision damage, I wouldn't have asked them to fix the wiper motor. I've already lost a day of work this week so I would have taken the truck back and gotten myself on the board today. The wiper motor could have been dealt with at another time. As it stands now, I'm bumming around McDonough, Georgia until my new module shows up tomorrow. Then the repair process is supposed to take an hour and a half or so. Then I'll be back in the saddle. There will be a few days left on this paycheck, so we'll just hope to catch a break tomorrow and then get a long run for the weekend.