On the 5th of January this year, Daniel Thorpe hit my car with his car. He backed into it from about 15m away, whilst backing out of a driveway. He didn’t bother turning the wheel because that’s just retarded. I covered what happened in my “Weekend From Hell” post, a couple of days after the event.
Eventually, around Feburary, I started talking to the insurance company. This was in part due to Daniel and my identically superior abilities at procrastinating.
On the 26th of March, I finally managed to get it to a crash repairer after waiting for about 3 weeks after initial contact with the crash repairer, due to them being “busy”.
I rock up with my car at 10am and they’re all sitting outside having a smoko. I leave them my car, and they say it will take them 2 days, and off I walked all the way back home (catching a train in between Salisbury and Elizabeth).
Today I phone them up asking when my car will be ready, to which they reply any time between 4:30 and 5pm. I accept this, and find out what train I can catch to get there around 5ish, giving them a little bit of lee-way so I’m not waiting around too long.
I shouldn’t have expected it to be done when I got there.
It was almost deja vu, the whole crew sitting outside on yet another smoko. I was there at 5pm. I walk inside expecting to see a receptionist, only to buzz and have her come in from the door where next to they were having their smoko. “Oh, you’re here for the VL? Won’t be too much longer.
So I wait.
And wait.
And wait.
At 6pm I am starting to get moderately pissed off. It shouldn’t take two days to fit a new door, which they didn’t do.
At 6:15pm I am getting more and more pissed off. Tapping my feet, rubbing my face… ugh.
At 6:30pm I make it my mission to walk out at 6:45 without telling them, leaving to get dinner and hopefully returning when it’s done.
At 6:40pm My car is finally ready. I get in it and try out things. The first thing I tried was the door handle, which was still the original door handle. They had only replaced the outer shell of the door, not the entire door like I thought they would. The handle is probably still going to be dicky, and if it fucks up I’m going to raise Hell.
Then I wound down the window, which worked. Then I got in and tried adjusting the mirror only to find the control on the inside was still unresponsive as before hand. This was another thing that wasn’t fixed.
This is sub-par service from an “approved repairer”. No customer should have to wait an hour and forty minutes without any kind of compensation, offer of food/drink or mention of how long it’s going to take. I would ask the RAA to take away their status as an approved repairer, but I’m thinking it’s more of the insurance company’s fault for not doing a proper inspection of the car, like they should have. I’m pretty sure I mentioned to them about the handle and the mirror, but nothing was done.
Now I’m going to have to wait until Monday before I hear anything more about my mirror and handle. I don’t want to pay anything, I shouldn’t have to pay anything. They should’ve done the job properly the first time.
Never trust crash repairers. Always get THEM to call YOU when it’s done, don’t ask them when it’ll be ready because whatever they say will be false.
I’ll be back later, building my mini-nuke “in case of emergency”