Category: car

Bam! 

My shattered sunroof

Whoooooosh, whoooosh, whooooosh!
“What the fuck was that?” my boyfriend shouts.
“Pull over, quick!”
I look up and my sunroof is gone.

We park on the side of I-70 and stare up in horror. What happened to the sunroof? Why are there just shards of glass left now?
Deep breaths. Breath in. Breath out.
Getting out of the car, I see black snowflakes of glass on my seat and I brush even more off my body.
My once solid sunroof now looks like crinkly aluminum foil that was viciously torn apart.

“We can’t stay here,” he yells as other cars from the interstate whip by us.

We drive off to the next exit and stop in the parking lot of a gun shop.

My boyfriend tells me to call the Volkswagon dealership I bought my car from so I do. I explain what happened and they tell me to bring the car into their service shop.

I call my dad and he tells me the same thing the dealership says. Except he asks if I’m okay.

Bits of glass sprinkle into the car as we drive to the dealership. I try not to hide my face from the glass.

We get to the dealer and the guy who sold me my car tells us that they’ll pay for the repairs and we’ll get a rental car shortly. Okay sure no problem. We wait in the waiting area lobby for an hour and nothing happens.

Bits and pieces of glass everywhere

We go into the service area to check on things.
“Oh, I didn’t know your name. Or where you were. So I didn’t do anything with your paperwork yet,” says the service manager. Great.
We wait 45mins longer in the service shop and listen to their phone ring and ring, always unanswered.
We move to the waiting room. A guy walks into the waiting room. “Anyone call for a rental?”
So, we get in the car he points to.
I think that he’s just going to ask me to sign some papers and we’ll take this rental car right then and there. Instead, he drives out of the dealership and I have to ask, “Where are you taking us?”
He states he’s taking us to “the office” and hands me his business card which says Avis/ Budget.
  While he’s driving us, he never uses his turn signal and the car is hot and stuffy.
We get to “the office” and he turns to us saying, “Okay, now let me call Volkswagon and figure out who is paying for the rental car.”
I think, “We were just at the dealership. Why couldn’t we have asked them there?” Instead, he calls and the call to the dealership, of course, goes unanswered.
“Okay, so we’ll put this on your credit card and then Volkswagon will refund you if they choose to pay for the car,” the guy tells us.

Some of the glass scratched my car

I’m thinking no, no, no.
My friend calls the dealership and speaks to a sales person who is finally able to connect us to the service manager. He tells the rental car guy that Volkswagon will pay for the car.
We wait as the rental car guy fills out the paperwork and types up stuff on the computer. He says he needs my credit card to put a $1 hold on it. I hand it to him and he types away.
Two minutes later he turns to me and says, “Okay, so I need you to call your bank because I accidentally charged your card $290.”
At this point in the day, four hours later than when I initially left home, I’m not surprised anymore. All I can do is take another deep breath and call my bank. He tries to tell the bank that he wants the pending charge cancelled.
Twenty minutes more of waiting, we get the keys to a car that smells like cheap weed and is the size and shape of a hearse.
At least it’s a rental car.

On Monday, the car dealership tells me they won’t pay for the repairs because they claim a rock hit my sunroof. I know what a rock sounds like and a rock did not hit it. I honestly have no idea why it exploded. After lots of back and forth, the dealership and Volkswagon are paying for the repairs.

I should be getting my car back in a week or so (probably longer.)