Tag Archives: truck

Traveling light…

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It usually takes every bit of room in a crewmax pickup truck to move me and the dogs just about anywhere. In the intrest of having places to be and still not exact idea when the truck might have its airbags installed, we’re going to give it the good old college try in something a little smaller. The Chevy Impala is a fine car, I’m sure, but even with its respectable trunk I’m not sure it was designed with me in mind. I’ve been working on it most of the evening and think I finally have it down to what I’d consider the barest of essentials: A backpack of electronic “stuff”, a rolling garment bag, a medium tote of “dog stuff”, two large dogs, and me. Neither of my oversized crates will fit in the aforementioned trunk, so we’re going to see how the trip goes sans crates. Hopefully they will be at least marginally well behaved and don’t destroy anything while were there. If something goes badly wrong with this plan it’s possible that all three of us may be banned for life from the house where I grew up. I’m cautiously optimistic because they haven’t really destroyed anything in years now… but I’m equal parts horrified that they’ll see the new territory as a good excuse to, I don’t know, shred an entire living room set.

I’ve thrown over every bit of extraneous bit of clothing, equipment, and random odd and end that I can think of, but the dogs… the dogs are the wildcard in all of this. If there’s any mercy in the universe, they won’t make me regret gushing about how well mannered they are. Otherwise, I’ll be paying for this short trip for a very long time. For the record, I never intend to travel anywhere within driving distance without the truck again. Trying to economize on volume is just too nerve-wracking.

So that’s the good kind of damage?

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The body shop I’m using comes highly recommended from several sources. Even the internet says they do good work and as we all know, the internet never lies. Now that they’ve had a chance to give the truck the once over, they’ve arrived at the strangely specific repair estimate of $7.968.00. I don’t know, it just feels like that would have been an appropriate time to just round up and announce it would be about eight grand. Lower than eight and I’d have been happily surprised, higher then eight and they covered themselves by making it an “about” statement. But rounding to the nearest dollar just seems like overkill.

I almost enjoyed talking to the guy, but that could have had more to do with the memo I was trying hard not to write than anything interesting he was saying. That was until he threw in that I had “the good kind of damage.” Say what? I’m pretty sure there’s nothing about an $7,968 repair bill for a crunched in front end that I’d consider “good damage.” I’m pretty sure he ment that the damage was largely cosmetic and didn’t foul up the drivetrain or frame, still, not what I think of as good damage. Then again, if I were about to get a $7,500 check from my insurance company, maybe I’d think it was good damage too.

Left turn, Clyde…

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To help give a little insight into how I spent most of the day yesterday, I wanted to provide a public service announcement to all the drivers out there. In most vehicles these days there’s a toggle switch on the steering column that controls the left and right turn signals that alert drivers around you to your intended course of action. For instance, when you’re in the turn lane with you blinker flashing, the rest of us assume that you are actually going to go ahead and turn in the direction indicated by your flashing signal. Well over 99% of the time, that’s exactly what happens. It happens with such regularity that it’s one of those things that the driving public just assumes to be true. They assume it to be true right up until the moment when it’s not true and they find themselves pummeled by a face full of airbag. You see, fellow drivers, when you signal one intention and then do something else, bad things tend to happen to everyone involved.

In case anyone is wondering, I’m fine. The dogs are fine. The Tundra, however, is distinctly not fine. We’ll find out just how not fine it is next week when the insurance adjuster and body shop get a look at it. In the meantime, I’ll go ahead and write that check for the deductible so we can get on with getting Big Red back on the road. Nothing like doing $20,000 of damage to two vehicles because the asshat in the turning lane is perplexed by the concept of a turn signal. Meh. It’s safe for everyone to assume I’ve gone from the thankful not to be hurt stage to the throughly annoyed because my truck is torn up stage of the process.

Despite being throughly annoyed, I do have a few shout outs. Special thanks to the Maryland State Police for a professional and rapid response. Of course it helps that we were less than 500 yards from their parking lot. To my dad, thanks for the loaner car. I’ll do my best not to get fooled by anyone else’s signal while I’m driving your ride. Mom, thanks for not freaking out too badly when I called to give you a heads up. She doesn’t think this is a blog/Facebook-appropriate topic, so don’t give her too much crap about me posting about it ok? Thanks. And finally props to my evil stepmother – thanks for driving over and hauling me and the dogs halfway across the state yesterday.

So that’s the short version of my Saturday. It’s safe to say this is not the relaxing and restful three day weekend I was anticipating.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Waiting. Some people, God bless them, are able to sit all day waiting on something to happen. Me? Not so much. Blame it on computerization, the Internet, youth or whatever else you blame such things on, but the bottom line is I’m not a patient person. When something is supposed to happen, I want it to happen right the hell now. Maybe that’s something I should work on, buti don’t think I have the patience for that.

2. Alarm clocks. On any given weekday morning, the alarm built into my phone goes off twice. I don’t remember the last time that work me up. About ten minutes later, my normal alarm clock sounds. That one might wake me half the time. The third and last line of defense is the rediculously loud alarm I picked up from Amazon. That one is still getting me up, but it’s taking longer and longer to get my attention. Another month or two and I’ll probably be immune to that end too. What I’d really like is an alarm that wakes me consistently without needing to set three or four different clocks. Sure, it seems like overkill, but it’s barely getting the job done. Surely there’s a better way.

3. Parking garages. This is America. We drive big vehicles here. Many of us have full sized cars, trucks, and SUV’s that are not only tall, but also wide. While I completely respect your efforts to cram as many parking spaces as possible into that fancy seven story garage you built, what I’m going to need you to do is widen up those spaces a bit so I don’t have to use two of them, every time I come visit or leave a big chunk of my vehicle hanging precipitously far into the travel lane. This is really something that I shouldn’t need to mention in the country that decided the Hummer would be a good ride for in and around town.

4. Bad coffee. If you’re going to charge almost $3 for a 20 ounce cup of regular, no frills drip coffee, there’s no reason you can’t make it from legitimately good grounds. Whatever you lose in the margin will be more than made up for by people who don’t go seek out your competition for the next cup.

4 hours…

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I took four hours off tomorrow afternoon. Normally that’s good enough reason for celebration, but in this case it’s time dedicated to hanging out with the fine men and women of the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration. Come on… The filling out forms. The taking bad pictures. The standing in line. The standing in another line. The filling out more forms. And finally forking over a fistful of cash. That sounds like some real kicks on a Friday afternoon, right? If this goes as smoothly as everything else involved with this move, it should be finished with everything sometime next Tuesday. With the stack of paperwork I’m taking with me, I think I have all the bases covered… Which practically guarantees things will go horribly wrong in a new and interesting variety of ways.

Free to a good home…

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Today marks the official one month mark since I moved in. That’s enough time to finally have things (mostly) settled and to figure out how livable the house is. All things considered, the place itself isn’t bad, really. There are a few layout issues and plenty of things that I would have done differently if it were my house – like the magenta bathtub and toilet. I mean seriously, how on earth did anyone ever thing that was a good idea? Other than that, the place seems to have good bones and is suffering only from the obvious neglect of the previous tenants and the general laziness of the property manager… Which of course brings us to the crux of the matter: A full month after moving in, there is still a Ford Expedition sitting in the driveway.

If someone drove up with a rollback and “disappeared” this Expedition, I certainly wouldn’t be filing a police report. I’d probably be willing to give them a hand loading it on the truck. It’s got a little body damage and I don’t have keys or anything, but I’d guess that you could make a good profit parting it out. I don’t have the time or energy to do it myself… and the point, of course, is to get it out of my driveway and into someone else’s. Maybe I’ll put a “Free to good home” sign on it before I leave for work in the morning.

Since I think 30 days is more than sufficient for the property manager to take care of this issue (and since the car seems to meet the legal definition of abandoned), I’ll be calling the Motor Vehicle Administration and the local police tomorrow to start the process of formally declaring it abandoned. That takes about 30 days from start to finish, but after that I can file for title and then sell the damned thing myself. I hoped I wouldn’t have to be a douchebag about this, but from here on out that seems to be the way we’re going to have to handle things. That’s probably what I should have done from the beginning. Serves me right for trying to be a nice guy.

Sitting…

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So the Line X manager was nice enough to drive me over to the Barns and Nobel instead of knocking around his shop for the three hours he said it would take. The good news is that there’s way more interesting things to look at here. The down side is that after 11:00, I have no direct way to hassle him about when it’s going to be finished. That’s only a problem in that after sitting around a bookstore and drinking coffee for an hour and a half, I’m pretty much finished with the part of the day where I want to sit quietly. I think I’m possibly more unnerved because I’m effectively marooned out here in the land of the all-day strip mall without even the most basic transportation. The mall is close by, but the walk across the million and a half acres of open parking lot makes me hesitant to leave the well air conditioned table I’ve managed to take over.

On the other hand it occurs to me that at some point in the not too distant past, there was a world without wifi… When there was no nation-wide cellular network… And when having this kind of wait would have meant truly just sitting quietly and waiting. No multitasking. Barely even single-tasking unless you count things like breathing and keeping your heart beating as “tasks.”

Since I’ve gone more and more digital, the book store itself is something of a strange land. Nothing seems to be where it was the last time I was here. Of course that was probably over a year ago. Fortunately, the coffee is still good and I’ll probably manage not to completely lose my mind while I’m here… But I’m really, really ready to get back among the ranks of the mobile this morning.

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Finding the right accessories…

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With the new truck tucked safely in the garage, it’s time to think about accessories. That’s probably a hold over from being a Wrangler owner, where everything was an accessory. I’ve got two appointments scheduled Friday. The Line-X bed liner gets sprayed in the morning and the tint shop is doing the windows in the afternoon. That goes a long way towards getting me where I want to be. Next step is finding a hard tonneau cover and step rails, but that’s going to have to wait for a week or two given a pesky trip for work that has cropped up in the middle of my accessorizing. Very inconvenient, that, though it does give me a chance to do a bit more research before making any decisions. I had a flip cover on the old truck which was great, but wasn’t quite as weatherproof as I’d like. Of course the drawback to the full hard cover is that it basically eliminates the ability to haul anything of size. Then again, how likely am I to manhandle a sofa into the back of the truck anyway? Yeah. Not so much.

If anyone out there has recommendations on brands or personal experiences on the hard covers, I’d be more than happy to hear them. Once I get these few things squared away, I should be set… until I catch a wild hare and feel compelled to start playing with the onboard electronics, of course.

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Let’s make a deal…

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I use to have a blog over at Blogger that went by the working title “Falling into it.” That’s mostly because at odd moments, I seem to trip over good situations. This weekend is a case in point. To say the least, I wasn’t planning on getting a new truck. In fact, I was extremely happy with the one I had. Usually getting a call from a car salesman on a Saturday isn’t something I’d look forward to. The only reason I picked up at all was that I was driving and had the bluetooth in my ear and didn’t feel like fishing for my phone to screen the call. I’m sure it’s an old line in the car business, but he was adamant that they had someone looking for my “exact model truck”and would cut me a good deal on anything they had on the lot if I was interested in trading.

I wasn’t interested in trading, of course, but since I was driving past the dealership anyway, I thought it wouldn’t do any harm to slip in and let them buy me a cup of coffee. My “old” truck was a 2008 and was getting along towards 50,000 miles (a couple of trips to Maryland every year will rack ’em up fast). No way were they going to be interested when they saw the mileage, so I should be on my way in a couple of minutes. I handed off my keys to the appraiser and hopped on the golf cart for a window tour of the lot, commenting on other trucks here and their and throwing out a laundry list of things I wanted: full sized crew cab, power everything, sunroof, 4×4, towing package, cloth seats, and nothing in white, tan, or silver. Pulling through the lot he passed truck after truck that got disqualified for one or more reasons (4×4’s in the south are surprisingly hard to come by). As we pulled back to the front, I was sure that we were all but through. Until, he mentioned that there was one more Tundra in the showroom that he thought I would like… The infamous one more thing. Sure, I though, he wants to get me inside to make it psychologically harder to leave. OK, I’m game. Let’s go have a look.

So there it was sitting in the middle of the showroom floor, with the exact specs that I had told him it would take for me to even start talking about a deal. I still had my safety net, though, as I knew the appraiser was never going to come back with an offer high enough to pay off my loan on the old truck. Well, the short version is that he came back with an appraisal that was well in excess of what I had been expecting and more than enough to pay off Bank of America. Still, I knew there wasn’t a chance of the finance people coming up with a number that I was going to be willing to work with, so it wasn’t even close to a done deal. In my own mind, I was no closer to buying a new truck than I was when I walked in the door.

Their first deal wasn’t bad enough to be insulting, but was way off in terms of where the numbers needed to be to convince me it was worth while. It’s a car dealership, there’s always haggling and that’s half the fun. Back he scurried to the sales manager’s desk, coming back 10 minutes later with an offer that was a little better, but still not sweet. One more time, I say, tell your guy that this one needs to be his best and final offer since we’re not going to do this all afternoon. Back to the sales desk, about 20 minutes this time, and he comes back and hands me a sheet of paper. And that was the offer I couldn’t refuse – 0% financing, and a monthly note that was about $2 more than I was paying already.

So to get this straight, I’ll give you my two year old truck, with 50,000 miles on it and in exchange you’re going to give me a brand new truck, 2 years of free scheduled maintenance, not increase my payment, decrease the length of my loan amortization, and let me use Toyota’s money at 0% to make it happen? Yeah?

Sold.

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Hardest part…

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Sitting here at the tire place with nothing but time on my hands reminds me how much I despise sitting around just waiting for things to happen. Aside from the unhappy series of events that led me here this morning, the last 36 hours have mostly been about waiting; waiting for people to do things they said they would do a week ago; waiting for hundreds of pages of handouts to churn out of the printer; and for the other shoe to inevitably drop.

Now that I have plenty of things that need done, I’m waiting again this morning and my schedule is purely in the hands of other people once again. Of course sitting here watching the torrential rain gives me a chance to think about the 20 cases of paper products sitting in the back of the truck and wonder just how well the “watertight” bedcover will actually perform. Any results less good than “wow its really dry back here” will tend to ruin my next six days.

I’ve still got a laundry list of things I need to get done today and the clock is running. The later in the morning it gets, the faster it seems to run. I suppose I’ll feel a bit better when I get the dogs to the kennel this afternoon. In the meantime I need to get serious about making everything else ready to be on the road for a while. In order to even get to that point, though, they need to get these damned tires on the truck and get me back up and moving. Sitting here while time’s wasting is making me crazy.