My Sears auto nightmare

I was all ready to make the trek back to Olathe from my parents' house in Minnesota on Wednesday morning. The car was packed, the dog was ready, the sandwiches to eat on the road were made. Then I found out I had a headlight out.


I debated just letting it go and hitting the road, but rain was falling pretty steadily, so I figured I'd better get it taken care of to avoid getting pulled over. So I dropped the dog back at home and drove to Sears, figuring I could get a new bulb and get it installed there fast.


When I got to Sears they had one of those drive-up auto shops, where you pull your car in yourself. I pulled up and the garage door opened, but there were two cars in front of me, so I just idled in front of the garage for awhile. The door stayed open, stayed open, stayed open, so I figured I was hitting the sensor. The cars in front of me moved, I pulled forward and when I was almost in the garage, I heard a loud crash and a screeching of scraped metal and felt the car shake. The industrial strength garage door had dropped right on the roof of my Toyota Corolla.


Once I cleared the door I quickly put the car in park and hopped out to survey the damage. My first reaction was "God *#%& it, son of a ^&*#@, how does that even happen?" The teenage mouth-breather Sears employee who arrived on the scene's first reaction was "Whoa dude, that sucks." Gee, ya think? The roof was scratched and deeply dented and the antenna busted off.

So the mouth-breather (who was probably also a stoner, given his instinctual, completely inappropriate use of the word "dude") goes and gets his supervisor, a short, wrinkled troll-looking "dude." We spend the next hour and a half filling out incident reports, talking to the other customer who witnessed the whole thing (a nice, older Indian guy named Ramesh -- he pretty much backed everything I said) and waiting for a "loss prevention" Sears guy to come and take pictures. By this time I had also called my dad in from work as reinforcements. I'm going on 28 years old now, but I still feel like a little kid in those kind of situations, afraid I'm going to get taken advantage of.

So while we're waiting on the loss prevention guy, the troll guy starts trying to make small talk, asking me what I do for a living. I tell him I'm a laid-off journalist, which initiates this maddening conversation:

Troll: "Oh, newspaper man, huh?"

Me: "Yeah. At least I used to be."

Troll: "Yep. Looks like newspapers are going the way of the ol' horse and buggy."

Me: "So I'm told." (At this point I'm wondering if this guy is deliberately trying to piss me off).

Troll: "I guess if people were smart, they would have known that these things were taking over the world." (He pats his ancient, yellowed PC, which looks like it couldn't take over a game of minesweeper).

This is the point where the conversation ends because I am so enraged I know that if I open my mouth I'll start screaming. This guy's garage door just crunched my car and now he's giving me a "I just pulled this tidbit of wisdom out of my butt" lecture about why I lost my job? What school of customer service did this genius graduate from? These are the times when I wish God would have left me with at least one middle finger.

Fortunately Dad is there to back me up. Literally shaking with anger, he shoots back, "Yeah, and if people were smart, there'd probably be more cars in this garage too."

Troll: "What do you mean?"

Dad: "I mean, years ago, this garage used to be full every time I came in. Looks like business has fallen off quite a bit."

The troll doesn't really get what he's driving at and launches into some speech about how bad it is for the auto industry all over the place and how GM is shutting down all kinds of dealerships. That's true, but business at most repair shops is actually up, because if people aren't buying new cars, they're generally spending more to repair their old ones. What Dad was driving at, of course, was that business was bad at this particular Sears because the troll and his crack staff were less than competent.

Anyway, we finally got everything settled, although apparently the responsibility is on me to get three different estimates for the repairs and then fax them to Sears. Seems like a lot of my time wasted because of their screw-up. The only good thing I'd have to say about the whole situation is that the loss prevention guy, Derek, actually seemed very smart and sympathetic. Oh, and the headlight got fixed. I finally hit the road, although the loss of my antenna had put my radio reception at somewhere around half-capacity, which is just what you want on an eight-hour drive -- one less entertainment option. Thank God for mp3 players. Anyway, I made it, safe and sound. Here's the proof (I'm holding the antenna):