Tuesday, September 27, 2005

The shit keeps piling up

*********Disclaimer************
Be forewarned that I am very pissed at the moment so there will be an overabundance of "F" bombs in this post. If this type of language offends you I'll pretend to be sorry. But right now I'm in to bad of a mood to give a Fuck!!!!!

So this turned out to be a really fucked up day. When I changed the oil in my wifes Explorer on Sun. I noticed antifreeze all over the underside of the engine. I thought well ok, it's probably just a worn out freeze plug. So I had my wife take her truck to the shop this morning. She calls me up crying so bad that I can barely understand what she is saying. It turns out that what I thought was a minor problem turned into a major fucking money dump. It has a blown head gasket, a hole in the radiator, and a pinhole leak in 2 different radiator hoses.
(Will this fucking day ever end. I started this at about 6pm. It is now 8pm. I stopped for dinner and dishes. It just keeps going just like the Energizer Bunny.)
So I get the info from her and ask how much it will cost. She says she will call back when they get an estimate. Now I'm going to say this now- I trust my mechanic very much. We have been going to him for almost 4 years now. He is a good guy and has been trying to get us to sell this vehicle for 3 years now. He treats us very good. He gives us all the parts we buy at his cost. No mark up. If a job takes 6 hours to do he only charges 3.5-4 hours. Every time I go to him I bring him a 36 pack of beer when the job is done. He has even offered to take me fishing on his boat. (he should do that I helped him buy the boat with all the business I send him through my cars and friends that I send his way).
Anyways she calls me back 45 minutes later and I can't understand a single word she is saying. Finally she just tells me to go to the shop after work. That gets me all worked up. Not angry but worried. So by the time I came back to my yard at lunch time I was not in a good mood. So my Leadworker starts telling me stuff that my supervisor has said during the day before he left early to go home. He really got me pissed. I had an idea yesterday and my boss turned it down for no reason. It would have made our job easier. He said no. So today he tells us to do what I suggested yesterday but in a different way. I wanted to take some stuff out of a dump truck by dumping it into the bucket of a front end loader. Then dump the bucket into the dumpster. He said NO! Today he tells us to take the stuff from the dumptruck and put it into the dumpster by using shovels. It will save time he says. Oh My Fucking God! My way would have taken 3 minutes tops. He wants us to shovel this stuff out by hand. Taking roughly 30 minutes. I told my leadworker that my boss was smoking crack and he needed to go fuck himself. To which he replied you can't say stuff like that around me (Because technically he needs to report me for it as workplace violence. Not because he agrees with the boss which he don't). I said watch me J____ is on crack and needs to go fuck himself. Nothing came out of it. The job did not get done as my leadworker made up another job for us instead.
So I got off work and went to the shop. I was told that I really need to sell that vehicle now. As a rough estimate it will cost between 1500 and 2000. That is without reworking the heads. If they are warped it will go up more. I just love how dependent we have become on cars now.
After leaving the shop I come home and my wife is apologizing to me like she did something wrong. (she still is and I don't know why). I told her its not her fault. The truck is just a piece of shit. We bought it in July of 2001. In Dec we put a new tranny in it for 3000. 1 year later the heater core goes out. 700. 6 months later the head gasket goes out. 900. 1 year later the other tranny goes out. Another 3000. Then last summer we had starting problems the whole summer. The shop worked on it all summer but could not find the problem. Didn't charge us for any of the work. the whole summer until they were sure it was fixed. Finally they found the problem. The Anti-theft relay was bad. It would cost 700 to replace it or they would bypass it for a case of beer. They were trying to diagnose the problem for over 80 hours and only charged me a case of beer. The problem would go away as soon as we would get it to the shop. And stay away for 2 weeks at a time. Finally the shop would start coming to us where ever we were broke down at. That's how they found the problem.
Any how I went to the chevy dealer in town to talk to them. Unfortunately my wife talked to a friend that works there and told them the problem with the vehicle. Good Bye trade in. So I'm went to the Dodge dealer and talked to him. I went out with the sole purpose of getting options. Nothing more. I came home talked to my wife and she got pissed at me because she hates Dodge. I told her that we are NOT in a position to be picky. We need to take what we can get. They have a Neon that is 1 year old with 10k miles on it that we might be able to afford. But I was just getting options. She then got upset with me about the fact that she only wants to look at Chevy's or Saturns. Again I told her that we aren't in a position to be choosey. She went on more about the issue so I told her I needed to walk away. We were both getting angry and I didn't want to fight. So I went to my comfort zone. The Blogs.
After dinner we talked a little more but the kids kept interrupting. She is still crying and is very upset. I'm feeling like failure for not being able to keep us in a situation where we have a decent car. To top it all off we can't afford to fix the car. And we can't afford to buy a new one. The Explorer will be paid off as soon as we sign papers on the house. (that's another thing. I called the lady we have been dealing with today to see how the loan is coming along. She said that the lending company is behind on the paper work and it will be at least another week. It has already been 2 weeks since the lender received the papers from us. So my dad wants me to call the lady and get the appraisal from her and tell her that if we don't have papers to sign by Fri. night we will find someone else. I feel wrong for doing that so I haven't done it yet.) Back to the car. We will be paying it off when we buy the house. When we close escrow my wife and I will receive a check for 25000 to pay off student loans, credit cards, and the Explorer. With maybe 1000 left over. We are paying all this off just so we can manage to make the house payments. Where did I go wrong? Actually I think I have a problem that I read about on Space of Dysfunction. We tried to keep up with the Jones's and we have been living outside our means for years and it is starting to bite us in the ass now.
So that is my fucked up day. I'm still pissed at the way things are going in life. I'm waiting for my wife to get our youngest to sleep and I'm going to put her in the bath tub. And taking some advice from Venting Houswife I'm going to put some candles around the tub, let my wife soak for a while then I'm going to wash her off and got to bed. Unfortunately we have no bubble bath for her soak in. I just want this day to end.

3 comments:

Frustrated said...

I'm really sorry that you had such a shitty day. If you'd like to vent more I'll be online to listen. Hope things get better for you. Hang in there. My thoughts are with you.

Lizzie said...

I sure can empathize. All we've done, over the last two months, is replace brakes and tires in all of our cars. My son just called from college to tell us that there is a problem with car #4. Our mechanic asked us what we were doing for food this month!! Top Ramen Baby.

DH said...

I'm all too familiar with the "Keeping Up With The Joneses" scenario...we're completely guilty of that.

Best of luck with everything!