After a lovely meeting with a client where we finished the information required to prepare their taxes and I was happily thinking thoughts of making a quick trip to Fayetteville after settling the client’s bill for services rendered, I have to say I was in a lovely mood and looking forward to a relaxing evening where I could wish Mom an early happy birthday.
Apparently the universe felt that was a direct challenge to it’s idea of the order of things.
I hadn’t made it more than ten minutes before the driver information panel in the Traverse started going completely nuts with message after message and the ominous bell rings of impending doom shortly after getting on the motorway.
Oh, I’ve seen *THIS* behaviour before and one look at the temperature gauge that was spiking well above it’s normal 210 degF reading confirmed that those fears were quite justified.
One rejected takeoff and pulling off to the side of the road later and instead of heading to Fayetteville, it was clear I’d be lucky if the Traverse would find her way back into the garage until what had gone awfully wrong could get mended.
The irony that this was in sight of the overpass where a very similar set of messages occurred was not at all lost on me.
Popping the bonnet and seeing liquid spewed all over the relatively new transmission that had been fitted not terribly long ago wasn’t particularly reassuring but Nick’s take was that it looked more like coolant to him when his friend Richard brought him to where my stricken Traverse was sitting.
They end up taking off to head to dinner as there’s not much they can do as I’m ringing up the tow company to arrange for the Traverse to be ferried back home to the garage where I was hoping that it’d be something relatively simple that Nicholas could mend with his superior automotive skills.
That is when I found out about a new innovation in the towing industry that I can’t say I’m a big fan of: having to pay up front before they’d even dispatch the truck. I understand this was a Sunday and I get it that in their line of work they’re occasionally stiffed by their customers but considering that they’d have my number plate as well as my address, I’m thinking that even if I were of a mind to try such a stunt that it’d be short-lived and much more painful financially.
I imagine that they’re more concerned about their drivers handling money as well as being potentially stiffed on the tow but it genuinely makes one wonder what’s the point of being honest if it doesn’t seem to do much for you in the real world.
That’s one area in which this world has gotten decidedly worse. I remember being able to take Mom’s checkbook with me to the Food Lion just up the street and write the check to pay for the groceries in the week’s shopping trip without showing one form of ID at all. They knew who I was and more importantly who I came from and that I’d sooner commit seppuku than dare to defile her good name (or my father’s for that matter) by writing a check that would bounce.
So after shuffling some funds round to make room on the card (which is just so much fun on the side of a busy motorway with the person on the phone that I’m using to do said funds shuffling), I was given a dispatch arrival time of 45 minutes.
It won’t come as much of a surprise that it was closer to 90 minutes before they actually arrived.
It turns out that Nick’s suspicions that it was coolant was correct as the gent driving the recovery lorry found the coolant hose that had sheared off it’s connector that attaches it to the engine block and other than it being attached in a very difficult to access place near the firewall, it should be something that can be plausibly mended in the garage at home.
Good thing that as I really wasn’t in the position to pay the exorbitant labour rates at a commercial garage!
The driver and I ended up passing the time on the trip back to the house with the popular game of “can you guess where I was born?” thanks to a command of the language primarily influenced by the BBC and the Queen’s English. He wasn’t willing to wager the cost of the tow on his guessing prowess but he did put up $10. I did technically win that reduced bet but I was nice and let him keep it…I’m such a soft touch! 🙂
So the Traverse is sitting in the garage awaiting being mended and the saving grace is that Nick is off to Toyota training in Winston-Salem for the week so I don’t actually have to hire a car to schlep Alex and Katie about which is a blessing beyond words.
