April 06, 2008
I Guess I Don't Exist
I made an appt. last Thursday to bring my car in for an oil change. I made it online and picked the first time slot available: 7:00am. I figured that I could get the car in, get the oil changed and get to work on time. I'm normally not up that early and worried about whether I would be able to function properly. But, they're supposed to have Starbucks coffee available for people who wait for their cars to be serviced. I sleep drive to the service area and get there at 6:58am. I pull up to the very front of the service bay. I am the first car for the day. I walk in to the counter and the nice gentleman verifies my appt. He also noted that the rear brake pads were due for replacement and my car was also due for some 40,000 work in the fuel injectors. (I am a little late for this as the odometer is showing 43,000.) I was all ready to have them do everything on that day when I realized I had left my checkbook at home. I counted the cash in my wallet and realized that I wouldn't be able to do both the brakes and the fuel injectors. So, I opted for the brakes and scheduled another appt, for Tuesday, April 8th at 7:00am. Went to sit down and noticed that there was no Starbucks around. Just one pot that said, "House Blend". House Blend? Volkswagen dealers have house blends? I also noted that the employees were helping themselves to the pot. Ummmm.... Won't it run out? I managed to get a cup before it ran out. I didn't need to worry though. Around 8:00am, the place started waking up and someone brought in a couple of other pots. Those were the Starbucks blends. So, it was actually quite nice, kicking back, reading the paper and sipping coffee. I hadn't been able to do that in about 5 years, since I started working. They had a TV going in there too. It was an interesting History Channel show about the Titanic. An expedition went to the location in 2005 to see if they could find her hull. I got caught up in that, and would read the paper during commercial breaks. Pretty soon, the waiting room started to fill up with customers and the number of available seats was disappearing. Which would probably explain why the vagrant, who wandered in off the streets, chose to sit right next to me. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as he walked into the place. I thought at first he was another customer getting work done on their car. But, his clothes were filthy and he was holding a bag of trash. He walked over to the large stack of Los Angeles Times newspapers that were placed on a table for the customers. I thought, for a second, that maybe he was going to grab the whole stack for their recycle value. But, he just grabbed one off the top and sat next to me. He seemed harmless, he just wanted to read the paper. After a few minutes, he grabbed a cup of coffee and left. Soon after, my car was ready.
So, why the title on this entry? After all that, I got a very strange e-mail from Pacific Volkswagen.
Boy, talk about making me feel irrelevant. I was there! He confirmed the appt. I scheduled yet another one! I tried to e-mail her back, telling her that I did show up, but the e-mail bounced back to me. It was from the server for Pacfic Volkswagen telling me that the e-mail address didn't exist in their system. *sigh*
Posted by Valkyre at April 6, 2008 01:07 PM