Fixing the car

Saturday was a bit of a weird day. DH had called a tire store in the city a couple days prior to make an appointment to have our car looked at and at a minimum it would need an alignment (though he figured it was more than that). DH also said, twice, we will have to wait there, while the car is being worked on. They said be there at 8am. So, we were up at 6:15, out the door at 7:15 and at the tires store at 8am. Barely could even find a parking place. Check in and go sit with all the other people in the waiting area. There was a guy with a little dog, that kind of looked familiar to me, but I didn't think much of it. About a half hour later a woman walked in and DH says "that's so and so" as she's walking to the guy with the dog. It was the people we bought our house from in town, haha! I had only met them like once or twice and being 50 miles from our home town, didn't realize it was him. So, we sat and talked to them for about an hour, while their tires got switched to snow tires. Our car continued to sit out in the parking lot. They got done and left.

Finally, at 9:45am, after almost 2 hours of sitting there and our car still not even started on, I went up to the desk and politely asked "can you give me an estimate on when my car will get started working on?" He goes and check and says "probably 11:30 or noon". I'm like "but we were told to be here at 8...we're supposed to just sit and wait 3 or 4 hours for you to even start on it?" Then DH walked up and the guy says just a minute and comes back and says "oh, it should be 30-60 minutes before they can start". DH then says, nicely, well, we were told to be here at 8am. If we'd been told you couldn't start on it for 3-4 hours, we would have come later, or went and ran some other errands and come back. The guy pretty much was like who cares. So, DH nicely says "ok, we'll just take our keys back and leave". He tries to say, but you are next - 30-60 minutes. DH says, no thank you. We'll just take our keys.

We drove over the another tire store across the street, but he didn't have a mechanic on duty to do an alignment. He was kind enough to call another tire store and see if they did (they didn't either). We got back out to the car and DH called up Firestone (this is the brand of tires we have anyway) and the gal said if you can be right over here shortly, we can get you right it. It was a couple of miles away and we were there in a few minutes. Before we even got finished checking in with her on her computer they had our car up on the lift and started working on it. We were out of there, completely fixed up 2 hours later! We needed new front brakes, a new tie rod, and the aligment. $600, but now the car drives good again. That is the only repair we have had to do to it in 8 years of owning it (118,000 miles) so cannot complain at all. I was expecting a bill of somewhere between $500 and a $1000, at a minimum, anyawy. And now we know where we will always go for that kind of work needed, right?!

Then we went and grabbed lunch at drive thru and went over to the grocery store and got stocked up for a few more weeks of eating.  We are both just relieved that our car is fixed and it wasn't anything too major or too costly.