Car Hell Part...Oh...Ninety Billion
4/22/1

There are so many lame ways to start this story and I hate every one of them.

Bitterness, resentfulness, or just plain bad luck? Yes.

So, ask me where my car is.

�Hey, where is your car?�

My car is on the elevated portion of I-565 with its hazard lights gradually getting dimmer and dimmer. Actually, that isn�t the whole truth. My car minus the rear left wheel is on the elevated portion of 565. The rear left wheel is in the trunk of Aisai's mom�s Camry in our garage.

But let me tell this tale chronologically:

Aisai and I had gone on a nice Sunday afternoon drive looking at land in northeast Madison County. On our way back home, at around 3:15 in the afternoon, we were headed west on Interstate 565. The cruise control was on 65 mph, the air conditioner was on, and the stereo was playing at a moderate volume.

Then the handling of the car changed. To me, it felt like a blowout. The car had stalled so I couldn�t get the full brakes. First I decided that I�d go and put the car on the left side of the elevated portion, but realized that part of my car would be in the 65 mph traffic, so I pulled it to the right and we eventually came to a stop. I turned to Aisai and said �We had a blowout�.

That�s my version. Aisai saw something different. She adds the point that after the car sunk down some and we started scraping, she looked out the left side window and saw a tire boucing at the level of the window.

I missed that part, but after I got out of the car and saw I had no wheel. I caught on quickly.

The tire was gone, the aluminum wheel was gone, and the brake drum was gone. We slid 600 feet or more on some kind of suspension linkage.

I call Tom�s house and get Teri. I call Tom�s cell and he says he�ll be there right after he puts away the groceries he�s in the middle of driving on the way home. While I made this call, Aisai called her mom. Then Aisai called the insurance company.

Aisai handed off her phone to me and I gave the information to the insurance people and Tom showed up. Someone had to stay for the tow truck, and that would be me. Aisai really didn�t like the fact that she was on a bridge about four stories above the ground with cars and semis and whatnot zipping by at 65 miles per hour, so she went with Tom to get the tire.

I was on hold. I had told the insurance dude that the left rear tire was missing, the color of my car, my zip code, and some other information. I was on hold, and Aisai's cell phone battery made it�s death sound. It�s a Mitsubishi G310. Great sound quality, but since I�m used to Nokia, it�s alien technology to me. It also makes a little �I�m Dead� song. Dee-duh-doh-bluh!

Using the last dregs of battery life in Aisai's phone, I called my cell phone which I�d given to Aisai. I told her quickly that her cell phone was dead and I needed mine.

Shortly thereafter, Tom�s van showed up and Aisai and I changed phones.

Only then did it occur to me that I needed to call 911 and have the police come out and do an accident report. I called 911 and they said they�d send someone out.

Before the police arrived, a tow truck showed up. They were from Athens, Alabama. I was surprised they had gotten to my location in only 45 minutes. However, they had the wrong kind of truck. I had a missing rear wheel and front wheel drive. You couldn�t lift either end of my car and drag it because you�d burn up the transmission.

They said that I needed to pay them and �If I were you, I�d make [company name] reimburse you [garbage, garbage, lie lie lie].� And they charged $75 on my Amex Blue.

I called the insurance again and told them that the wrong kind of truck came. The fellow from the pirate towing company kept trying to talk to me while I was on the phone.

It�s rather hard to talk to someone on the phone in the first place when you have Semi trucks and cars zipping past you and you�re in the middle of, essentially, a bridge. Having some crook mouth at you is even more irritating.

The crooks left and the insurance told me they would call me back to let me know what was going on.

The nice policeman arrived.

Let me get the timeline down. The wreck was a 3:15 and the first tow truck showed up at around 4:20 and the police showed up at around five.

Technically, to the police, it wasn�t an accident. If I�d hit the wall, it would have been, or if my tire had hit someone, that would count too.

�Oh, and where is the tire?�

Aisai and Tom had found my tire in the middle of the Washington Street and I-565 junction.

He filled out the form and then the second tow truck, a flatbed, showed up. The policeman said, �I just came from his house�. I didn�t ask, but later found out that the call that my cop was on before was a report at this tow man�s residence where someone had run their car through his fence.

The second tow man was an honest man. He said that he could get my car up on his flatbed easily, but getting it off would trash the bottom of the car and possibly the fiberglass on the rear left. He suggested that I call the Toyota place in the morning, as it is a preferred place of my insurance company, and let them take care of it from beginning to end.

I called the insurance people and told them the new plan. The tow man talked to the gal. The gal allegedly told the tow man to have me call Toyota in the morning and let them take care of the whole thing. The gal hung up on the tow man when he was saying that he�d hand my phone back to me. He cursed at her in her absence.

He also cursed when he saw what I had done with the car. �You did good,� he said. �You did [curse] good. Real good.�

Aisai told me that when she saw the tire flying behind us, she expected the car to fly around or start flipping. I honestly just thought I had a blowout. But I will admit that I did do much better than I thought I ever could.

I really thought the car would try to get more out of control if it lost a tire. Granted, it did pull to the left, but the greatest challenge was that I had no brakes since the engine had cut.

Hmm, wasn�t that why I had my last wreck.

The policeman and the second tow man both indicated that I was out the $75 for the first tow truck. They actually quizzed me to make sure they understood correctly. Yes, they came out and didn�t do anything. Yes, I gave them my credit card info and actually have a receipt. The second tow man said that my insurance always gives out good information and that the instructions on this were specifically for a flatbed wrecker truck.

Aisai and her mom showed up in the Camry and picked me and all my stuff up out of my car. The nice policeman stayed with me until they showed up. When we were driving away, it was 5:58 p.m. Aisai's mom let us borrow the Camry since we need to do stuff tomorrow. I hope that they can fix the car quickly so I don�t have to get another rental. Aisai is fretting that the insurance won�t cover this.

So, as I write this, that is where it stands. I think the comprehensive covers this. The second tow man said that the bearing spindle snapping, for that is what happened, is a factory defect type thing. There is really no way that the people who fixed the car after my last wreck could have known. I will have to call Toyota and meet them at the car. The tow man thought that it would be simplest if they just fixed it in place and got another wheel on there and then took it to the shop. I think that�s a bit of a challenge due to the situation.

What will the situation be like tomorrow when I meet them at the car? Well, more people work in Huntsville than live in Huntsville. I-565 is the main east/west road in the city. If you live out toward Gurley or Scottsboro and work anywhere in Huntsville, or are headed to Huntsville International Airport, then you�ll be there. Or, worse yet, if you are a semi and you are headed to the intermodal station at the airport, and you are east of the city, then that is the way you�ll get there.

It will be a lame, lame thing.

At least I changed the deductible to $250 and not $500 like this last time. But if this is comprehensive, as I suspect, then there is no deductible.

Oh, and I�m out $75 to the crooks. But Aisai will have a field day with the Decatur Chamber of Commerce, the Better Business Bureau, our insurance company, and she�ll stop payment on the card. She�s pretty gung ho when it comes to money. Hey, maybe we will get reimbursed.

Yeah, right.