Monday, August 13th, 2012
I have not written until now simply because there was not much to tell. Everyday was more of the same. WE would wake up in that small room and then we would spend our time applying for jobs and watching the 15 channels the tv in the room got. Oh yeah and 5 of them were news. That was our life for awhile. Wake up, apply, go back to sleep and do it again.
We had recently gotten into the habit of going to Burger King to play the Family Food game. Basically there are game pieces on cups and frypods that give you the chance to win free Burger King items and collect pieces toward a larger prize. Sort of like the Monopoly game that McDonalds puts on. I think when we would go to Burger King, I would embarrass Di a little bit. I was not above searching garbage bins for unused and discarded game pieces. I ended up winning a bunch of free items that way as well, but Di always laughed at me.
At any rate, we were going to have lunch at BK and I was going to sift through the garbage again. It was sort of going to be our anniversary meal. Seven months today. Okay it wasn’t really a anniversary meal, but still.
We get out to the car, I unlock it. I stared in disbelief. It was one of those moments that you always read about where you rub your eyes because your mind will simply not let you see the reality. The passenger window had been smashed into tiny pieces inside the car. The center console and glove compartment ripped open. The only thing stolen were a few bills, a checkbook, and Di’s camera. Jokes on them though because it was a European style camera that needs a special adapter to charge and it was about dead.
Up until this point, Sacramento had not been great to us. The people are terrible drivers, and no matter where we went the customer service was lack luster. But this was kind of the last straw.
We went to the front office and I said I wanted to speak with a manager and file a complaint because our car had been broken into. I was met with a dispassionate, disinterested response. Worse yet, they knew about it and did not tell us. I shit you not. I told her what happened and she said “yeah we saw that”. Well if you saw it, why didn’t you say anything. This time I actually said what I was thinking. The response was “we didn ‘t know who the car belonged to.” Here’s the kicker, we filled out an information sheet on the car the day we checked in to be filed with them and they still did not know. But even more illogical than that is that the car has Minnesota license plates and I am near certain we were the only ones from Minnesota there. I would find out later why they did not know.
So instead of spending the day with a delicious Whopper in my hands, the wife and I were forced to do damage control. She filed a police report while I filed an insurance claim and called the bank. We know nothing will be done about it. I had to place a stop payment on 20 checks. If you have ever had to do that before, you know it is not cheap and not free. This is perhaps the only silver lining in the whole ordeal, Affinity Plus. Although it is strictly a Minnesota bank, I had decided to stay with the, because I have always been treated well. Turns out that there are points associated with your account and I had roughly 1300. It cost me half of those points to place the stop payments. No biggie.
Getting this fixed was another story entirely. The glass is designed very smartly to break into pieces the size of a bead and those pieces are designed to not be sharp should somebody break it. Picking up the large parts was no problem but shards of the glass would break loose. Before I was even a quarter of the way finished picking glass out of the car, my hands were bloody. Why not wear gloves? Great idea. Except that we left home with nothing besides what was in the car and gloves was not one of those things. We ended up going to a nearby gas station to vacuum the glass out. I felt a little bad filling their vacuum with so much glass, but I quickly got over it. We covered a once window with cardboard and magic duct tape. It had not rained since we arrived in Sacramento, in fact they were experiencing a drought. But I had a feeling that would change.
We made an appointment to get the car fixed. It would have been okay if the assholes would have just broken the glass. That I could live with. But the frame that holds the glass was bent and the weather stripping damaged. We brought the car in to a place where my insurance company was waiting. The person at the auto repair shop gave us a ride back. He tried to make small talk and seem friendly, but what he had to say just pissed me off.
He told us that Sacramento had put a lot of money into the Natomas area (the area we were staying) but that there was still crime. And that criminals are not going to damage their own people stuff so they look for nicer cars and the out of state license plates. Well screw you. Him saying that, and the fact that he was probably right, was basically saying to me that “We don’t want you here”.
That night we got a quote. $500! And the glass was free because I have a $0 deductible for that. At this point Di and I do not have money for a rental so we assumed to just stay in the room until the repairs were done and grab a cab to the repair shop.
The day came to pick it up and we got a quote for a cab. $25! To a boy from MN that always had a ride and rarely rode in cabs, that was a lot. We were only going 6 miles. Long story short, we hoofed it. It was a hot day and I was dehydrated by the time I made it there (I had lost Di to a much cooler feeling Subway a few blocks back).
Di and I were struggling with whether or not to come back. And there were a lot of reasons to stay and a lot of reasons to go home. But this was perhaps the last straw.