Vacation: Fall, 2011 - Day One

Day 1 of my fall vacation was supposed to be a pleasant morning visiting with my friend Laura and going to a few stores to look at specific items.  

It started off okay.  There were a couple of work issues I had to deal with, but they did not take long and they were not stressful.  Laura came over and I showed her a video to help her with odd angle binding and then we were preparing to leave when my cell phone rang.  It was my oldest.  He never calls, so I told Laura I had to pick up.

He started the conversation off with something like "So what do you do when someone wants to handle something without going through insurance."  I was a little confused at first, but then I said "Whoa, go back and start this again."  

He then explained he was in his apartment when the campus police called him out to the parking lot because someone had hit his car.  They should have said slammed his car.  When he went outside his car, which had been parked straight into a single parking space was sitting diagonal across two parking spaces.  The right tail light was just a bulb, and the right back door had part of the fender over it so that  the door no longer opened. The campus police made sure he was given all the insurance information and filed a report on the incident. He then was left to deal with the girl that hit his car.

She is an international student that was driving a friend's car.  She did not want us to file insurance she wanted to pay everything herself.  I told my son to bring the car up to my favorite body shop immediately, and not to agree to anything.

Before he was able to get to the body shop, a man called and left him a message that he should immediately come to some other shop to work it out with the girl and that if my son did not do so there could be harm.  (I considered that to be a threat, which put me in Mama Bear mode.)

I met him at the body shop and we received a preliminary estimate of $1,700, that did not include fixing the door issue because they would have to get it up to look at the frame, and that we were probably looking at two weeks without a car due to the holiday.  I told my son we were filing an insurance claim as he would  need a rental car to get to work and back.

My son called the girl and told her he was filing insurance, and she became very upset.  Now my son is really a nice guy, I mean really nice, so he was being really polite and telling her that he would see what he could do, etc., and I am standing there wanting to smack someone. 

I finally took the phone from my son and told the girl that she was talking to the wrong person.  I explained that my son did not own the car, I did, he was just a licensed driver.  I told her she would be dealing with me for the rest of the day.  She said she would have to call me back.  I told her I was going to take my son to lunch and she had 30 minutes.

She called again after we arrive at lunch and begged me not to file insurance.  I asked her if she had $5,000.00.  She said "No."  I asked her if she had $4,000.00.  She said "No."  I kept asking her until I got to the $1,700.00 and again she said "No."  I told her I was calling the insurance, but that I would wait for ten minutes while she called her friend and explained what had happened.  She called back in about five minutes and said to call the insurance.  (Like I wasn't going to do that any way.)

We went back to the house and my son filed a claim on their insurance, and then the rest of the afternoon was spent getting him a rental car and taking care of other paperwork.  

I did manage to go get another Christmas tree, have a very nice dinner with Loni and finish the Tree Farm quilt so it wasn't a horrible day, it just wasn't how I wanted to spend the first day of vacation.