Monday Morons: Me

Well, I've gone and done something not to bright. I do this once in a while, cause I feel bad and this temporarily makes me feel a little bit better. Only afterwards I don't feel so good about it, and I feel stupid for ever doing it in the first place. Still, the damage is done, and it does temporarily make me feel better, and it is beginning to look like it just isn't going to matter that much in the long run anyway. My situation is going to change anytime soon, except maybe to get worse.

I'm not feeling really bad yet, just acknowledging that I might have done something stupid.

But that isn't what I want to write about today. What I want to write about today is the car recall.

In the seventies, we had a Pinto. So sometimes car recalls are very scary. And I should have dealt with it right away, but I didn't.

After we stopped working for a certain company in 2001, we bought bought cars. Not new cars, just "new to us" cars, and much newer cars than what we had been driving. They seemed very nice and in good condition, but still, they were both about five years old and had a lot of miles when we got them. About the time all the really bad stuff happened, my husband had to have his vehicle replaced so that he could drive all over the place for his new job. He hadn't even had it for a year when he was in an accident and had to get yet another vehicle. This one was much newer, though it was still purchased used.

And while all this was going on I was having some car trouble, and it kept getting towed to the shop, where they would "fix" it, and then I would get stuck at the mall or something and have it towed again. So I was spending money on repairs, but I just think that they either didn't know what was wrong with the car, or else they were going to repair all the minor stuff, because if it turned out to be something major I just wouldn't be able to keep the car. It just wasn't worth the money to try to fix a now ten year old car.

And I just kept thinking that if I had bought a new car to begin with, that I wouldn't be dealing with this stuff, or at least not for another five years or so.

And so we finally gave up trying to fix my car and I bought a new one. Really, a new one, though it didn't cost quite as much as my husband's slightly used vehicle. This is the only actual new car that either of us has ever bought.

So we have both had our current vehicles for a couple of years now. And we got a letter in the mail from GM telling us of a recall. It didn't quite make sense. Something about a leak and something about the cruise control and the car maybe blowing up. It said that until I could get the car looked at that I should park the car as far as possible from houses and other cars and such.

I left the car right where it was. It wasn't leaking anything, so I think that it was unlikely just blow up while parked on the street. And there really wasn't anyplace else to park it anyway.

I looked up stuff on the Internet about my car, and there was a recall of some sort for the year that I bought the car, though it did not say anything about the cruise control. And it wasn't supposed to blow up just from being parked, only if there was a collision.

Anyway, my car doesn't have cruise control, which was why I was confused with the original letter.

The letter came before Christmas. We were about to go out of town, and I decided that it could wait a while. And then we got back, and I was very busy knitting and doing other Christmas stuff, and I decided that it could wait a bit more. The letter said that there would probably be a long wait anyway, since everyone else who had bought the car would also have to have their cars looked at. I wasn't driving the car much, so I decided it could wait a bit more.

And then I just sort of forgot about it for a while. It could wait til after Christmas and New Year's. Probably everyone else will have gone in for the repairs by then, and I wouldn't have a long wait if I took it in sometime in January.

As you can see, it is now past the middle of January, and I still hadn't done anything about the car. I misplaced the letter about the recall, but I didn't think that they really needed the letter. I finally took the car in Friday and told them I had this letter from GM, but I wasn't even sure that it was my car being recalled. They said that they would look at it anyway.

After getting some numbers from my car and looking on their computer, they did not find any recalls about my car, even though I had seen something about it on the Internet. Since I wasn't actually having and problems with the car, they thanked me for checking and sent me home.

So I'm thinking that I got this letter by mistake, that it was only for cars with cruise control, cause it said something about cruise control in the letter, and my car doesn't have cruise control.

So I've been trying to do a bit of cleaning, and I finally found the letter about the car recall.

It wasn't about my current car. It wasn't about my husband's current vehicle. It was for one of those other vehicles that we don't have now.