CAA and J.A. Towing Continue to Fail

Well, CAA is ducking responsibility for the damage that their agents J.A. Towing have done to my van. They are saying that J.A. Towing will be the ones to deal with me. CAA passed along my complaints to their agents, J.A. Towing and told me that J.A. Towing would be contacting me soon.

Yesterday, (the damage was done on April 13), J.A. Towing contacted me. Jorge arranged to come out tonight at 7 to look at the damage to the car.

By 8, I had heard nothing. I called J.A. Towing. Jorge was not available, but they would pass on a message. At 8:15, Mindy from the office called. Jorge is on a tow out of town and would call me when he got back into town.

It's now after 10:00 and I've turned my phone off and will be going off to bed soon.

CAA seems to keep failing to meet their responsibilities. I emailed them a short while ago and told them that I can't keep waiting to get the wiring that was damaged fixed. I will call my mechanic tomorrow and arrange a time for them to fix the wiring next week. I expect CAA to pay for the repair and the rental car while the van is in the shop.

I would like compensation for cleaning the car of the grease prints the tow truck driver left all over the quarter panel, for the damage to the rocker panel and for the frustration and aggravation that this whole experience has caused.

Unless, a resolution that meets my requirements is met, I will be filing a complaint with the BBB and I also will not be renewing my membership of 12 years with the CAA.

I'm Not Too Happy With CAA

Back two Sundays ago when the van broke down while I was shopping, I called CAA to have it towed up to my mechanic. For you folks not in Canada, CAA is the Canadian Automotive Association. It's the Canadian affiliate of AAA. CAA actually operates some tow trucks of their own, but most of the time the truck that shows up is a CAA affiliate. An independent contractor who is able to brand his truck with the CAA logo and is paid by CAA for the towing that he does for them.

This time the truck was operated by J.A. Towing. The driver seemed to know what he was doing and quickly had me hooked up and off to the other end of town to my mechanics' shop.

Once we got to the shop, the mechanic (who was working on a Sunday!) told the tow truck driver where to drop my van. I started talking to Micheal about what had happened and after 5 minutes or so, he asked "What is he doing?"

Looking out into the parking lot, we could see that the driver had set the van down in the middle of the parking lot and was attempting to hook up to it again. Micheal pointed out that the driver had crushed the rocker panel under the passenger side door of the van. !!! Not sure how the hell he did that! A modern tow truck uses a wheel lift system. A hydraulic t-lift extends from the back of the tow truck. Locking bars are clamped to the front wheels and the vehicle to be towed is lifted up into towing position.

Somehow the driver had gotten the t-lift behind the front wheels of the van and had tried lifting the van with the t-lift under the floorboards of the van!



After a lot of futzing around the tow truck driver got the t-lift out and in front of the tires again, locked on to the wheels and got the van parked where the mechanic had originally asked. He said to call CAA and report the damage and they would take care of everything. He also diminished the severity of the damage done by commenting on the rusted condition of the van.


While there was certainly under body rust, the rocker panels on the passenger side were still intact, even if there was rust underneath. (Our old parking spot in the parking garage always seemed to have a puddle of water under the driver's side of the van and the driver side rocker panels are in worse shape).



He also covered most of the front quarter panel with heavy greasy hand prints. Unlike, every other CAA tow I've gotten, he did not required me to show my CAA card or sign any paperwork, just jumped in the truck and took off. Another CAA tow truck driver at the mechanics (who drove for a different company) confirmed that CAA would take care of the damage. He did recommend that I contact CAA as soon as I got home.

I took his advice and call CAA within an hour of getting home and reported what had happened. The operator told me that a supervisor would contact me within 48 hours with the results of their investigation.

It's not 8 days later. I've called a number of times and have not heard anything from J.K., supervisor assigned to my case. Each time I speak to an operator, I'm told that this should of been resolved withing th 48 hours. It might be a good thing that it wasn't resolved right away because I've had a couple of problems surface.

I've discovered that the automatic lock for the back door of the van no longer works. As well, the door ajar light is on constantly now. It would certainly seem that the tow truck driver did more damage than was originally obvious. It seems that he severed wiring that runs along the body of the passenger side of the van to the rear.

I've been a happy member of CAA since 1996. Twelve years. I have never had this kind of poor service with a tow or with the management. I keep looking at the membership renewal in front of me and wondering if I am going to renew for another year.

Good News About the Van and Some Bad News

I got the call shortly before the end of the work day. Wayne, my mechanic called to say that the van had been fixed. It turns out that it was the front axle. I park in an underground parking garage and apparently this is quite bad for cars due to the dampness accelerating rusting. Advice for people parking in underground garages from my mechanic. Oil coat the underside of the car and wash weekly during the winter. The dampness, salt and above freezing temperatures means that the salt is actively rusting the car when it is parked. Someone who parks outside or in an unheated garage won't have the same problem because it does not get warm enough for the salt to actively rust the car. At least that is my understanding.

What happened is that the axle had rusted so badly that it broke under the stress. Fortunately, the repair came to just under $300. Micheal, the mechanic who worked on the car say that the underside of the van is badly rusted and I might only get a year out of the body of the van.

This is good, because we can make a plan to be in a good position in a year to replace the van. Most of the tax returns are going into the savings account under the car replacement heading. The $257 extra in our biweekly pays that was going towards extra debt payments will also be going in to the car replacement fund. This should mean that we will have $7,000 to $9,000 saved up in a year to replace the van. Even if it does die earlier we will have a very good down payment if necessary.

We will take a little longer to get out of debt, but we'll be able to afford to replace the car!

I hate to think what would of happened six months ago!

Taxes and Cars

Well we filed our taxes about two weeks ago. I had been planning to use Studio Tax, a free tax program to do our taxes, but a friend offered to do them and efile them for us. We took him up on his generous offer and today we got our cheques in the mail. Two nice fat, refund cheques.

Good thing too. Yesterday, Sunday while out grocery shopping, something in the drive train of the Chevy Venture failed. Big time. In the grocery parking lot, it failed with a horrible snap and grinding noise. While in gear the van would no longer move and while in park it would still move.

CAA towed it up to my mechanic who was open and working on a Sunday. Actually, it's a father and son operation and the father is in Florida. Since there's only one guy in the shop, of course it has got completely crazy busy. He hasn't had a chance to look at it but did say that if it was the transmission, a used replacement would be $2,200 to $2,800. I'm not willing to put that kind of money into a 1997 vehicle. If the repairs are going to be $1,000, we'll get it fixed, otherwise we will have to find a new vehicle. Well, a used vehicle. Maybe an older, used vehicle.

This would of been easier in a year or two, but we're in a way better spot than we would of been six months ago.

A number of friends of ours have Ford Focus Wagons and they all seem pretty happy with them. My quick check online tonight seems to indicate that 3 -4 year old models run $10,000 to $14,000. More than we can afford right now. We still have $23,000 in debt and I don't want to put that up more.

Up here in Canada, car prices seem higher than in the states for cars. The $3,000 - $4,000 that we can put towards the car will not buy too much. I'll be putting feelers out to all the people I know to see if anyone has a decent cheap car for sale.

Ah well. Time to sleep on this. Good night.

Exercising Willpower Strengthens It

Wow. Apparently you can exercise your willpower, just like a muscle, and strengthen it over time. The New York Times has an article on willpower that says two interesting things.

The article is called Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Wallet. The authors are Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton. Together they have also written a book called “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

The first point they make is that apparently you use up blood sugar when you use willpower. By choosing not to eat that donut, you actually use up some of your blood sugar. Their experiment showed that exerting willpower repeatedly became harder over a short period of time. Your body begins to deplete the available blood sugar and it becomes harder to maintain your willpower.

The second point is that your brain appears to become more efficient at using blood sugar while exercising willpower. While in the short term, willpower gets harder, over extended periods of time using willpower you are more able to continue exerting willpower. Practicing exerting willpower makes it easier to exert willpower. Just like exercising a muscle.

The article suggests that this is why it is initially hard to diet and save money at the same time. Experiments indicate that refreshing the bodies blood sugar between bouts of exerting willpower makes it more likely that you will be successful with the subsequent tests of your willpower. After your diet salad for lunch if you drink some lemonade, you will be less likely to overspend when clothes shopping.

Also, continuing your frugal spending habits will make it easier to push away from the dinner table without having that second helping because you will have trained your willpower.

Interesting article, check it out.

I wonder how much of a bonus on my willpower check I get for eating a Snickers bar?