Functionally ReTodded

Yesterday was a good day…

After a week of wrangling, hand wringing, swearing, barking at the moon, migraine headaches, poor sleep, and a general crabbiness right beneath the surface, we finally won our battle of car payment chicken.

The best part was when the HSD (head sales dick for those of you that haven’t back-read yet) handed the wife and I each a business card (his obviously) and then headed out to talk with “The Cliche.”

The wife then held the card down in the general direction of urchin 2.0’s poop chute and said “here baby…crap on this, would ya?”

And the second after she said that, Sophia was making fists, turning red in the face and making that “it’s really time to grunt one out” face. She dropped a beauty, and we actually discussed and searched openly for the perfect place to hid said turd catcher in this dude’s office so it wouldn’t be found for a few hours or days.

We then (obviously) won and went home with our new, old, new car, much to the delight of the wife. She was also delighted that we didn’t have to explain to 2.0 why we didn’t have on-board movie viewing capabilities anymore. Hooray.

When we got home, it was a little late to think about starting dinner, so we (at least Lauren and I) got our favorite dinners in a hurry:

She got re-heated spaghetti using Heather’s famous and delicious butter noodle recipe.
(By the way, it’s spaghetti in a bowl with a chunk of butter heated about 45 seconds to hot and then slather with parmesian cheese. I liken it to white trash Alfredo sauce. And you might say that’s too much butter for a child not yet four years old, but considering she ate so much butter earlier that day that it was all in her hair, I think she’ll be okay).

I got Stouffer’s Creamed Chipped Beef over toasted white bread. YUMMY!!! My mom lives near (or near enough to shop at) the Stouffer outlet in North Cackalackee, and they brought us a case of it. A CASE!! She also brought two cases of some lean cuisines that were about six bucks a case. How great is that?!?!

Molly got creamed chipped beef too, but didn’t feel like it, so she heated some noodles and threw on some jarred Alfredo and sun dried tomato sauce. Yummy too. Of course, Lauren ate all of hers and wanted some of mommy’s so she ate that too. What an appetite that child has for pasta.

Then it was upstairs for 1.0’s bath and bed, and then a feeding for 2.0 (which has been a challenge recently). I got her to eat five ounces and then she was asleep on our bed while I finished my workout (4.01 miles in 68 minutes), and when I came out, Sophia was asleep in her crib. Not a first, but it was hoped that it was to be the first night she slept the entire night in her crib.

She slept until the 3am feeding which I took. No muss, no fuss, five ounces in 15 minutes and back to sleep until 6:30am for a quick feed of three ounces and back to sleep immediately. It seems that whatever has been bothering her recently may have passed. HOORAY!!

(and don’t be all judgemental asking “hey, isn’t she three months old? Why is she still sleeping in your room?” The fact is that it makes no difference until they’re about five months old. She sleeps in a bassinette thingy and not with us, so it’s pretty much the same. We didn’t do that out of some wierd “I want her near me” vibe, but simply because it was easier during our recoveries and then at night all the way around).

Hell. Judge us. I don’t care. We’ll raise our lump how we see fit.

Have a good Thursday everyone!!

As I said earlier, the rubber was to meet the road this afternoon in the case of righteous honest consumers (us) vs. Big Behemoth Asshole Car Dealership (them).

I did a little research this afternoon and found out a few things, but the biggest thing was that, errors on the contract or not, we had “taken delivery” of our new car and if push came to shove big time, the dealer could tell us to suck on it and stick us with the whole thing. Our only hope was that we play it cool and hope that they discovered (or at least felt like) that they had stepped on their dicks in this case, if only a little bit.

On the way home, I also got some valuable advice from Unk Todd a.k.a. The B-I-L. He reminded me that actually money on the price isn’t the only compensation you can ask a car dealer for in situations like this. You can also ask for various services to be rendered at no charge.

Knowing that, the wife and I decided the following (time for some algebra):

Our old payments added up to X dollars.
The new payment on my Trailblazer plus the new van were to have netted out to be X+31.00
The payment they came to was X+71.00

We wanted them to make that gap right, or at least dent it a good ways.

My wife did the talking early for fear that I might go off on a Tourette’s jag and just unload on the guy. She did a great job.

The guy’s point was basically that, while they wanted to “make this as right as they could,” we both needed to “acknowledge some responsibility for the situation we found ourselves in.”

At that point, the wife said “This is the fourth car we’ve bought from this dealership, and I took your employee’s word that the VIN information and related prices and dollar figures were correct and accurate. I trusted you for that, and that was clearly a mistake by me.”

ZING!!!!

The guy sort of looked at us, and while meekly defending their position, more or less realized where we were all at right then.

Then I said “Look, we can all take or not take as much blame as we feel like, but at the end of the day, we told your salesman what we wanted to do, he told us that’s what he’d done to arrive at the price we got, and now we sit here with an error of around forty five bucks. Since that’s more than 13% of the monthly payment, we need to see how we can bridge that gap.”

In the leasing / buying world, for the most part, 20 bucks in payment is around a thousand dollars financed. My hope was that, at worst, they’d come off for half of the difference.

He said they’d be willing to take all profit from selling our vehicle (allegedly $785) and apply that to our trade. We sat silently as he calculated.

He said “That brings the total prices back down to X+15.00 and change. How’s that?”

Deadpan as I could offer, I said “That’s almost half, so why don’t you throw in a year’s worth of oil changes and we’ll call it even?”

He wrote the coupon for that on the spot, and when it was all said and done, we walked out at X+$19.00, which is close enough for government work and, in my opinion, showed that they were at least willing to work to make this right.

That doesn’t excuse their bullying tactics, their bait and switching with our old car and all of the other cliche’d car dealer smarmy salesman bullshit tactics. That was all wrong.

It also doesn’t leave us knowing how we are going to fill out their survey. You know, the one they tell you about over and over again that, if you don’t give them perfect scores on, people can and will be fired, killed, maimed, tortured, or forced to eat lead paint, or worse.

As I said, we are ultimately pretty satisfied with the result, but how we got there felt similar to how Andy Duphrane felt escaping from Shawshank when he “crawled to freedom through five-hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can’t even imagine, or maybe I just don’t want too. Five-Hundred yards… that’s the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile.”

But hey, it’s better than having to tell Lauren that we didn’t have the car with the television in it anymore. I’d rather pluck my own eyes out and sell plasma while working nights at IHOP than do that.

I love you punkin. Enjoy your terrible kids shows on DVD in car. With mommy. I can’t listen to them.