This took time. This took effort. Wasted time and effort, of course, since the first thing they did was cut off the one electronic piece that would actually let them start the car, but still. That's like beating a dead horse.
Anyway, to continue from where I left off last, the car is undriveable (of course) even with its key. I texted my coworkers on Friday afternoon to make sure that the car was still there before I went to work, and they confirmed that it was -- so the first thing I did when I got to work on Friday was schedule it to be towed back home to our apartment parking lot. The scheduling of this was perfectly fine -- AAA allows you to do it online, type in details of what you need, etc etc, and they give you a timeframe estimate there on the website once you schedule it. That was easy; however, getting the car out of that lot was, well, not.
I'll remind you that the one part of the car that makes it able to do anything was completely destroyed. Without being able to even turn it on, I can't shift it out of park. It was parked with its nose up against a treeline, so it's not like the truck could've gotten up in front of it to just lift it and pull it out. It had to be towed from behind, which is a much harder job that requires the car to be lifted and an extra set of roller wheels attached on each side in the front in order to get it out of there. Daisy thought I was being irrational by having it towed home immediately after I got to work, but the fact is that I get to work at 3, and we only have daylight until 5-ish. Not only would the tow driver need to be able to see to get the car out of there, but I wasn't leaving it there after dark again so that the thugs could possibly come back and try to get it a third time. No, I was getting that car home safely ASAP, and at that moment I didn't care who it inconvenienced (read: Daisy, who had to be awake early that afternoon to not only get me to work, but to tell the tow driver a space to put it in once it got home). So no, at that time I didn't particularly care -- if the thugs came back a third time for it, I'm sure they would've found a way to get it out of there even if they had to tow it themselves. The damage on it already isn't covered by insurance, and neither is theft -- even if it can't be fixed, if it's actually successfully stolen, I can't even sell it and get something out of it. So yeah, pardon my "irrationality."
The car was towed home safely and put back into our apartment parking lot. I thanked the tow guy profusely, and he told me that he didn't think the damage looked incredibly bad -- it looked pretty fixable. Once it was home, Daisy took the pictures of it, one of which I shared above, in order to get them sent off to a shop who specializes in ignitions and steering columns here in Omaha. We've been told by multiple sources that the mechanic there is the best in town for that stuff, both on quality of work and price. We've yet to hear back from him yet; however, I have looked up replacement parts for the car to have an idea of how much these things would be to replace outright -- from U-Pull-it Omaha's site a new steering column with airbag is $69, without airbag $49. An ignition switch is $12. A new steering wheel, if the mechanics in mine is too damaged to use, is $11 or something like that. All of that is do-able, even with whatever labor costs the mechanic may charge. It may suck, but it's do-able. Better than that, all of the parts appear to be in stock.
Right now we just appear to be in a holding pattern more than anything else; as we've not heard back from the mechanic yet, Daisy is going to call him this afternoon once I go to work to see what he says. And since the car is "safe" at home, I'm not too concerned about it right now. I say "safe" because, as you'll recall, it was also broken into once here in our parking lot. Not that there's anything left in it now to take out of it, of course, unless a thief wanted half a bottle of radiator stop-leak or a two-year old air freshener tree hanging off my rearview mirror, I mean. I took the insurance card and registration out of it and brought it back upstairs for the time being as well, because not only was I relieved that it was still there, but because one can never be too safe.
As an aside, when I had my car towed home, the other car the thieves had stolen (and left there running with a screwdriver in the ignition) was still in the lot next to mine, though it was no longer running at the time. I didn't get a good look at it, honestly. It was a red, mid-90s SUV like a Blazer or Jimmy or something. I don't know if the cops turned it off when Daisy gave her report, or if it just ran out of gas in the hours between -- but it was still there when Daisy went to the gas station the next night, and when she got back twenty minutes later it was gone. So, it appears the thieves did come back to get it. No tow truck would've picked it up at 1AM, and Daisy says she was only gone for 20 minutes. Because of this, she apologized for snapping at me over my "irrationality" earlier, and told me she knew I'd feel vindicated. Ironically, the one thing I did notice about that car next to mine is that it had two AAA stickers on the back glass, one on each side.
With nothing else that can be done for the moment (and no more money to afford anything else repairs-wise until after we get paid on Black Friday, paying rent and bills first), we wait. We go about our lives as per the usual. Despite the stress caused by this bullshit, I've actually been in a decent mood all week (for the most part). Last night we went to see Big Hero 6 and did a little Christmas shopping -- and to some extent, it was therapeutic. Our work schedules this week are altered from the usual, of course, due to Thanksgiving -- one of only five or six days per year that our business actually closes down -- and I get Thursday off. We all have to clock out before midnight on Wednesday night, to be honest with you, as it'll screw up the time system otherwise. Most of us will be working on Black Friday, including Daisy and myself, on what is historically one of the craziest days for the year or the most silent. It's a flip of the coin, really. If a major retailer's systems go down on Friday? Oh, we're boned. Otherwise? Crickets.
"Here's the thing," I told one of our coworkers on Saturday, "if it's busy, good; we'll be there, we'll be working, it'll be a normal Friday afternoon. If it's quiet? Well, then we're there and we'll get paid to get a reprieve from the normal Friday onslaught of craziness. Either way, there's only going to be so much we can do anyhow on a holiday weekend with most of the workforce being gone."
If Saturday (and, from what I heard, Sunday) is any indication, it's going to be a fairly quiet week in the office if only because of the holiday. My boss is out of the office on vacation through the beginning of the month, which puts Daisy as the next in line on the chain of command most of the nights she's there working.
The cold has let up, at least a little bit; it was probably in the low 60s on Saturday, and though it's been cold and windy since, it's not so brutal that you're frozen to the bone. Tonight, however, we're supposed to get a rain-to-snow mix that's going to hit the east coast on Thursday, including back home in West Virginia, so I'm waiting to see what's going to happen there. I've been getting to and from work with Daisy's help as well as with the occasional ride there or ride home from a few coworkers when they offer. It's going to remain that way, sadly, until I get a vehicle again that I can drive myself -- whether that be my car or another, newer car. We'd originally planned to start looking for a newer vehicle for me once it started getting warmer in the spring, but it appears that timeframe may be bumped up somewhat depending on what we can do with the Monte Carlo.
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