As I leave, seven men are gathered in a circle, unmoving.
When I return to the car dealership on Friday afternoon to pick up the loaner car, none of the people who’ve been part of the fiasco want to engage with me. (Gee, I wonder why.) The girl who greeted me that morning is still there, but on another call. Bob is walking another customer out.
Besides the two of them, there’s Angelica, who I’ve dealt with in the past & have always found extremely helpful… but she’s got another customer at her desk. And there’s another girl at the front desk. When I give her my name, she looks confused, asks who my service contact is.
Again, like they didn’t have any expectation of my arrival, which is pretty much par for this course.
I tell her I spoke with Bob earlier. She still looks confused, but she gets him.
He doesn’t converse with me at all. He doesn’t even make eye contact. He just directs me quickly to an empty desk, where he tells me Patty will be right with me.
I sit there for the few minutes I need to wait until she arrives. Just long enough that I sincerely hope she’s real, and not hypothetical, encouraged that despite how bad this has all gone to date, she won’t actually be long, by the open can of diet soda (pop, if you prefer) waiting on her desk. It’s not really that long a wait, it’s just that I am still incredibly frustrated by this entire engagement, and really tired of being so angry.
She arrives, looks me up, and starts the paperwork to loan me a car overnight. She’s efficient… while she’s doing the paperwork, she pulls a file & asks one of the guys to go bring around the car in preparation.
There is no conversation whatsoever on the reason my car is here at all, or why I need a loaner.
A moment later, the young man she just sent out comes back in and throws something on her desk, says something about something falling. Intent on whatever question she just asked me, and trying to make out the meaning of a key ring with no key on it, at first I am puzzled about the details. But he starts to walk back out, when she calls after him.
Apparently, as he was walking out to get the car, the key literally fell right off the ring.
And in the process of picking it up, it slipped further away, and down into the drain in the floor.
Of course. Because everything goes so smoothly here of late.
Thus explaining why there’s a key ring with no key, and how it relates to me.
He starts to leave again.
“Where are you going?” she asks him, incredulous.
“We’re trying to figure out how to get the key back.”
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t move. Stay right here,” she tells him.
“But I…”
“We’re not waiting while you figure this out. So stay right here.”
She ducks into the cabinet behind me to find another file, muttering under her breath about him knowing how few loaner cars are available and how this could even happen. Pulls a file, comes back around, hands him another key.
“Go get this car. And please don’t drop the key.”
Finishes my paperwork. Has me sign that I understand if I get a parking ticket or something, that’s on me. Tells me they’d appreciate me bringing it back with the same amount of gas I left with. (Whatever. I’m not going that far with it. Which is good because in fact, I’m know I’m not putting gas in it, so it’s fortunate that I won’t need much.)
When I’m all done, she escorts me out to the waiting vehicle. As if I could miss it, she points out that off to the right, seven men are staring down at the drain grate.
They stand in a circle, unmoving, perplexed…
Unintentionally comedic.
Anyway, it’s all over now.
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I hope they didn’t place one of those follow-up survey calls to you!
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