A comedy of errors...
(Only not really funny and kinda expensive.)
So back in April, I took the van in to be completely repainted. We have decent insurance I suppose and the paint job was covered except for the $100 deductible. The paint shop gave us an estimate of 15 days. We also have a rental car clause for $100 a day/$1500 max so the inconvenience of losing the van for two weeks didn't seem like it would be a big deal. The rental car place was even great and provided another 12 passenger van as a rental. Which was so much better than the last time I had to rent a vehicle while the van was in the shop.
(Do you see where this is going? Everything has been too easy so far.)
15 days to paint an entire van... That didn't seem too unreasonable to me. I called on day 15 to check on the progress. Another couple of days, they'd call me when it was ready. They didn't call after a couple of days so I tried again. It wasn't ready, they hoped to be finished on Monday. On Monday it wasn't ready, they planned to be done by Friday. Okay...
Last week Greg scratched the paint on a car in his work's parking lot. Lovely... He was checking our insurance policy to figure out the best way to handle that when he noticed the $100 a day/ $1500 max rental clause. We had had the rental van for 26 days at that point. And guess how much is it to rent a 12 passenger van? $100 a day...
Here's where the stupid little errors come in. I did know about the $100 a day/$1500 max stuff in the beginning. I told the rental place my max was $100 a day and since we were told it would only take 15 days, I didn't care so much how close to the $100 limit we were. And then life got nutty and I didn't think too much about it because hey, it's time for soccer practice, we're out of milk, First Communion, baseball games, strep throat, a couple of dozen sales through Blue Kitty Designs, Greg's out of town, Girl Scouts, etc.
Obviously the paint shop was taking way longer than their estimate. And the insurance company never sent our rental policy limits to the car rental place. The car rental place normally calls customers when they are close to the max but since they never heard from the insurance company, they didn't know when to call. Bam, a $1100 rental bill and our van still wasn't completed.
To finish up a long story, Greg spent all day Thursday on the phone with the paint shop, the insurance company, and car rental place. We dropped the rental van off on Thursday in hopes that our van would be finished Friday (it was). Greg has talked the rental place and paint shop into paying a bit of the $1100 rental bill so we're not stuck with the whole thing. He's still working with the insurance to cover the rest (I'm seriously considering finding a new insurance company now).
The whole thing has been terribly annoying and I wish we had just decided we could live with paint scratches in the first place. Or suffer in a rental mini-van for a while. Hindsight is 20/20, they say.
(I'll get to our camping trip at the beach and Mother's Day soon! I'm kinda backlogged in a bunch of areas of life at the moment...)
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