It’s been an expensive of a month for the Urban Driver. Our home was broken into and our computers were stolen. After two weeks of sorting through insurance and identify theft, and chasing missing computer files (aka accepting they’re simply gone), I was picking up a new computer when my transmission crapped out.
There we were in the parking lot of one of the country’s busiest malls, steps from two massive highways, and all I could do is reverse. Utterly surreal, I would have been laughing if it had only been happening to somebody else. I briefly considered reversing the whole way to our mechanic until I came to a barrier and needed to execute a three-point turn to proceed. The tow truck driver was befuddled.
It took over a week to fix — I’m going to pick it up today — because of a comedy of errors. It started with a towing service that went awol, ballooned due to a miscommunication between my wife and me, and culminated in a snowstorm that stopped the couriers from delivering spare transmission parts in time. Consequently our car spent the weekend in pieces in a garage that’s closed on Saturdays and Sundays. A two-day job took six.
All this coincided with a couple of weeks when I didn’t have any test rides arranged. So the Urban Driver was walking, cycling, using public transit and taking taxis around town for a week. And to be honest, considering how much it’s going to cost to replace the transmission, it wasn’t that bad. The dog got plenty of walks.
Besides, it could have been far worse. A couple of years ago our neighbour’s whomping willow split in half and fell onto the same vehicle, causing thousands in body repair costs. See the attached photo. That could have been worse too. At least we weren’t in the car at the time.
