Alas, I’m not Dooce.  A fact, for which, I’ve no doubt, she drops to her knees and thanks god nightly.

And let me just say right here before anybody gets all, “I can’t believe that Dooce person uses her name and interwebz fame to get stuff,”  Really?  Get serious.  And also, it’s her job.  She’s a terrific writer and her medium is the blogosphere.  How she gets paid is between her and karma and Whirlpool, so step off.  Plus she looks like she could mess you up good, and by you I mean me, if you pissed her off, and by you I mean me, so I’m not about to let you criticize her.  And by you I mean you.

And for those of you who are all, “Who the hell is Dooce?”  First.  OY.  Second…here.  And third and probably more to the point, here. *

What the heck am I talking about?  Right.  The CAR.

Once upon a time, a young couple with an infant bought a Volkswagen Passat.  It was a family wagon, because a family with an infant and a big dog needs a family wagon.  It was a nice car.  Nicer than any car they’d ever had, and they got a good deal on it because the car dealer’s wife had been driving it for six months so it wasn’t exactly new but it wasn’t exactly very used either.

Four years later, out of the clear blue sky, one night  – so I guess the sky wasn’t very clear blue but rather inky black – this glaring red light started flashing on the dash and alarms went off and sirens blared and a neon sign lit up saying “STOP THE GALLDURN CAR AFORE SHE ‘SPLODES!!!” So, uh.  We did.

We dutifully took our car to the dealership whereupon we were told that it had a problem with oil sludge buildup and that we had to give them a kabillion dollars, a kidney, and our son in order to get it fixed and that it was our fault that this problem had happened because we were bad car owners who had obviously never even heard of an oil change.

Au contraire, mon frere.  Or mein bruder.  We argued with them about the fact that we had, in fact, regularly changed the oil and there was no way this was our fault.  They let us keep the kidney and our son, but we still had to give up the kabillion dollars.

Jackbooted thugs.  Deutschbags.

In December of 2010 – six years after being accused of Oil Sludgery, I got a notice in the mail from a law firm telling me that a class action settlement has taken place and that if I submit forty reams of paper verifying this, that, and the other, I’ll be reimbursed a kabillion dollars because, LO AND BEHOLD, there’s a flaw in the turbo thingamabob in my VW that causes oil sludge buildup and all kinds of asshattery in the engine-region.  Gee, you don’t say.  Still, better late – SIX YEARS LATE – than never.  Ach du lieber!

In January, I was driving to work, and the lights, bells, sirens, and signs all came on again.  Mein gott im himmel!

Back to the dealership we go… to be told “DUH, what?”  Because we’re in between a warranty extension granted by the class action settlement they don’t know if they can fix the car, but obviously we need the car fixed, so they’ll fix the car but we have to pay for it.  So they fix the car, except they don’t really fix the car, they only sort of fix the car.  So we pay for the repairs, $2400 +, but of course it’s not fixed, but they can’t figure out what’s actually wrong, and they’ll sort of say that the repairs they think they have to make are due to the oil sludge problem, but won’t totally commit to that because VW has told them not to commit to that, no doubt because they don’t want to get sued again – which they will.  Especially because I’m now contemplating going to law school at the ripe old age of 43 to get a JD in Suing of the Automobile Manufacturers Who Make Shitty Cars With Oil Sludge Problems.

It’s now April.  I still don’t have my car.  I can’t sell it, because it doesn’t run.  I will sell it, the moment I get it back from the shop.  My regular, non-VW dealership-affiliated mechanic could have fixed this in a week for 1/3 the price that the VW dealership will fix it – and competently, which the VW people don’t seem to be able to manage.  Tonight, I literally heard a guy say, “Well, I guess it could probably be something like that.”  This was a mechanic.  A VW mechanic.  To another mechanic.  Tweedledee and Tweedledickhead.  But my mechanic can’t do the work, because if my mechanic does the work, I absolutely won’t get reimbursed according to the terms of the class action settlement.

Of course, I might not get reimbursed anyway.  But nobody can tell me anything about that.  VW won’t comment.  You can call them yourself.  Go ahead, do it.  Just for fun.  It’s like shouting into the abyss.  The dealership repair people throw up their hands and say helpful things like, “Volkswagen tells us nothing.  We don’t know a thing.  Sorry.  Don’t know what to tell you!”    One guy, who proudly informed my husband that he used to be the service manager and is now the sales manager, I think his name is Jack Wagon, gave us a nice little lecture about the importance of changing the oil regularly.  If he’d been standing closer to me he might have lost his larynx.  My nails are kinda long right now.

Let’s recap:  Volkswagen made a faulty product.  They’ve been sued and acknowledged the fault is theirs.  I’ve so far paid over $4000 to repair damage to my car caused by said faulty product.  I have been without a car for three months.  Volkswagen is not willing to a) fix the car b) pay for the repairs c) help us untangle the web of mystery surrounding WHAT IN THE HOLY HELL is going on with this settlement to determine whether or not our car is covered by warranty or not.  They won’t even give us a loaner.  Which is probably smart come to think of it, because I’d probably just go try to trade it in for the Honda or Hyundai I’m about to buy when this gets all settled or I get out of jail.

And forgive me here, while I get a little philosophical and not just a little grandiose.  But people wonder why America can’t compete?  This isn’t German VW I’m talking about.  This is Volkswagen of America at work here.  This is American customer service at its finest.  This is the kind of soulless, hard-hearted, petty crap that grinds away at all of us every day. It’s the guy who cuts you off in traffic.  It’s the telemarketer who calls during dinner.  It’s the rude waiter.  It’s the bad tipper.  It’s the parent who lets his kid throw his McDonalds trash on the ground.   It’s not holding the door for the woman with a toddler and an armload of groceries.  It’s death by a thousand cuts.

What are we all going to do about it?  Because one person’s car isn’t that important, but all the rest of it is.  It really is.

Significant afterthoughts:

*These days a more apt allusion would be the Pioneer Woman, I know, but she wouldn’t accept a car, so that doesn’t really work.

For the record, I said “I” a lot in here, as though I were the one dealing with all this car stuff.  I should probably just say that if you are of a fragile composition or sensitive to the whole “TMI” thing, you should stop reading here. Every time the subject of the car and its problems came up, I literally (and I’m using “literally” in its actual LITERAL meaning, not its non-literal, figurative meaning because I own a dictionary and read books and know what it means) had to stop whatever I was doing and go straight to the bathroom because the topic was so distressing to me that I was instantly, uh, sick.  Not throwup sick but, uh….yeah.  You get it.  My husband,  The World’s Greatest Husband, handled all of this. Except for one incident where I was released from my cage and I lost it on three service reps and four mechanics after which I was promptly returned to my cage and silenced with a large fountain Diet Pepsi and an Ativan.  I’m not usually allowed to confront Bad People.  I cannot be trusted to be civil in those situations.  He can.  And does.  And did.  Well, mostly.  Until Jack Wagon started in about the oil change, and the less said about what happened then the better.  Love you, babe.  Danke.  I mean, Thanks.