As promised, here’s the tale of my sucky week. Although, there have been a few new additions to the list of suckage. I’ll start at the beginning.

    About two weeks ago I neglected to mention that my baby – otherwise known as my 1996 BMW 318i – was backed into while I was busy shopping at Target. A nice grandma from South Carolina was pulling her mammoth GMC Yukon out of a parking space while her grandchildren were distracting her by being obnoxious. Unfortunately, my car took the brunt of her distraction. The Yukon put a huge gash by the rear driver’s-side tail light and warped the trunk and side panel quite a bit. All in all, that SUV caused almost $2,000 in damage, and the scariest thing is, she didn’t even feel it. She waited for my Mom and I to come out of the store though, so while I was disappointed, I got over being mad at her pretty quick.

    The car got fixed. It came out of the shop about a week or so ago. It felt a little shakey, so against my advice, my parents took it into Sears to have the tires rotated and balanced. The first time they screwed the car up, not balancing them properly so the car was really wobbly – not something my Bimmer is normally prone to doing. So, a few days ago, we took it back to Sears cause they said they’d redo it for free and get it right.

    Well. They didn’t. When we went to pick it up and Mom started to drive it away with me behind her in my Dad’s baby (a 1998 BMW 328i – yeah, we’re addicted), I noticed that now the rear taillight on the passenger’s side was out. That seemed odd, so I pulled up beside her at a light and told her. That’s when she asked me to look at the paperwork – she had a hunch the mileage was higher than when we left it the night before, and sure enough, she was right. In less than 24 hours, 45 extra miles had magically appeared on the odometer. She also informed me that it was driving horribly, shaking so much it was making her ill, and that the car was barely reacting to the steering wheel. Needless to say, we turned around and took it right back within three minutes of leaving.

    When we pulled into the parking lot, that’s when I noticed it. The underside of the front bumper. It was hanging off. Bumpers really shouldn’t do that. I looked at it closely and realized that there was a huge gash in the hard plastic bit that forms the bottom part of the bumper, leading to the piece of the undercarriage that was hanging loose after being ripped off the steel of the bumper panel. Worse still, that gash followed a line that went all the way to the very back of the car. In front of the rear tire part of the undercarriage had been peeled away about three inches or so and was practically scraping along the ground. There were scratches all over the right side of the car and part of the rubber on the side of the tire had been extremely chafed.

    I was mad. Really, really mad. Some two-bit hack of a mechanic had violated my baby, taking it for a 45-mile joyride, hitting something that not only messed up the body, but made it entirely unsafe to drive. The engine doesn’t even sound right. But thanks to having just gone through the autobody shop after the other accident, I have photographic proof that there’s no way that damage was there before Sears had it. Better yet, after the fact, Stephen was nice enough to go back to Sears with me to get them to print out another copy of the work order. Somehow, magically, despite having the exact same turn-in time & date as the original work order, those 45 extra miles popped up. Funny – first those dinks thought I would be ignorant enough to not notice the damage to my baby, but they also thought they could cover their tracks. They’ve picked on the wrong woman. I don’t think they were counting on some girl knowing her car like the back of her hand, or being protective enough of it that I’m going to demand someone’s head on a silver platter.

    So I’m royally peeved. Sears has been trying to tell my insurance company that the only damage to the car is some kind of cracked valve. Ha. I have pictures that prove otherwise and they will pay. Thankfully my insurance company rocks and they’re going to the mat for me. But in addition to that, I spoke to the police about it to see if their actions qualified as theft (since they didn’t have permission to take my car further than 5 miles for a road test). Sadly, the police seem to think it’s in a bit of a gray area, but they did say that if Sears doesn’t cooperate and repair the damage to my satisfaction, I have one hell of a civil case on my hands. One way or another, Sears will pay, and I’ve had a bad enough week that I’ll go to the ends of the Earth to make them answer for what they’ve done. I want them to fix my car, I want to know exactly what they did in my car that caused so much damage, and I want the name of who did it. And if they don’t cooperate, they’ll become intimately acquainted with the Wrath of Meg.

    In other news, I had a killer cold this week, and things ended quite abruptly with my boyfriend. I still have no clue what happened there, I thought things were fine. I’m not going to theorize here, though, since that would be contrary to the rules of blogging and I’m not about to be as rude as he was to me. I just want you all to know so people don’t have to ask me any more questions about how it’s going. Cause it’s not, and I’m fine. Believe me, I’m fine.

    Sure, I’m mad, but I think you’d all agree that anybody would be after the week I’ve had. And yet I’m doing okay. There was a bit of good mixed in with that bad and I’ll kick whatever butt I have to in order to insure this recent rash of horribleness turns into something to my advantage. Damn it, I’m not going to tolerate this sort of behavior, from anyone. I’d like the world to know that right now, because the next person to screw me over will find their head on a silver platter, and I’ll be the one to put it there.

A peek at the new bathroom!

In happier news, I finished redecorating my bathroom! I’ve been working on it for a few weeks now because the paint from the previous redesign two years ago was looking a little languid. Because of the deep redness of the walls, I was kind of limited in what I could paint over it without having to apply a couple layers of primer too. And frankly, I’m too busy kicking butt for that right now. So I went with the raspberry from my blog, and I have to say, the bathroom looks fabulous. My goal was to make it extremely flamboyant and maybe a tad obnoxious, because hey, it’s a bathroom, and it’s really the one space where I can go completely nuts with color and be okay. Check it out and do please let me know what you think. I’m quite proud of the design – it wasn’t just the blog’s color scheme that inspired me. Post comments, let me know what you think; this is by far the craziest thing I’ve ever done, I’m eager to hear what you all have to say.

Here’s to hoping this week won’t suck quite as much as the last one did. Because goodness knows, I’m tired of being taken advantage of. Look out, world, I’m mad as hell and I have a pink bathroom! 🙂