Sundry

The roof didn't make it to Birmingham on Thursday morning like it was supposed to.  It didn't get there Thursday afternoon, either.  But at least the insurance company's delegate figured out where it was.

Apparently, whoever ordered the roof for the insurance company's delegate had it shipped to one of their facilities in Indiana instead of shipping it to the installer in Birmingham, AL.  I'm not sure when they stuck it on the plane but it didn't land in Birmingham until late Thursday or early Friday morning.  This was the news I got when I called them on Friday morning to see what was going on.  I was told that they would call the installer, give him the tracking number, and let him pick it up at the airport instead of waiting for it to get delivered by truck to his shop.  I went to my training class expecting that this was what was going to happen.  I was wrong.

They never called the installer to give him the tracking number.  Maybe they found it too late and it was already on the truck, I don't know.  So my class ended at around 2pm and we headed over to the shop hoping to pick up the car.

No one was at the shop.  We called and got the installer who was just around the corner.  He came over to see us.  Fed-Ex had tried to deliver but for some reason couldn't find him even though he claimed to have been there all day.  So the roof stayed on the truck and would be available for pickup when the truck returned to the airport around 6pm.  My plan in case the roof didn't show up was to leave for home anyway and have the roof shipped to New Jersey to be installed when we got there.  This wouldn't happen, either, as he had already removed the old roof.  Why not?  They had been telling us for three days that the roof would be there "tomorrow".

At this point our plans were totally shot for the rest of the weekend.  We could not leave Birmingham as planned on Friday.  If the installer picked up the roof Friday night, he could install it Saturday morning but we wouldn't be on our way until early afternoon at best.  This would put us nearly a full day behind schedule.

I called the insurance company's delegate and made sure they knew I was very upset.  I called the girl who had been handling my account and she wasn't at her phone.  I hit 0 to get to the operator and asked them to find her because I needed her immediate attention.  The operator told me she would try to find her and have her call me back.  I called back a few minutes later and left a voicemail message for her.

I then got on the phone and cancelled one of the hotels we had planned to stay at.  Hopefully I won't get a cancellation fee since it was technically beyond the cancellation time.  I called the hotel we were supposed to stay in Friday night and asked them to move the reservation to Saturday.

A short while later, I got a call from a customer service rep from the insurance company's delegate.  He said he had reviewed my account and realized several mistakes were made and wanted to make it up to me.  He offered to reimburse half my deductible.  I told him I was out  about $160 just in the rental car I had for two days because I had brought my car to the shop in anticipation of a part that never arrived.  If I knew the part wasn't going to be there, I could have kept driving my car instead.  On top of that, I was now stuck in Birmingham where few hotel rooms were available due to the races at Talladega and would lose a day of my vacation.  I had already given up my hotel room so I couldn't get onlnie to search for another hotel.  My best bet would be to find a AAA office to see if they could locate a hotel room for us.  The CSR eventually agreed to reimburse me for the entire $500 deductible.

The installer told me he had a friend who ran a hotel just up the road about a mile.  Luckily he was able to get us a room.

Saturday morning, we came back to the shop.  The installer was already working on installing the new roof.  He said it was a bit difficult since it wasn't cut as well as the roofs he normally gets.  The company he normally orders from cuts the material so that it should lay one inch past the tack strip.  The roof he got from Ford was not cut like this and had no markings for where it should be tacked.  He had to try three times before he got it lined up right.

He loaned us his car so he could keep working while we returned the rental car.  He finished installing the roof and reassembling the rest of the car at about 12:30.  Shortly thereafter, we were on our way to Chattanooga.

We got to see everything we planned to see in Chattanooga and a bit more.  We went downtown Saturday night and rode the electric trolley which was pretty full with people attending a barber shop quartet competition.  Most of the stuff we would have liked to see were closed but we walked down to the waterfront.  There was a bluegrass festival in progress so the area was kind of crowded.  We tried to get into a brew-pub for dinner but the lines were kind of long and we didn't think we could finish dinner before the trolleys stopped running so we got dinner on the way back to our hotel.  Sunday we went too Lookout Mountain and saw Ruby Falls, the inclined railway and Rock City.  Due to losing a day, we didn't get to check out Knoxville.

We're now sitting in the hotel in Kingsport where we'll stay for the night.  We'll be leaving for home early in the morning.

Here we are, Wednesday night, and my car window is still broken.

I brought the car to the dealer on Monday morning.  They said they couldn't replace the glass.  If anything, I could work with their auto body shop but they thought I would have to take it to an auto o shop or an upholsterer (apparently some of them do ragtops).  They thought it would be an expensive piece of glass anyway so I should contact my insurer.  They might require that I take it to a specific place to get it fixed.

So I contacted the insurance company.  They took the details and initiated the claim.  They refer glass replacement issues to another company so I was connected to them.  They did some research and recommended a place to take the car.

A short while later they called back and said they found some notes in the system saying that it was a special situation and couldn't be handled  like a normal glass replacement.  They referred me to another company to deal with this situation.  After they looked into it a bit, they discovered that the rear glass could not be replaced.  It is secured into the roof in such a way that the entire roof needs to be replaced.  They located a replacement roof and we discussed how and where to get it installed on the car.  I was leaving Memphis the next day which wouldn't be enough time to ship it there and install it so they had it shipped to a place in Birmingham, AL.  That's where I was going from Memphis and would be there for three days.  That should have been plenty of time to get it installed.

Originally, I was told it would be there late Tuesday or early Wednesday.  I was told to call the installer when I arrived in Birmingham to make arrangements for installation.  We called Tuesday night and the roof wasn't in yet so I told him I would call back on Wednesday.  I called today at lunch time and it still wasn't there yet.  I called the last company I was working with to see if they could trace it.  They somehow managed to find out that Ford shipped it and it should arrive late today or early tomorrow, Thursday.

So, I'm hoping they're right and the roof will arrive tomorrow morning.  I made arrangements with the installer to drop the car off tomorrow and I'll rent a car until they get mine fixed.  If it doesn't show up tomorrow, I don't know what I'm going to do.  My training is over Friday afternoon and we have plans to go on to Chattanooga that night.  I don't think the installer will be open on Saturday so it really has to get done on Friday or we'll probably have to get the roof shipped back home for installation.  In that case, we'll be praying it doesn't rain since there's no way to keep the water from running off the roof right into the back window.

Anyway, we had a nice dinner on Beale Street in Memphis Monday night.  Met some characters on the street, too.

I guess I'm not really cut out for blogging.  I don't feel I think out my view well enough to sell it to someone else so why bother?  I also don't like talking about myself and there are a lot of things in my life that I feel should remain private.  This especially applies to work related things.  I could probably write a book about things that happen at work but I don't think my employer would be too happy about that.  I prefer to stay on the salary continuation program.

Anyway, I think enough has happened this year that I should have blogged about but since I had kind of given up on the blog I never bothered to write about any of these events.  I'd like to go back through the year so far and say a little bit about some of the events of the year.  I'll write up each one in a separate post.

Let me start by mentioning our current trip.

I've been having real bad luck with my computers lately.  The hard drive on my laptop was the last thing to start complaining.  It was causing the computer to hang while it was making a clicking sound on occassion.  One time, it just stopped responding altogether even after a power cycle.  Luckily, it came back after letting it cool a while.

I ordered a new drive to replace it and it arrived yesterday.  I was wondering how I was going to preserve my Windows XP partition and was even considering converting it to VMWare virtual machine.  When I plugged in the new drive, I found out it had the same geometry as the old drive except it had twice as many cylinders.  This meant that I could define the XP partition exactly as it was on the old drive which should have minimized any chances that XP would complain.  Sure enough, I used 'dd' under linux to save it to my desktop machine and used 'dd' again to restore it onto the new drive and it booted up with no problems.

The old drive was 40GB and the new one is 80GB.  I kept the XP partition at 10GB (I hardly use it but it occassionally comes in handy).  I extended my swap to 1GB (I recently upgraded from 256MB to 512MB RAM but kept running on the 256MB swap partition).  I used to have just one linux partition at 25GB.  I now have one of 20GB for the OS and another of 40GB for /home.  I also extended a shared FAT32 partition from 3 to 4GB.

I also bought a new battery a while back.  The old one wasn't holding a charge for more than half an hour.  Although it's capacity is rated 1.5x the previous battery, it lasts more than twice as long somehow.  I could never get an hour out of the old battery but have gone over two hours on this one.  It actually makes the system usable as a portable device.

All these upgrades to the laptop almost make it a new machine.

I just doubled the memory in my laptop from 256M to 512M. It's nice being able to switch between Firefox, Thunderbird and MythTV without waiting for something to swap in and/or out.

I also got a new battery. This one's 6600mAH - 50% bigger than the old one which was 4300mAH. I just finished charging it and I'm checking to see how long it will last. Looks like it should go at least 90 minutes. The old one would never give me even 60 and recently has been giving me about 30.

The laptop overheated a couple of times with the old battery plugged in. I think that's what's been causing the AC connected light to flash. It's not doing that anymore.

Update: The system ran for about 90 minutes before complaining about the battery being low.  I just started OpenOffice.org Calc while running the three apps listed above and I think I still haven't touched my swap partition.