~Tuesday, August 4, 2020~
Day 51
A nice morning jaunt with my faithful furry friend before the heat sets in. Have a few “to do” items to tackle today. One, get our tow vehicle back FINALLY, call the RV park to extend one more day (I’ve only been asking for this for the past 5 days), sign up for AT&T’s mobile hotspot for the truck (so I can work on my laptop while we have long hours of driving), and call Wix for some technical advice about our FootprintsOnWheels site, that I hope to launch this Friday!
I got a great deal on the wi-fi hotspot service. Normally, unlimited is $25/month, but I didn’t bite at that, nor the next offer that was $20. So, Jay finally gave me the unlimited for the same price as 2GB….$15/mo. I’m only going to try it out for 1 month to see how much use I get out of it, since I’m still in the thick of dialing in all of the social media stuff.
The news on the truck….Omar called around 11:00 to say the truck would be ready by 3:00. OMG...is this really happening now? I vacuumed out the loaner car abundant with Sadie hair. Gosh that Dyson cordless vacuum is so valuable and well worth the price! Before we headed over to the dealership, we discussed our plan with also purchasing an extended warranty. Chris Strong (who helped us with the loaner cars), put us in touch with one of his finance guys. We had gotten a few quotes when we purchased the truck, but at the time, wanted more time to really think about the expense and which tiered plan would work best for us.
First, drop off the loaner car. The front desk clerks were a little confused about the circumstances and why we weren’t having to pay anything, since Chris arranged the whole thing for us. Jeff was about to launch into explaining it all, when they said we were all set. We arrived to see our truck waiting and dirty. Do you think they could have put in a little extra effort to wash a car that’s been sitting, the majority of the time in their parking lot for 3 weeks? A few weeks ago, I had asked Omar if they could make sure the tires got rotated before we arrived. That got done. When Omar reviewed the paperwork with us, he explained that there was a little issue with testing out the new transmission. It was having trouble getting out of 3rd gear, but they were electronically able to reset it. Should we be nervous? We’ve kind of lost some confidence in the truck, with the worry that something might happen again. Anyway, we signed off on the paperwork and asked if we could leave the truck there a little longer since we were going over to the finance department to talk about the extended warranty. Little did we know the service manager, who’s been involved from the very beginning, was listening to our questions and the conveyance of our frustration. Had we just left, we wouldn’t have been approached by the service manager over in finance. He asked if he could speak with us for a moment Tom wanted to apologize for how long we were inconvenienced, and to express regret that we had an unreliable NEW truck. Let’s hope that isn’t now the case. He explained how they were really trying to do the best they could with the situation. One thing that I had not thought about was their difficulty in getting parts with the pandemic going on. Many factories are not running at full throttle, making it 10x more difficult to get anywhere. The new transmission they put in even came from another dealership in Texas, not from the vendor. Otherwise, it could have been another month of waiting possibly. But even with that valid point, he expressed that Ford Motor takes care of their customers and that we should seek having Ford present an extended warranty, at no cost to us. So we’re taking his advice. We really appreciated his honesty and his effort to speak with us directly. Frankly, Jeff and I had already thought about asking Ford to cough up the extended warranty, but it was satisfying to also hear it directly from the service manager. We’ve already begun talking to Ford Motor Co. (Josh) and have been assigned a case number, so now we need to squeeze a little more assistance out of them in terms of reimbursing our out-of-pocket expenses and pay for the extended warranty. We left feeling better that the service manager had our back, and that we finally had our truck. As we were leaving, we ran into Chris who asked if everything was taken care of to our satisfaction. He also shared a little history about the dealership’s humble beginnings to becoming one of the top Ford dealerships in California. I am definitely writing a letter to the GM of Jim Burke Ford, to praise sales manager, Chris Strong and service manager, Tom Moser, for going out of their way to make things right.
Time to begin breaking down our site. It’s hard to believe we’re actually heading out tomorrow, and finally leaving California. It only took us 52 days to do so. It really is unbelievable. The truck really needed a bath, so Jeff and I teamed up to do that before beginning the breakdown process. The more we do tonight, the easier the morning will go. Had a nice visit with our RV park neighbor, Larry, and exchanged contact information with him doing his Facebook travel blog, and us, our website, along with Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. It will be fun to stay in touch, and hope to one day, cross paths again.