Yet Another Break-in

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you may recall back in July that my car was broken into. At that time it was first ever time that I had experienced anything close to the intrusion of personal space that is a equal to a car break-in. I was just getting out of bed this morning when I had a knock on my door. Looking through the peephole was one of Maplewood’s finest. Luckily I’m not the type of guy that gets in trouble so my first thought was ‘what happened to who’. The first words out of his mouth was “do you own a maroon Passat?”. Suddenly the fact that I had accidentally left the faceplate on my stereo the night before came hurdling into my head and when he told me that they broke my car window and stole my stereo I knew I was right.

I have a feeling that whomever in the neighborhood is targeting cars sees a big target painted on mine (I looked, I don’t see one). Because of this hallucination they deem it necessary to rip the music giving appliance in my car out of it whenever they have the chance. I can literally count on 1 finger the number of times that I forgot to take the faceplate off my stereo and bring it in the house with me.  The 1 (ONE, UNO) time I do this yet another window is broken and yet another big hole is in the center dash.

I tested my car alarm… they had actually opened the door and yeah, the alarm went off, but just like previously when my stereo was stolen nobody cares. The alarm turns off after a certain amount of time people that hear it are no longer annoyed by it.

As it turns out there was a garage open and the apartment complex let me rent it for half price (you know, two strikes discount).  I actually wanted to just get out of my lease completely, but they’ve got that pretty locked up with the whole (paraphrased) “we’re not responsible for what happens on our property, you are” text written into the lease.

I figured that even though I have my car tucked away unseen in a garage now that I’m not even going to bother putting a stereo in it until I’m out of here. I compared the community to my last apartment in Saint Louis Park. I was there for 2 years and never even heard of a car break in on the property. I don’t know how many times I accidentally left my car unlocked or a window down or something that endangered the safety of my vehicle, but nope, nothing gone… ever.

The good news is that my window was able to be fixed within a few hours of me finding out. This was actually the highlight of my day. After the last time that I was given the run around by a different company and SafeLite saved the day for me I immediately went with them for the window replacement. They scheduled the appointment from sometime between 12 and 5 today. The guy called me around 11 this morning and since I was already home he was there in 15 minutes. He was done around 11:45 (a whole 15 minutes before he was even scheduled to possibly be there). On top of that he vacuumed the driver’s seat and floor for me so that I could drive the car without sitting on a bunch of broken glass (a song just popped in my head). So, thank you Shawn. You got 10′s on the survey I took. I hate it when I have to call them, but when I do have to it is one of the best Customer Service experiences that I have ever encountered. I suppose this is how they set themselves apart from the competition with this. People are stressed, hurried, and busy when they need glass replaced for whatever reason. Their agents know that and take care of everything. Asking only the relevant questions and in my case apologizing (albeit unnecessarily) that I needed to call them at all.

See Also:

• Driving without a stereo (car break-in)
• Naivety Decimated
• Unexpected Customer Service

Tagged as: confused