I called the store at 10 this morning to ask about my warranty, and was told the owner of the shop would call me back to talk about it. I waited until 4:20 when my patience finally expired, and I called them back.

As explained to me by the head mechanic, the warranty I have was a deal offered through Costco Canada and an organization that has since gone out of business. Since the other company is dead, they are not honouring the warranties because it means they don’t get paid. My “only option” is to go to Costco Canada and demand they pay my repair bill, since it was their deal in the first place.

Some facts:

• The shop I bought my scooter from is still run by the same people from two years ago; it’s the distributor that partnered with Costco that is no longer around
• The shop DID honour some of these warranties by just eating the cost in the name of customer service, but have stopped doing that because it was costing them money
• This likely won’t mean much, but I have all my original paperwork including my receipt that says I have an extended warranty
• I don’t give a fuck about the distributor going out of business
• I’ve asked four times now for an estimate of this repair bill, and I haven’t once gotten an answer – even a few minutes ago he danced around an answer saying his “shortcut” to save me money on parts ended up taking him twice as long as it would have to go the normal way and while the parts for the repair will cost me under $100, the rest is all labour .. and he started today’s work on my scooter at 10:30am and he isn’t done yet, so …
• There are two shops in Vancouver that sell Vespa scooters – I’ve always publicly backed THIS shop, and I have a very loud online voice
• I WANT MY SCOOTER BACK

I’ve asked Ed for help, and he is making some phone calls. I feel sick to my stomach, because I was positively elated that my prudence of 2009 was going to pay off in my favour. I can’t believe I was just told “yeah, sorry, this is all on you” when I did everything right, and I’m baffled that the shop’s lack of being paid for repair work done under warranty is somehow my problem.

This sucks.

Will update as more information is available – here’s hoping that Ed and his ability to handle shit like this calmly and rationally can come through in our favour.

Here’s the page I have in my paperwork outlining the deal I bought:

click make big go

It’s close to after midnight* and something evil’s lurking in the dark – me, actually. Hi there.

As I was laying in bed trying really hard to fall asleep, a nagging thought kept poking me in the back of the head. It’s been almost two weeks since I dropped Lola off at the shop, and I’ve spent every other second of that time stressing the fuck out. I just dropped a large wad of cash on an Impromptu European Adventure, and I had no idea a) how much this repair was going to cost and b) how I was going to pay for it. Sure, I could easily stick the entire painful bill on mister credit card, but that wouldn’t really solve anything – just defer it at a rate of 11% per month for a while. I’ve got some money set aside for London Incidentals (which is the name of my Clash cover band), but if I use that money wisely and put it towards Lola’s repair, I will be broke on my trip. I was wrestling with my desire for spending money in the UK versus being a Responsible Adult when a Sneaking Suspicion entered my head and wouldn’t leave: the warranty on my scooter. There was something special about it, but WHAT?

I thought harder, and vaguely remembered some of the many fights conversations I had with Ed surrounding Lola’s purchase. When I make a seemingly ridiculous decision to do something crazy, I tend to a) have done a great deal more research than it appears, and b) do a lot of fast talking to get my way. I had repeatedly told Ed that buying Lola at that instant in time made perfect and magical sense for a variety of reasons, including ……………

Holy shit, one of the reasons was an extended fucking warranty.

Well, there went my hopes of sleep. I got out of bed and padded into the living room and started to pull all the paperwork down off the shelf. I made it through two magazine racks full of stuff we probably don’t need to have any more when I hit pay dirt: the bill of sale for my scooter, and all the corresponding paperwork including the pages I had printed outlining the special add-on bonus available during May and June of 2009: $200 towards a helmet, $50 towards a pair of gloves, a $50 Costco gift card, and a two-year extended warranty that was an extension of the 1-year warranty the scooter came with.

Lola is under warranty until June 16th, 2012.

I vibrated with excitement and demanded Twitter play along to see if I was on the right track with this exciting new theory that my valve seal replacement shouldn’t cost me a fucking cent. Not satisfied with that, I even woke Ed up to run the new developments by him. He was 80% asleep and likely didn’t fully get what I was going on about, but he grumpily agreed with my assessment. All that was left to do was to go the fuck back to sleep some how and wait until morning when I could call the shop to demand an update on Lola and to inquire about my findings. I was cautiously optimistic, because everything I found lent proof to my favour – I had receipts, time stamped print outs, DEFINITIONS even – this had to work. It had to! It was all right there in black and white and yellow and red: 3-year warranty! The same warranty that saved my ass last year during the Great Gasket Failure of 2010 was STILL VALID, and therefore HAD to cover my ass for 2011’s Valve Seal Gate!

Didn’t it?

As of right now, I don’t know. I’m waiting for the shop owner to call me back, and when I phoned this morning the guy who answered my call said a) my scooter is being worked on today and might be ready this afternoon if all goes according to plan, and b) the extended warranty was offered under the old distributor and he’s not sure how it plays out now. I’m squirmy with stress and restless anticipation, because I NEED this to go my way. Besides, I don’t give a flying fig about distributors; I’ve got signed paperwork with proof of my extended warranty. Are places allowed to do that? Cancel something bought and paid for because something changed in the back end of the business?

Between the stress of this repair and losing all my naked pictures, I’m completely keyed up and twitchy. I hope everything is positively resolved and soon – I have to come up with 151 synonyms for the word “employee”, and I can’t do that if I’m too worried to concentrate.

AHHHHH!

(*: I started writing this update at 12:30 this morning, so I am technically correct – the best kind of correct)

It’s dead, Jim.

On Sunday night, I turned off my iMac because things were dangerously hot to the touch. Unfortunately, the next morning it wouldn’t boot. I started by unplugging peripherals, and eventually narrowed down the problem to my 500GB LaCie external HD – it was dead. Before panicking, I did a little research online and found that the most likely culprit was the power supply, so  I ransacked the house but was unable to find a similar power cable due to the weird-ass configuration of the connector. Refusing to cave in to reality, I set the drive aside to bring into the office hoping that Desktop Support would be able to help me.

This morning I told my sob story to IT Keith, who forced open the casing and connected the SATA drive to his PC. Windows happily read the data, and I was elated – all my music files, pictures, articles, resumes, websites and more for the past 10 years could be rescued! He started transferring the information to my network drive, and I’d be able to transfer it back over to my computer later. Hooray!

Unfortunately, the transfer was taking too long and IT Keith needed his computer back to do actual work. He gave me the drive back and said he’d rig me up a system so I could transfer the info over later. This was cool; I’d still get my stuff back including our wedding pictures and tax returns. I could be patient.

Then the other IT guy arrived, and he brought with him two power supplies that fit my drive. Hooray! We plugged in the first one, but it wasn’t watty enough and it didn’t work. The second was 62w (I needed 57w), so it should be cool.

*pop*

*sizzle*

*smoke and burning*

Um, shit. We quickly unplugged everything before fire could happen, and set about to finding another solution. He took the drive back to his desk to try a hard drive reading toaster and/or his own PC, where he could copy the files and I could retrieve them later.

.. except that pop and sizzle kind of killed the drive for real this time, and it will. not. be. read. by anything we’ve tried. It’s completely, utterly, horribly dead and my data long gone unless I want to pay $600-$1500 to use a data recovery service (which I clearly cannot do). Instead of grabbing the data when I could, or asking if I could just transfer over the truly important stuff, or waiting until I had a PC available to use, we actually killed the drive dead when it was working just fine only minutes before.

I’m trying hard not to think about it, because I have a minor panic attack when I think about what I just lost. Losing all my music is annoying, but I can probably recover most of it. Losing all my written work, IRC logs, websites, pictures – that’s the heartbreaking part. Pictures of Sasha, of my dad, of friends long since grown apart. Images from our wedding and honeymoon, from Ed’s grandparents 50th anniversary, of my snails. My first website, written entirely in humiliating Comic Sans and HTML’d by hand in Notepad. All gone.

It’s beyond heartbreaking to lose all those memories – it’s actually going to cost me my livelihood. You see, I basically grew up online in the infancy of the internet – in 1997, we were doing things so sordid and naked that if they took place today, the devastation caused by moral panic, Fox News and Nancy Grace would spell the end of online life as we know it. Since my very first step online with a 1200bps modem, I’d been storing chat logs, screenshots and pictures away in a secret folder for blackmail purposes. The logs aren’t all that useful anymore; it’s too easy to fake them and a lot is lost in the translation – but the pictures! I have – had – naked pictures of dozens of people, some of whom have gone on to become responsible members of society with jobs and mortgages and cell phones of their own. I had always assumed – counted on, really – that one day I’d shake this annoying tendency to not be an enormous asshole and start threatening to release the information I’d saved unless they funded my cushy lifestyle of no pants and Diet Coke. All my retirement plans just went up in a puff of smoke, and I am utterly desolate and wrought with despair at the loss.

This sucks.

To make me feel better, please email pictures of your genitals to kimli at delicious juice dot com.

OH FUCK – I just realized that I’ve also lost the ICQ log of the conversation Ed and I had the very first time we chatted online, in which he asked me if I’d ever have sex with five guys at once. I’d been planning on suing him for breach of contract, with that as Exhibit A. SHIT! This is SO MANY KIND OF SUCK! I am a sad.

:(