Car talk

I'm having an embarrassing problem with the car I've been driving. No, it doesn't make rude noises or insult passersby (though one of my high school friends once got a traffic ticket for turning his windshield washers to the side and squirting pedestrians). The problem is embarrassing because it just could not be more of a first world problem. You ready? If I plug my iPhone into the integrated touchscreen system to access my music, the touchscreen doesn't work very well at all.

I know, how can I possibly get through the day? This is even worse than my cappuccino machine making foam that's not quite thick enough I just made that up, my cappuccino machine is fine). What's even more embarrassing is that I've had the car for over 2 years, and not only had I never noticed that the system didn't work, I didn't even know it existed. So you can see how essential it is.

In essence, the problem is embarrassing only because it's so minuscule and unimportant that I feel like an idiot even complaining about it. On the other hand, I paid for this thing, so I did nothing until I needed an oil change and then I told the dealer about this problem, almost as an afterthought. And the good news is that it turns out that all the cars made with this system have the same problem, so they will fix it free. It requires replacing a computer module and the USB port. The bad news is that the parts needed to be ordered.

A few days later I got a postcard saying parts had been delivered so I made an appointment. I sat in the waiting room for a couple of hours and then the service guy came in and took me into the shop. He showed me what was happening and I told him it was exactly the same as it's been. He said the service bulletin said to replace 2 pieces and that only one had been delivered. So would I mind coming back?

Now mind you that I had now already spent 3 hours on something that is much much closer to not existing than to being an actual problem. But now I was curious so I said okay (though I have to admit I was dubious about that part fixing it).

Another post card arrives trumpeting the arrival of the part, I make another appointment and sit in the waiting room for another 2 hours, noticing that my car had come in gone from its shop bay rather quickly. Finally they tell me that the part didn't change it, and that they'd spent the last hour on the phone with the central office service manager who apparently was trying to convince them that working poorly was either what these things were supposed to do or that there was nothing to do about it. To his credit (though of course this is based on his own telling of the story), the service tech refused to accept that answer, so now we wait for the mythical traveling service supervisor, Elijah I think his name is, or was it Godot?

So now 6 hours on the non-problem. We're getting pretty close to the horizontal asymptote if we're graphing improvement in my life versus time.