\tThe night before last we were on our way home from visiting our son and his wife in San Diego when our truck did a nasty. It was nighttime and we had just made the transition from poorly lighted freeway to completely unlit road when the \u201ccheck engine\u201d light came on. About 5 seconds later the display on the dash brought up a message that said \u201cSTOP SAFELY NOW.\u201d The message should say \u201cimminent failure\u201d or \u201cprepare for disaster\u201d because about 5 seconds after the message came up, the truck stalled. Fortunately, we made it to the side of the pitch-black road before the thing quit rolling.
\n\tWe called our rotten insurance carrier, let’s call them 21st Century, and started the process to activate our towing coverage. The idiots selected a towing company called Reliable Towing and allegedly dispatched them to our location. They said it would be 65 minutes before the tow truck arrived. An hour and five minutes later, the tow truck had not arrived. We started calling both the insurance company and Reliable Towing and were given numerous estimates of arrival time, all of them short. Two and a quarter hours finally elapsed and soon after that the truck arrived. The tow driver stated that he only got the dispatch 30 minutes prior to getting to our location. Numerous people have been lying. Perhaps Reliable Towing should adopt a motto like \u201cYou will be left in abject terror alongside a heavily-traveled pitch-black curve while we ignore you\u201d or \u201cWe were only fooling when we chose our name.\u201d If we did this again, Reliable would be our last choice.
\n\tAfter the maximum towing distance had been exhausted, we only had to cough up $50 in excess of our insurance coverage to get our F-250 dropped at our home Ford dealership. It was late Saturday night, long after the service department had closed, so we filled out an envelope with our poop written on it, tucked in a key and dropped it in the night box. Of course the service department is closed on Sunday as well although we did drive by to determine that they were still selling lemons to suckers. Fortunately we were then near our son’s place and he picked us up at the dealership.
\n\tThis morning (Monday), we finally got ahold of the service writer and, after a few hours of patience, were rewarded with an estimate of around $1500 to fix some components that I was blissfully unaware of until today. They alleged it was something called an exhaust gas temperature sensor that must be vitally important since it shut down our in-motion truck with scant warning. We are quite happy this component did not fail while we were partway down a serpentine, steep grade with our 12.000 pound trailer pushing us along.
\n\tWe have rented a spiffy-looking black Dodge Charger to get around while the truck is in the shop. It has a very perky motor and alarmingly touchy brakes but it is also has very uncomfortable seats and insufficient room for fat guys, like me. The odometer has only 81 miles on it so maybe we are the first unsatisfied drivers of this vehicle. Nothing has fallen off, like normally occurs with Mopar products, and we hope the car remains intact until we return it tomorrow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The night before last we were on our way home from visiting our son and his wife in San Diego when our truck did a nasty. It was nighttime and we had just made the transition from poorly lighted freeway … Continue reading