Okay, I know there are plenty of other things in the world of far more concern than this. But we’ve gotten a bunch of emails asking, ‘So what happened to your car? What’s the latest?’ If you’re more interested in the usual fare (which I can certainly understand), just skip down the post below.
Now, as was pretty obvious from the moment the garage manager called us Tuesday morning and told us someone had taken our car, the thing is clearly long gone. After that, the folks from Central Parking started making accusations blaming the whole thing on us, then saying our car wasn’t nice enough to steal and other bizarre behavior before finally admitting that it had been stolen and that they had apparently left the key in the car, which presumably made it rather easy to steal.
(For a point of reference, this is a big company, which may be why they act this way, I guess. I think they probably run like half the parking garages in New York City and their website says they’re the “leading provider of parking and transportation-related services throughout North America, South America and Europe.”)
Anyway, finally, the higher ups got back to us after we kept complaining. But despite some initial conciliatory words we found the same pattern of weirdly aggressive behavior toward customers that seems to run through the whole company. My wife and I were just talking to the company representative, Neal Sanderson, today who told us what the company thought it was reasonable for them to pay us. I pointed out that their offer didn’t seem quite equitable since it would only buy us like a third of the car we had. And, remember, this was the car that’s so lame that no one would want to steal it anyway.
Then the Monty Python portion of the conversation got underway.
Now in a graver voice, the Central Parking guy, Sanderson, said, “Well, we have evidence the car was not in mint condition. In fact, we have documentation that it had several scratches on the side …” At this point, as a uncontrolled chuckle started to sneak out of my throat I hear my dear pregnant wife saying, “Don’t even …”
A little backstory is in order. A few months ago, one of the garage employees ground another car against ours leaving a deep scratch and some miscellaneous nicks on the drivers’ side of the car. They gave us a claim ticket to get it fixed and they’d reimburse us, etc. We’d gotten the estimate. Hadn’t had the work done yet. But the ‘documentation’ was the report of Central Parking damaging the car.
So at this juncture in the conversation I point out that this seems hard to figure how they should pay us less to replace our car, which they got stolen, because it had lost value when they banged into it.
After all, if we wanted the thing crashed into and stolen we could have saved a lot of money just parking it on the street, right? (Has anyone else had this kind of experience with this company?)
Anyway, it went from bad to worse from there.
We’ll keep you posted.
