08:02 – Thanks to everyone who posted or emailed condolence messages. Barbara, Frances, and Sankie are all doing well. As hard as it is to lose Dutch, the worst part of it was watching him suffer, knowing that there was no hope for recovery. So now he’s at peace. We’ll all miss Dutch a lot, but now our lives can return to some semblance of normality. No more waiting for that middle-of-the-night phone call. No more dropping everything and rushing over to the nursing home or Hospice to stand vigil. Barbara actually got a full night’s sleep last night, the first in a long, long time.
10:10 – Barbara is out running errands this morning. Yesterday, she mentioned to me that the unlock function on the keyless-entry remote for her Chevy HHR was working only intermittently. She’d replaced the battery recently and the lock function works fine, so obviously there’s a physical problem with the unlock button on the remote. The car is still under warranty, so I called the Chevy dealership this morning. The guy I talked to said she could just stop by, no need for an appointment. So Barbara drove over there first thing, only to be told that the remote wasn’t covered under warranty. They wanted her to pay $100, so she called me. I told her that was bullshit, and heard her tell the guy at the Chevy place that I’d told her not to do it. She told me he then said he’d check into it and see if he could get it covered under warranty. Yeah, right. A few minutes later she called back and told me that the guy had discovered that it was in fact covered under warranty. Geez.
When it comes to trying to get customers to pay themselves for work that’s covered under warranty, some car dealerships are slime. I told Barbara I could get a new OEM Chevy-branded remote on Amazon.com for less than $20. Of course, programming it requires special equipment that only a Chevy dealership or an automotive locksmith has access to. I’m told that programming the remote takes about 12 seconds, literally, and that most dealerships will do it for free as a courtesy. I think I’ll buy one of those Chevy-branded remotes on Amazon as a spare and see if I can get one of the local Chevy dealerships to program it for me at little or no cost.