tspencer227 | Feb. 1st, 2004

Well I've got the car back, following 33 days in the shop, a 36 hour round trip to and from NY to pick it up, and around $10,000 spent total, $1238.04 coming out of my pocket this past weekend for that. Kenneth and I drove up to New York Friday as soon as I got home from work and got the rental dropped off, and as soon as I woke up Saturday morning at the house, I started taking a good hard look at it.

There was no way in hell Gary's did $10,000 worth of work on that car for everything I found wrong with it.

Now, I don't know if it's just me, but when I work on a car and get the interior dirty I think I'd clean up after myself. Nope. EVERY SINGLE surface in the car was covered with a thick layer of some kind of dust, AND the floormats, which I'd taken especially good care of to protect, were FILTHY. I mean, I'm not just talking dirty here, but COVERED with dirt and grime, stained to the point where I don't think that even shampooing them will get everything out. Somebody owes ME $200 for those.

Then I started walking around and looking at things....

- There's a gap about an inch wide between the front quarter panels and the front bumper around the headlights on each side, so noticable that even my dad's eyes were drawn to it immediately.

- The sunshade for the sunroof is off its track and jammed, meaning and I can't open the sunroof or the sunshade

- The headliner in the interior is loose. (may be related to the sunroof issue)

- On the passenger- side door, the entire housing for the interior door handle is popped out about an inch, looking VERY obvious.

- The power steering fluid was underfilled below the low- level mark, even with the engine warmed up.

- Only one of the windshield washers function (the passenger side), and it's aimed too low to be effective. (found that out the hard way on the drive back down)

And a couple of things I noticed when I started driving:

- the right- rear wheel/ tire (the one that blew in the wreck) is either improperly balanced or improperly aligned, creating a shimmy that was VERY noticable at interstate speeds and made the car EXTREMELY squirrely over rough pavement at said speeds, so much so that I slowed down for most of the ride back.

- After being started cold, the engine doesn't idle normally, but revs between about 1500- 2200 RPM without any inputs from the throttle.

Needless to say I'm just a LITTLE bit PISSED THE FUCK OFF!!!!! I've already made a list of all my complaints, and when I can FINALLY get through to one of Geico's customer service people, we're going to have a nice little chat about Gary's Body Shop, their Satisfaction Guarenteed Policy, and my car, and I know the word "lawsuit" will be used at least once. WHO THE FUCK USES A BODY SHOP THAT CHARGES THIS KIND OF MONEY AND GETS A SHITTY FINAL PRODUCT BACK?????????!!!!!!!!!! So as a word of warning to all of you up in NY, DON'T USE GARY'S BODY SHOP IN ELMIRA, NY. They WILL fuck up your car and charge you double for it, at least. Geico got taken to the cleaners by one of THEIR approved body shops, and the worst part is they greeted my brother at the shop with a smile and couldn't thank either one of us enough. I can ALMOST understand the 33 days part, since they are in the middle of fucking nowhere and there aren't any nearby Honda dealerships, but FUCK!

*Breathes*

OK, I'm gonna go watch the game now and try to forget about this for a while. I'm going to take my car to the Honda dealership down here and have them give everything a VERY thorough check to see what else the body shop fucked up that I haven't found yet. Then SOMEBODY's going to pay to do it RIGHT this time, other than me.