Tremendous Timing

The majority of the time if someone in my family has a car problem we bring it to our family mechanic. He goes a great job, never tries to up-sell us and charges a fair rate for the work, which is really all you want from a mechanic. However, there are the rare times when Kurt doesn't have the equipment to fix what is broken. When that happens we usually end up going directly to the dealership because they are the most likely place to get the problem fixed correctly, even though they are probably going to charge more than a smaller garage. So, when my parents needed to get some work done on their Ford 500 at the local Ford dealership, they had braced themselves for it to cost a lot of money. Not surprisingly, after diagnosing the issue, it was not going to be a cheap fix. But, as my father likes to point out about car repairs, it is cheaper to fix a car than buy a new one.

But then the weirdest coincidence happened. I was checking my email late last night when I found I had an email from this same dealership. I've been getting them sporadically for years, even though I don't remember signing up for them. (I assume I get them because I used to drive an Explorer and might have brought it there to be repaired at one point.) Most of the time I ignore anything in my Junk folder, but given that my parents car was sitting in their lot I decided to open this one. I discovered it was a couple of coupons, including one for 20% off any service. On a whim I printed it out, fully convinced that they wouldn't honor the coupon for one reason or another. But, I gave it to my dad (who can be intimidating if you don't know him) and told him to give it a shot. Turns out they honored the coupon with no questions or gripes and my parents ended up saving over a hundred bucks. Let that be a lesson to us all: sometimes spam email isn't just someone trying to steal your identity.

-Speaking of Internet scams, there was a story in the news this week about a man in Illinois who recently wired $200,000 to various accounts all over the world which he thought belonged to people who had kidnapped the girl he had been dating over the Internet for the past two and a half years. Apparently he and the girl had never met, but he was convinced she was real after seeing her photo ID (which has since been discovered to be a generic sample of a Florida licence) and was told to pay her ransom. After he paid and she never showed up, he called police who did some digging and found the girl never existed. So far the cops have been unable to track down the people running this scam or get the man any of his money back. Alright, it's clearly wrong that this unfortunate and obviously lonely guy was scammed out of so much money, but I have to ask: how did he make that amount of money while being so gullible? They say a fool and his money are soon parted, but someone has to explain to me how a fool gets that much money to begin with.