The next day I went to the impound lot holding our car.
I signed in and talked with one of their techs, Ruben. He told me where my car was and said he’d meet me at the car. He got up and walked out. I got in my car to drive around to our car. I passed him as he was walking and gave him a lift.
The car still didn’t look bad. The front bumper was messed up, and the windshield was spidered where Jeanette hit it. The back bumper was messed up and it hadn’t been when I left the scene of the accident. I suspect the wrecker damaged the back bumper when they towed the car. I went to work on getting all of our stuff out of our car. You don’t realize how much shtuff you accumulate in your car until you have to clean it out. I looked all through the car for my glasses. No luck. Got anything out of the car that wasn’t miscellaneous paper or obvious garbage. I noted all the doors worked fine, including the hatch in the back.
Ruben left part way through my cleaning the car out and said to come talk to him when I was done. I drove back around to the office and went inside to talk to him.
He said the insurance company had already taken care of the fee for the car being stored at the impound. Then he asked me what to do with the car. I told him I thought it was staying at the impound until the insurance company decided what to do with it. Ruben said he could move it to the body shop, that it was easier for the insurance adjuster to inspect the car there. I told him if that wasn’t a problem for them, fine, but I thought we should call the insurance guy to find out what they were going to do. Ruben then turned me over to his associate (also named Ruben – maybe they were all named Ruben like everyone was named Bruce in the Philosopher sketch on Monty Python?) Then Ruben hands me a page and tells me all the places I have to initial and sign. I read the thing over. It is a list of fees (over $1000) for what they will charge me if the insurance company totaled the car. I told him that was a lot of fees and I’d been told that most of the time insurance companies would total a car if the airbags were deployed. Ruben said he replaced airbags on a car all the time and it was no big deal. I was uncomfortable signing the document (and still not sure why I had to do so) but went ahead. They bid me good day and I left.
There’s a maxim in business that people do business with people they know, like and trust. I didn’t know these guys. Because I didn’t know then I was sure if I liked them. I was certainly at the point I didn’t trust them.
Later I got a text from the insurance adjuster saying he’d be by later that day to assess the damage to the car and not to sign anything. I texted back and told him it was too late, I’d already signed the paperwork. It’d been nice if someone in the insurance company would have given me that tidbit of information earlier in the process.
The upshot of all this is that I got a text later in the day from the adjuster saying they called the car a total loss, and the claim was being turned over to the total loss team, and they would contact me. So far, nothing from them.