Isn't that your job?

Part of the joys of buying a car is having temporary plates while the dealership orders your new license plates. As we were approaching the day of expiration that also happened to be the day before we were driving the van up to Austin for our vacation, we tried to figure out where those new plates were. Upon calling the dealership we discovered that the plates indeed arrived and were over nighted to us. Whew!

Then, when the mail came and went with no new tags, we got nervous. We called again only to discover that the overnight shipping really was normal snail mail the was assumed to arrive the next day since it was coming from Dallas to San Antonio. To me, overnight and snail mail are not the same. Furthermore, when we explained the perdicament of leaving town and needing to drive with legal license plates we were told just to drive our van illegally. The car dealership seems to have the missing tag perdicament often, because that is their standard protocol. The tell their customers to drive and if pulled over and ticketed, that the customer can then send the ticket to the dealership to pay for it.

Does anyone feel more then strange about this "solution"? First, ok I have about 10 1st problems but here are a few that instantly popped into my mind when they flippently told me to send the ticket on to them. 1st: Said dealership already seems to have a problem getting paper work taken care of on time, why would I trust that they would pay the ticket at all nonetheless in a timely manner? 1st: Who's going to pay my insurance increases and/or remove the ticket from my flawless driving record? (or at least never been caught driving record)? 1st: Isn't that your job to get license plates for the cars you sell?

I was doing my best not to yell at the sweet receptionist. I felt bad that she had to get the brunt of disappointment when she probably had nothing to do with this mess. Then again. . .may be she was the one responsible for cheaping out on the overnight mail. I asked her to figure out the problem and get back with me. Meanwhile, I called the police station to see what could potentially happen in our given situation. I know that once I got pulled over for something (not ticketed) and discovered that my insurance print out had expired. No biggie, the police officer just looked it up in some magical record and we parted ways. I figured the same could be true about the tags that exsist but are lost in mail land. Just so you know, you do have to have the physical tags on the car. On top of getting that piece of devisating news, the police lady remarked "Well, you should have called them before to make sure the plates would arrive." (ok that is a toned down version of her snide comments) Thanks civil servant.

Fernando was tag teamed for the call back. He asked to speak to everyone's manager and discovered that the only solution all those car people could come up with was illegal driving. SO, we the consumer, pay for the goods and the misgivings of the company with no reprocussion to the dealership at all. We can demand nothing nor punish them.

Our solution: squeeze back into our Civic and be grateful that we decided to fly instead of drive to CA which was our original plan.