Sometimes things happen that are completely out of your control, and when these things happen, you need a network.  Of people, of support, of whatever it takes. One’s network is invaluable in this invariably shitty situations.Like, when you suddenly find yourself living in a city where you need a car and don’t have one. So, your friend lends you their car for the week while they are on vacation. And that car happens to be a really nice car, a Mercedes-Benz.

Then, you park that car at your boyfriend’s apartment complex, in a super safe, family neighborhood. When you wake up, both of the side mirrors are missing. Just gone. Somebody just decided to pull them off and take them.

What the fuck.  Seriously? There wasn’t any other damage to the car, so it could have been much, much worse.  But really, who does that? I guess you can hawk them for a couple hundred dollars on eBay. If you’re the type of low human being who doesn’t care about the poor person who has to pay to replace them.

So I’m standing there, gawking at the car, in utter disbelief that somebody would do this. I start bawling, of course.  I don’t know what to do, so I do what I do every time I don’t know what to do, which is call my boyfriend, who I know will be calm and level-headed and will listen to me cry before patiently helping me figure out what I should do.

But I can’t call him this time. He’s on a plane from San Francisco back to Austin. Since, you know, he just finished moving me out of my apartment in San Francisco and into storage. While I wasn’t even there to help. (Can we say keeper?)

Instead, I call a friend. A friend who knows about cars. This is a car problem, so I reason that he should at least be able to estimate how much it’s going to cost me.  He kindly listens to my tearful account of the situation, and suggests that I call an old mutual friend of ours who, duh, fixes fancy cars.

I call that friend, who tells me to come to his shop first thing the following morning. When I get there, he says that this is a common problem for this model of Mercedes.  I briefly wonder why anybody would ever want an expensive car, or an expensive ANYTHING for that matter, after suddenly realizing that a display of wealth obviously makes you a visibly marked target for petty crime.

He makes a call, then sends me over to his long-time good friend who works in the service department at Mercedes-Benz. Things are looking up a little bit at this point.

I get back in the car, and slowly, carefully drive over to the dealership. Because, in case you didn’t know, it’s really hard to drive without either of your side mirrors. I’ve read that after people get a limb amputated, they continue to have feelings or sensations of trying to use the missing limb. I felt the same way. I kept turning
and deliberately looking over my shoulder when I changed lanes, only to systematically glance at the corner of the window out of habit and realize, Oh wait, THERE IS NOTHING THERE.

While intensely concentrating on my driving and trying to figure out how to get to the damn dealership, I realize something else. I’ve been to this dealership before. And it’s not because I’ve owned a Merecdes. Rather, a guy I’ve known since I was 10 years old works in parts at Mercedes.

I can’t really remember the last time I’ve talked to him, and he’s not in my phone book, but I rapidly dial his number from memory. I explain the situation to him, and he tells me what I already know, which is that buying parts through the dealership will be fuck-all expensive. However, if I give him the VIN number of the car, he can get me wholesale prices on the parts and order them for me.  I pick a nearby place to eat lunch, pull over, and call him back to read off the VIN number.

The verdict isn’t good. Even at wholesale cost, the parts are twice as expensive as I anticipated. It’ll be a whopping $1500. He tells me it’s probably not worth going over to the dealership, because they’ll tell me the same thing, except with a larger price tag. But I go anyway, because my other friend had called his guy on my behalf and told him to expect my arrival.

When I get there, I find the person I’m looking for, who examines the car and verifies that, thankfully, there is no unseen body damage. I tell him that my friend in parts is going to give me wholesale price. Turns out, he has known my friend for many years, and uses the internal extension to give him a call.  From his evaluation of the car, he tells my friend that the perch on the driver’s side is still fine, so I need not replace it. This will hopefully knock a couple hundred dollars off the price of parts.

So, the parts are ordered and on their way, all that is yet to be seen is if her insurance will cover any of it, and if so, how much.

If I had parked the same car in the same place on a different day, it probably wouldn’t have happened. On the other hand, if I’d turned left instead of right at an intersection a month ago, I might have been t-boned by a dump truck and died. Or, if the damage had only cost $50 to fix, everything would be exactly unchanged, yet I’d feel completely different about it.  Existential serendipity just fucks with your head. I think that’s its job.

The moral of the story is that I never know what to do about this kind of shit. However, the people in my network were able to help me out of a really tough spot. Perhaps I could have just gone to the dealership,
laid down my imaginary black card, and magically, monetarily made things better. But alas, I’m still broke from the last situation.

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