Un-Dent-Mobile Part 1

Back in 2007 my poor ole pickup was backed into. I was at the city transfer station a place you can dump construction material if you are a city resident. And the clown backed into my truck and drove off. Not fun. The cops didn’t care, I filed papers with the state and nothing happened. Since then I have been driving a dent-mobile. The front passenger fender has a nice set of dent and scratches that I just haven’t done anything about. Well actually I tried to get insurance involved but because the damage was $20 or so less than my deductible of a thousand bucks so they couldn’t help. Nice. But that is the risk of having a high deductible I guess.

So anyway my buddy LJ gave sent me a link to this website that allows you to search the inventories of most of the salvage yards in the country. So every once and a while I would search for a fender from a truck that matched mine. I found one four or five months after the collision (not an accident the guy was just stupid) but it had a pin stripe where mine doesn’t bummer. Nothing else has shown up in the last couple years close to home. So I tried changing my tactics and looked close to my client. Sure enough I found one an hour and a half away from my client. So I decided to buy it and drive it home. $75 dollars for a fender with a couple quarter sized dings is a lot better than $500 for a new one that needs $300 of paint. One day after a client service day where we volunteered at some charities I skipped the party afterwards and drove up to Springfield Missouri.

The drive itself was uneventful. The salvage yard is on the edge of the city and defiantly on the other side of the tracks. Nothing in the area was up kept, there were abandoned warehouses, broken down cars along the road, tons of pot holes, and the whole area seemed littered with garbage. When I found the place I pulled in and the rental car was easily the newest in the area. But I have been to salvage yards before and this isn’t too uncommon. Coming out of the building was a guy who I don’t think has worn a shirt in 5 years; all he was wearing were cut off shorts and sandals. His skin was a dark tan color and seriously looked like leather. He was friendly enough greeting me with a “Hi” I answered “How’s it going?” He responded simply “it’s goin.” Of course he mumbled it sounding a little bit like Boomhower from King of the Hill. I figured it was just a local coming to get parts for his car. Nope.

In fact this fellow was an employee. When I walked in there were two more gentlemen wearing the exact same outfits. It must have been the company uniform. No shirt, sandals, and a cut off. A third guy walked in wearing the same ensemble but with an old muscle shirt and a red trucker’s cap. It was a scene. The decorations of the place include a mix of three different kinds of items. Notices to customers about return policies or warnings on buying used electronic items, Christian posters like I have never seen, and very off beat and somewhat dirty jokes! The second category was a new one to me. They had a poster talking about Jesus’ race car (I didn’t follow it), one denouncing evolution, and a couple others with various quotes that didn’t seem to go with the what the poster was actually trying to say. But hey they had the fender I needed and it was a good price so I bought and drove it back to the client site.

Now I had to figure out what to do with it. I put it in my room in the corporate apartment. So for a month a half I had a truck fender sitting in my room. I figured to get it home I would just drive the rental car home instead of flying. There would be no way to ship the fender or put it on the plane so that is what I did. I drove the 9 hours home one Thursday afternoon and back again Sunday night. No the most pleasant thing but when you consider it normally took me 6 hours to get there Mondays and 4 hours to get home it was only 8 extra hours but now the fender is in my garage. Of course my truck is still the dent-mobile until I get the motivation to install the new part.