Ever Have One Of Those Days?

Well, it was supposed to be a great weekend with friends, but...

I thought the original plan was for two friends to come up Friday night and be in Des Moines by about 11pm. That meant we'd have the entire day Saturday to do some fun things and then they could head back after dinner on Sunday. That was the original plan. Oh, how things change...

During the course of the week, one friend was keeping in touch and trying to get that plan to work out while the other has some outrageous work hours and hasn't quite figured out how to have a life outside of work for a full weekend. That friend really needs the work and money so you can't blame her, but I firmly believe that if you have a month or more worth of time to plan things correctly then work shouldn't be an excuse. Just my humble opinion and I don't live in their shoes.

The plan did shift a bit so that they would arrive late Friday, but have to leave late Saturday night. That was better, but still made it feel like it would be a short weekend. At least a full day is better than a half day which is better than nothing. Still not as good as a day and a half, though.

I got a call about 11pm Friday, which was their previously scheduled arrival time, that they were finally leaving home. This would put them here about 3-4AM. When I awoke at 6AM, I saw there was a message on my phone. The message said they had hit a deer around Knoxville, IA. I was a bit panicked, but there was no implication of injury. I called them right away and they were sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot awaiting a local mechanic to arrive at work. They were safe, but the car had overheated. I received another call about 8:30AM stating that the car could not be repaired sufficiently to make it to Des Moines and asking for a ride. I took off and picked them up and we went and had a pretty good breakfast in that town. We made the decision to head back to Des Moines, make some calls, and see what they could do to get home.

When we arrived back in Des Moines, I offered some suggestions to get the insurance company handled for a rental and learned how one insurance company tries to avoid helping their customer. I don't mind mentioning Shelter Insurance and stating that their customer service and assistance for their customers who are paying for full coverage on their vehicle is abhorrent. I could not believe what poor service and lack of answers they had for my friend and I even talked to them on her behalf. It was disgusting. Imagine paying full coverage for a nice full size sedan, hitting a deer on the weekend, the most traveled time period, and being told that your insurance company can't help you out until business opens on Monday at the earliest. Imagine paying for rental assistance and being told that you can't get a rental car to get back in time for you to work on Monday. This is what Shelter Insurance's customer service employee Jennifer told my friend. The actual statement was that they could not do anything for their customers until an adjustor is able to see the vehicle and confirm the damage, which could be Monday or Tuesday. My friend had a job to return for on Sunday, which helped shorten the weekend even if they didn't have an accident, and had no way of returning in which her insurance would help her out. Many insurance companies have deals with rental agencies to facilitate the service of their customers, but not Shelter Insurance. Shelter Insurance said they would reimburse my friend if she held on to her receipts and provided them after the adjustor had a chance to look at the car. That means my friend would have had to pay for a rental for several days before she could get her money back. That's also assuming my friend had enough cash on her to plan for a rental. Any insurance company that makes that assumption and doesn't go out of their way to take care of their customers ought to be fired since the customer is the boss. My friend will be dealing with her local agent to see if she wants to continue to do business with them or take it elsewhere. We tried contacting her local agent, but he doesn't work on Saturdays probably assuming that the 800 number for Shelter Insurance customer service would be sufficient. I will never do business with that company and don't recommend anyone else doing business with Shelter Insurance. They have no plan in place to help their customers out who have been in accidents on weekends that is sufficient for their customers. My advice is to take your business elsewhere.

Anyway, back to the rest of the story... My friend had to make some business calls, which also seemed a bit nuts when you take time to visit friends. This took up our entire afternoon until we could actually play some darts and have some steaks on the grill. That took us up until 4:30pm. Both friends were able to shower as they had very little sleep, if any, by this time. So far we'd had a nice breakfast with lots of laughs, a shortened dart game with lots of laughs, and dinner, which was quiet, but delicious. We did visit a lot and did laugh a lot because the friend who was driving really needed it and we are just that good of friends that we do a lot of joking and laughing.. It's just our nature. My roommates even got in on some of it since they were around for dinner, too. No, we didn't get to do anything except dinner and darts that was planned, but we were having some fun in spite of it being a short day and the accident.

At 5pm, the three of us went to a local friend's home for SCARY MOVIE NIGHT! My local friend and I had planned this for the last several weeks and we were going to start it off with the movie SAW. There were about 8-10 people that were interested in our SMN and my local friend really went all out to throw a party with snacks and drinks. The nachos were delicious! My friends that had travelled weren't really into scary movies, but did enjoy this one since it had some thought behind it and wasn't as gory as they had thought. SAW is a great movie and so is the sequel. We did have some laughs there, but we had to leave not long after the movie to be able to meet the ride that was coming to Des Moines to get my friends. I was really hoping for a better movie night, but only one friend came over that was on our planned list. We really had 6 of us there, but there should have been twice that since I had brought two guests and the couple that lives there made up 5 of us. Hopefully, it will get bigger. My local friends are just as fun so we did have some laughs and no stories about me came up, so it was all good.

When we arrived back at my home, we watched one of my favorite comedies, The Sweetest Thing. My visiting friends are women so I knew they would enjoy that movie and I highly recommend the unrated version since there are some huge laughs that weren't in the theatrical version. It was a good time to just sit and relax some more without the intensity of a scary movie and we had some more laughs. Their ride arrived just after the movie ended.

Even with the intense fog and late time, they still decided to leave on Saturday night instead of getting up early after some sleep. Thankfuly, they made it back safely, but they did see a lot of deer on the road and dead deer off the road.

I'm thankful for their safety and hopeful that the next time we plan a weekend that it is planned with more time for the fun stuff we did and more and that there are no accidents in the travelling portion. We tried planning this weekend about two months in advance so maybe I should get them started even earlier to plan the next one. Maybe they will use the time WISELY to maximize the full weekend WITHOUT WORK, WITHOUT INTERRUPTING PHONE CALLS, and hopefully during times of safe travel. I have great friends. They are fun, funny, and glad to live life positively as best as they can. In spite of the accident and in spite of the lack of time, we still had some great fun and that is the most important thing with friends.

Oh, and even with our abbreviated Cricket game of darts, I won by a VERY LARGE score.