Working Hard for The Money

I had another one of my hair-brained schemes the other day. I'm always looking for ways to bring in more money & save it up. I 'm a big saver & tend to spend more on loved ones then myself. So since we've had the recent car purchase & with Phil going back to school, I thought it was valid to want to pull in some extra cash. There is a publication that gets delivered in our neighborhood. We'll call it the Neighborhood News. In the NN I saw an ad that you could get extra money to deliver the NN & to email if you were interested. I emailed them right up & didn't hear anything. Figured they filled up fast since it was summertime & there were prob. a lot of college kids home for the summer until I got a phone call 2 weeks ago. Those of you locals know that 2 weeks ago we had record highs in temp on the weekend. The lady called & said that someone had cancelled their route & they needed to have the NN distributed by Tuesday & she told me how much it was & that it was only 400 houses & was I interested? Well of course I was! :) We were having a lazy Saturday so we were able to meet her in town to get the NN that was already supposed to be stuffed in the bags that you hang on the doors. - only to later find out that she lived in my neighborhood & I could have walked to her house to get them-
Well when we met she noticed that there were not in fact stuffed so she told me how much more I would get for stuffing them. Then she told me that the neighborhood had to be done by Tuesday (it was about 4PM on Saturday). Then I realized that 400 houses, is well FOUR HUNDRED houses. I will just come right out and tell you I am NOT directionally savy in any sense. The way the neighborhood was laid out practically every street was connected to the next so it would be hard to just stay on one side of the street without missing houses. We had plans with our Lifegroup for Sunday night, Phil had school on Monday & I didn't want to hand them out last minute. Now you are prob. wondering why does it matter if phil had school on Monday? Well I roped him in to help me with MY project because of the amount of houses & because it was so freaking hot. So we traveled out to the neighborhood, and for 3 straight hours on Saturday night in the heat we handed out the NN on all the doors. It wouldn't have taken nearly that long if you didn't have to actually walk up to every door of all 400 houses, which I knew I would have to do, but didn't realize how much time that would add. We ran out of daylight on Saturday & finished up the last 100 or so homes on Sunday after church, again in the blistering heat. I swear I sweated off at least 4 pounds that weekend, but never fear I ate plenty of Salsarita's with the Lifers that night. I am going to continue to try & hand out the NN as new routes become available, but I told the lady in charge that I think I would prefer to do smaller neighborhoods. (You know that way I don't have to rope my wonderful husband - who by the way has been roped into plenty of other 'I'm in over my head' projects that I decide to take on without ever complaining.)

Saturn of Greenville - her take

Although I was lucky enough to have Phil deal w/ all of the issues & UTTER & COMPLETE LACK of customer service there are a few things I want to expand on
(back story: my car died in Bi-lo's parking lot on Sunday & AAA had to tow it to Saturn. Our friend Casey took me to Bi-lo to get Phil's car keys & then to work where Phil's car was so that I could drive back to Saturn to pick him up - Thanks Casey!) Monday morning Saturn calls & tells us that the starter is bad & just for example sake let's say they said it was going to be 200 (they didn't it was more). So phil gave them the green flag to fix it. When they called they also said that the timing belt was bad ($700 to replace) and that the oil filter need a solution (bought at your local auto store for about $10) that would cost $150. Phil said no to both of those. When he went to Saturn to get the car w/ it's newly installed over-priced starter they informed him that it was actually going to more than they quoted on the phone (they can apparently legally do this as long as it's not 10% more than the original quote). A discussion w/ the manager that happened to be standing there lead to him admitting that they overcharge for their parts. On drive back to work it seemed that the timing belt was now making noise & it hadn't last time we drove it on Sunday. P got back to work & called Saturn only to be told that they may not have filled up the oil like they told him they were going to & that the reason it was making that noise was because of the belt not working, or it was because the car was low on oil, or the belt, or the oil (you get the idea). they offered to fill up the oil if he brought the car back. While they were filling the oil, the mechanic was sure to tell P that you just can't run a car this low on oil, it's not good for the car - umm yeah that's why we told you to fill up the oil- Since you can't, apparently, run your car w/ a bad belt either we will be taking it in this weekend (NOT TO SATURN) to get looked at. Donations can be made to either Phil or myself towards the purchase of a new belt - or maybe a new car since the Saturn isn't worth much more than 2K at this point. oh & one more thing. I was looking over the invoice after all of this had happened & they noted on there that the Saturn started fine for them Monday a.m. had we known that we would have driven it elsewhere.
UPDATED : phil & i cross-posted on this at the same time so there will be repeats in my post vs. his