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Doom, Gloom and Kaboom?

End of January.

That's the latest guesstimate for when I might get my car back from the body shop.

Want to hear the latest excuse for why it's taking weeks and weeks longer than it was supposed to, to repair $3,200 -- strike that -- $6,500-and-counting in damages from my December run-in with the uninsured Floridian?

Some frame-measuring equipment necessary to repair my vehicle just happened to break. They had to order a new one. Meantime, my partial shell of a car sat there motionless on the garage floor with its guts ripped out and its sheet metal exposed. (I know that because I made the mistake of asking to get into it to retrieve something last week and could barely eat for the rest of the day. It was like seeing a loved one's chest split wide for open heart surgery.)

This was on top of two previous delays when they "whoa" found a lot more damage than expected. One of those "whoa"s required removal of the motor. All coming back to you now?

This latest delay, along with the auto body guy's insistence that "we're still plugging away at it (long pause) as fast as we can," sent me straight to my insurance office for some reassurance that the guy wasn't stringing me along and taking my insurance claim money on an all-inclusive junket to a Turks and Caicos resort.

The State Farm claims rep insists he's telling the whole truth -- apparently I'm just jinxed. Run of bad luck. Could be worse. Could've been tossed through a windshield or pummeled by an airbag or impaled on the gear shift or some such.

The auto body guy has even offered me a loaner car. I think I'll skip it. We have one working car and public transportation if we get into a bind. My luck, that loaner would be a 1975 Ford Pinto. Try a rear-end crash this time?

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