Yes, it’s another angry open letter. Yes, it’s about my car issues again. But the world needs righting, and I might actually send this one.

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Dear Chrysler Financial,

Your website touts a lofty mission statement:

We are inspired and empowered to deliver exceptional financial products and services.

Let me be among the many who are probably congratulating you for accomplishing your mission. I am an account holder with a lease held by your company and I’ve found your lease transfer process to be exceptionally BAD. My experience trying to sign over my lease to a friend has been painful at best. You really ought to send me some Excedrin with that next round of paperwork.

So far, the lease transfer has progressed thus:

During my initial call to inquire about transfer process, I was routed to a person for whom English is obviously not a first language. He did not understand what I meant by “lease transfer.” I tried “lease assumption.” That did not work either. I was put on hold and waited for a supervisor who fortunately did speak English but unfortunately tried to talk me out of the transfer. I had to cut her off three times, the last very rudely, to get her to just give me the information I want.

Your terms are reasonable: a credit check for the new lessee for $50, and the final transfer for $250. These are normal market practices. Toyota, Honda and Ford have similar standards. It is your time frame that makes you truly exceptional among your peers. After requesting the credit check paperwork, I was informed that I could expect it to be delivered in 10-14 working days. You would do the U.S. Postal Service a grave disservice by assuming such a long delivery time frame, so you managed to delay the blank, not pre-populated paperwork exactly 6 days before even placing it in their capable hands. Trust me, I checked the postmark.

What you were doing with it for those 6 days is anyone’s guess.

The new lessee filled out the credit check form and mailed it, along with the $50 check, the day after we received it. Today I was informed that the credit check was received on January 19th and is processing. Let me clarify: you received a credit check request over a week ago and are still processing it. When I had my credit check to lease the car in the first place, it took two minutes. Unless you are writing to the credit bureaus by hand and sending the inquiries by tugboat, there is no reason that a credit check should take this long.

This processing throughput time is indeed exceptional. Have you even heard of Lean Methodology? It’s not just for manufacturing anymore – give Toyota a call.

The customer service representative then told me that I could not have the actual transfer paperwork until the credit check was complete. When I asked about a time frame for that, he said it might be another week or so, and that the processing of the transfer would take 30 to 35 days after they receive the second round of paperwork back from me. I’m sure you are all very busy figuring out ways to spend that 1.5 billion dollar loan you just received. I hear that you’re planning to use it to make financing more accessible for more customers,and I imagine that probably makes it difficult for you to deal with the financial needs of your existing customers.

Don’t worry. I completely understand.

Chrysler Financial, why can you complete a lease process in mere minutes when I am at a dealership and then fail to provide any kind of timely service when the exact same process is being done again? By the time the transfer is complete, we will have been working on this for over two months. Two months, when it could have taken two days if you wanted to be normal and not exceptional.

Perhaps it’s not so bad to be status quo after all.

Your vision statement is also on your website, and I am sad to inform you that although you accomplish your mission admirably, you fail miserably in achieving this vision:

To be the first choice provider of financial services for our dealers, customers and partners.

If I had no other vehicle financing options, I would buy a car on a high-interest credit card rather than apply for services through Chrysler Financial again.

Unapologetically,

Rebekah

I became friends with Tim this summer. It was a long path from our nasty breakup (two years ago this week, wow) to an actual friendship, with a few layovers in FWB-Land in between. When our best friends’ marriage began breaking up, Tim and I found ourselves thrown into identical situations with our friends and while they were falling apart, he and I had something to share that ended up with us in a much better relationship.

And then of course, E.

Tim and E met for the first time last winter and they got along okay. Like ex-boyfriends do, Tim always thought that the guys I dated weren’t good enough. He was fine with E at first, but in the early days of an improving friendship, I made the critical mistake of calling him once after E and I fought last spring, and it was all downhill from there. E was suddenly the devil to him and nothing he did was right.

E and I broke up and Tim was pleased that I was rid of such a terrible, terrible guy. Then when we got back together and Tim was skeptical, to say the least. For the first few months of the E and Me Do-Over, he was constantly saying “Are you REALLY serious about this?” and “I can’t believe you took him back” and other stuff in a similar vein. He couldn’t believe that we were doing things with each other’s families again (because that is serious shit, I say), so when he called me a few weeks ago and I told him I was with E at his mom’s house in Michigan, I was a bit surprised when he asked:

“What nights is E off work?”

I told him. “Why?”

“We have a pool league that plays on Thursdays.”

He wants E to play pool with him? Huh? “But he works on Thursdays.”

“Yeah, that’s why I was checking. We need a girl to kind of round out our numbers and I wanted to ask you but I didn’t want to have to take you away from him if it was going to be on one of his nights off.”

Whaaaat?

After I picked up my jaw from the floor, I protested about my absolute lack of pool prowess and he explained the way the APA scores so teams need people of all skill levels – even mine. He filled me in on some of the details and told me to ask E if it was okay. “I hope he doesn’t mind because it would be really cool if you could play, but let me know and it’s cool if you can’t.”

E was fine with it. Of course he doesn’t love the idea of me hanging out with my ex-boyfriend for hours every week, but he knows that he has to trust me and so he sent me off with a kiss and some sort of just-try-and-hit-the-ball-straight advice on the first night.

“How was it?” he asked me later.

“Meh,” I replied. “I lost, of course. But I had fun, I guess.”

“Any cute boys there?” he teased.

“There was one who talked to me a lot,” I said, teasing back. “But he looks like a 12 year-old with a beard. He looks like that High School Musical guy.”

“Should I be jealous?”

“I’m not a pedophile and beards aren’t my thing, so no.”

The next week when I went back, I checked in with Tim to see when I was going to play. “You don’t have to worry about <dude> anymore, by the way,” he added after telling me to chalk up at 8:30.

“Huh?”

“He was talking about you like crazy after last week,” he said, not making eye contact. “Asked if you were single and stuff. And I said no.” He made a scribble on the score sheet.

“Good, thanks.”

“You seem really happy with E and guys like <dude> are just bad news. If he doesn’t respect that, tell me and I’ll make him back off.”

“That’s really sweet of you… especially ’cause you don’t even like E.”

“It’s pretty obvious that you’re really happy with him and he’s treating you right this time.” He still won’t look up at me.

“I am. And he is.”

Tim finally lifted his head. “Try to get at least one ball in tonight, okay?” he grunted.

I think that was Tim-ish for ‘I approve.’ And I did win one of my four games that night… only because the other girl scratched on the 8-ball, but hey. The night was full of miracles.

Wow. What an article.

Ashley from Turquoise Ribbons sent that link out on Twitter today… I read the article with my eyebrows up to my hairline in pure shock. This is the sort of thing you might read on an angry person’s rant blog, not on anything resembling a professional website. Well, you shouldn’t read it anywhere because it’s crap, but you know what I mean.

Salma Hayek has a beer gut, which she tries to hide by wearing flowing dresses. She fools no one with this trickery. This lady is fat.

Yes, America Ferrera plays a dowdy, awkward character on TV’s Ugly Betty [...] Hollywood is about being extraordinary, not ordinary. It’s crazy that she has become a poster child for “curvy” women. She basically gives women an excuse to be fat.

Read it and barf. Those women are beautiful.

It’s something of a coincidence that this article was shared with me today because after yet another morning of trying on pants and flinging them away for being too tight around the girl parts,  I was frustrated beyond belief with the fact that I am yet again gaining poundage where I need it least. (Come ON, boobs, do your part here!)

For the record, I know I’m not fat. I know I’m not ugly. I know that a lot of girls would love to have my body. I know a lot of boys who would like to have a grab at it. Ten or so pounds after we broke up, Tim still says I’m his hottest ex-girlfriend. But pants are expensive and I am sick of gaining weight because it costs money, and I don’t have much to spare.

I like to think that I’m pretty positive about my body image. When I say I have a big booty it’s not because I think I’m a chunk, it’s because proportionally, I do. I carry my extra weight south of the hips and north of the knees, and it’s exaggerated by my genetic predisposition to have a sway back. My sister has it too. We get it from grandma. It’s no big deal, it’s just how we are built and frankly, I don’t mind having a little extra cushion back there. It makes stadium bleachers a little more comfortable, and it looks good in the right jeans. Boys like it and so do I. It’s my one womanly curve. (Again, boobs, quit slacking – these fries are for YOU!)

I don’t weigh myself and I don’t (yet) own a scale. It’s never really mattered to me because my weight hasn’t changed much in recent years. I’ve been underweight most of my life and now that I have achieved a healthy weight, it’s not something on my worry radar. But I’ve gained SOMETHING recently, I don’t know how much, and the one reason it really bugs me is because none of my pants fit. I just bought all new pants when I gained my healthy weight a couple of years ago (thank you, Depo-Provera) and now none of them are any good to me. Even my lazy-day slacker jeans are squishing me a bit.

Is it sick that I’m thinking about diet and exercise not because I’m overweight or unhealthy but because I just want my J. Crew cords and my Paper Denim & Cloth Franklyns with the patch pockets to fit again?

So now I will become one of those girls who clings to her “skinny jeans” and puts them away on a high shelf, unwilling to part with them because someday, some wonderful day, she will lose ten pounds and fit in them once more. That depresses me. I will say it flat out and underline it to emphasize my honesty: my weight gain depresses me. It depresses me like my credit card statements and bank account and 401(k) balances depress me.

I went to the nice resale store the other day to drop off some other no-longer-fitting stuff (I physically could not put the jeans in the car) and I looked at pants. They weren’t too expensive, they were in good shape and by decent brands, but I didn’t even try on a single pair. I was sad just looking at them, sad to the point where I gave up completely and figured that if I couldn’t wear MY pants, I wouldn’t wear ANY pants! I will wear dresses! And if/when I do lose weight around the boo-tay, my dresses will still fit. So I bought an adorable green Banana Republic dress for $6.00 to make myself feel better.

I don’t feel better yet. I am cute in my new dress with my sweater-knit tights and kicky citron flats, but I want my pants back.

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**No, I am not pregnant. Last I checked, babies make the bulge in the front. But I peed on the stick anyway, and all is well down there.

**Dress pants are another story. I can’t smoosh myself into dress pants. Tight-around-the-booty can sometimes work with jeans, but NEVER in the office. Those must all be replaced immediately.

“I fought in the Gulf War. There’s no way I could ever vote for someone named Barack HUSSEIN Obama. How could you do that? Would you vote for someone called Hitler?”

Um. Right. And I know this person.

Posted on my company’s webpage, in an advertisement for an MLK Day event that will be taking place today:

Special music will be provided by “Gods Chosen,” [sic] along with other youth groups and artists from the community.

I’ll ignore the fact that they left out an apostrophe (and if you know me even a tiny bit, you’ll understand that this is very difficult) and just laugh at that sentence all day. It kind of tempts me to go to the event just to find out who God’s Chosen really are and see if they can put in a good word for me sometime.

I feel badly for those “other” youth groups and community artists though… talk about being upstaged.