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

Hooray! Today is the day that the blog design is really done and I can stop messing with it for awhile. Most issues have been resolved and I’m finally very happy with the way this thingie both works and looks – even more so because I did it myself, and that’s a fun feeling. I spent a lot of money this summer on things I couldn’t afford, meaning a professional blog design got cut off the list. I was kind of jealous of the people who had such pretty pages on their own domain names and blog lust kicked in.

But self, I said, can’t YOU just do it? Come on, you had your first webpage on GeoCities and you were messing with basic html when you were 14. You at least knew how to work with if not write javascripts a year later. You can speak binary. Heck, you’re one of the 17 people in the world who remembers what a BBS is because you actually used one. And you have impeccable design skills, really. You can read a book about how to do this and the Intertubes will tremble.

And really? It’s not that hard! I got this guy…

and dedicated a lonely Saturday night to a date with my shiny new laptop. I signed up for a domain name and basic hosting with Tigertech.net and thank you baby Jesus, they pretty much dummy-proofed the startup process for me. Everything in the Dummies book correlated nicely with the way Tigertech has their user page set up. I knew exactly where to go to do my PHP thing and my MySQL thing and all the other thingy-things. Don’t ask me what those are, I just did them AND I DIDN’T HAVE TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TO DO IT.

The Dummies book recommended several FTP programs (file transfer protocol, I knew that one! It moves files from your hard drive to your host server). I chose one called FileZilla. Since the book and my server were so helpful, it was really easy to get my FTP set up.

I installed the Wordpress.org design and editing software because it runs like good old Wordpress.com and has so many built-in options for customization. They advertise a 5-minute install for the software and the kids are not lying. Simple. If you’ve used Wordpress.com, you’ll love how similar it is to what you’re used to. And if you’ve used Blogger (and I have, so I can say this), you will worship its superiority.

But then came the scariest step. I had to move the blog. All the content, all my writing, the good, bad and ugly of three years just HAD to make it with me in the transfer. I was scared. I ate a peanut butter cup to calm down. The Dummies book spelled it all out for me though, how to export from Wordpress.com and import to Wordpress.org. The book also includes instructions on how to move blogs from Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and I think a few others. It worked! My posts, my categories, my pictures, my blogroll, everything imported. Not all platforms will import EVERYTHING, categories and whatnot, but the book explains it further,

CAVEAT: Four posts randomly went missing, and I only noticed because my post count at the old host was 4 more than my post count after the import. Check this before you delete anything from your old blog! Since my old blog still existed, I just copied and pasted the text and entered the correct publishing date and those posts are online with the new blog now. A small pain, but easy enough to fix.

Now the fun part! Aesthetics!

Wordpress.org starts off your blog, even if you’ve imported it, with its own very basic theme, and you get to take it from there. There are gajillions of free themes on themes.wordpress.net, and most of them come with nice instructions about how to upload them via FTP. The Dummies book has info on this too.

I wanted SGB to look unique but I didn’t want to dive into a lot of code to do it. The Dummies book has information about CSS and whatnot, but I was still sweating peanut butter from the blog transfer so I looked for a free theme with opportunity to customize. There were so many! This theme you see here is called Mandigo, and it is by far my favorite of all the themes I looked at and/or tried before settling. You can customize easily with a theme options tool that is built right in – colors, header, columns (how many, where placed), widgets, plugins, all sorts of little stuff that you’d have to change in the code of many other themes. No need for code here – just fill in the blanks! Plus, there’s a user wiki for support and I found a few other tricks on there, like how to make my image header clickable and so on.

(And that comment glitch should be fixed, effective now. Something to do with IE and graphic file types. I dunno. But it’s awesome that I don’t HAVE to understand to fix it! The designer himself wrote to me and helped me out. There’s a lot of support even when you’re self-hosting and you feel like you’re on your own out there.)

I thought about just buying a custom header and building a color scheme around that, but I was dorking around on iStockphoto and found the little redhead up there. It’s soooo uncanny – I have chin-length red hair, green eyes, Converse shoes, and I wear white-rimmed sunglasses. All year. I have three pairs. So I bought the image rights (check out the designer’s portfolio, he has a lot of other graphics if you like that look) and set off to Adobe InDesign to see what I could come up with. Mandigo lets you put in as many headers as you want and will rotate them for you, which is why you often see different subtitles up there. I made the background image in InDesign as well – if you look, you might notice that all the writing is just portions of some of my posts.

There are so many free backgrounds out there as well, and you can have fun making a header if you’re so inclined, or there are some pretty cheap but nice ones available for customization and purchase. Jenn’s Must Love Geek just got a makeover from So Chic Design and they do reasonably priced headers and full custom or premade designs, along with many other design studios. I just got all DIY on it and had some fun, and it turned out pretty well. Even without custom images, Mandigo still offers options for several headers and backgrounds, all built in. I bet if you browse through themes.wordpress.net, you’ll see something that tickles your fancy and you’ll be inspired to try it.

I heart my new blog design. For those of you out there who are thinking about making the jump to self-hosting but are afraid of cost and effort, don’t be! I get my blog hosted for $72/year and I bought one image for $35 and one very important book for $25. That’s IT. That’s what this blog cost. It took one Saturday night and many small tweaks since then, but it’s all mine and if you’re a blogger, you understand how great it feels to produce something that’s all yours and show it off to the Interwebs. It’s the blog equivalent of sweat equity, and sometimes it makes me so happy I just sit and look at it for a bit and think “yay me!”

I do still pride myself on the content of my blog, and it’s a hundred times more important than a color scheme or a widget. If you didn’t love the heart and soul of SGB, you wouldn’t be here and my pretty page would have an audience of one. But I want my kids to go to good schools AND have nice clothes. Now my baby has a brain and a pretty outfit with purple sneakers.

Done! Woo!

</self-aggrandizement>

</shamelessproductpushing>

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post: For worse, for better, for…whatever.

My phone actually rang twice, but it wasn’t until the end of the second missed call that I heard it. I slide my feet off E’s lap and retrieve it from the study.

“Uh-oh,” I say, walking back into the living room.

“What?”

“Two missed calls.” I point at the phone. “Melissa a few minutes ago. Ben just now.”

“I wonder what it is,” he says, twisting his mouth into a frown.

“They had their first marriage counseling thing tonight,” I remind him, flipping the phone open to dial Melissa. “It looks like it did not go well.”

Mel doesn’t pick up and I leave her a quick voicemail. I try Ben next, and he answers with the same small, broken voice he used when he first told me she was leaving. “She doesn’t want to work on it,” he says. “She doesn’t even want to try. It’s completely over.”

I can’t pretend that I didn’t know this would happen, so I make some sort of mumbly noises as he continues, telling me what she said that clued him in to the fact that there really is no chance. I’m shocked that he says these things, not because I didn’t expect him to tell me what went on, but because she’d told me before that she didn’t intend to tell him certain details. “Some of these things could be really hurtful to him,” she’d told me over lunch one day. “I’m leaving and that’s going to hurt him enough, I don’t want to tell him things that will just make it worse.” She was right. So now it’s worse.

I don’t have time to reply to Ben before he says he has to go and hangs up the phone quickly. Sitting back down next to E on the couch, I snuggle into his arm. “Bad, huh?” he asks.

I tell him what was said.

“Ouch,” he says, eyes wide. “Really. OUCH.”

“Yeah.”

My phone beeps with a new text message. It’s Mel, asking if we can meet up and go somewhere to chat. “You don’t mind, do you?” I ask E, even though I know what his answer will be – had BETTER be. “I know we planned to spend the evening together but – “

“Go, baby,” he says gently. “I’ll wait here. You need to be with her right now.”

I slide over and smoosh into his lap, dropping a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you, honey.” He kisses me back. “This sort of simple thing, this is what I need from you. Just understanding when things are hard for me too.”

E hugs me close for a moment. “I know. And I’d never tell you not to go. It’s going to be okay.” I text Mel back, telling her to come pick me up whenever she’s ready, and I go to pack. “What are you getting?” he asks as I head into the kitchen.

“I am getting what is necessary for an evening like this,” I announce, opening the fridge. “I knew there was a reason I saved this thing!” Shoving the bottle and two plastic cups into my (fabulous) new Juicy Couture satchel, I head back out to the living room to wait for her.

“What did you get?” I hold up the Polka Dot Riesling, mine and Melissa’s favorite, and make a pouty face. E frowns at me. “Honey…”

“Pleeeeease.”

“I won’t tell you what to do,” he says resignedly. “This quitting drinking idea was all you, so it’s your decision.”

“Just tonight, it’ll only be tonight. We’ll sit in the park and drink like winos and bond over our troubles and I will come home to you safe and sound.” I hear her car in my driveway and tuck the bottle back in my bag. “Bye, sweetie – I’ll call you if we’re gonna be late or when I know what’s going on.” He just smiles and shakes his head.

I get into the car and immediately pull the plastic cups from the parish picnic out of my bag and plop them in the cupholders. “What are those – “ Mel asks, then sees me reach for the wine. “Woo!” she squeals as I twist the cap off (yeah, it’s the classy kind) and pour us each half a cup. I take a long swallow of mine, savoring the sweetness that is all the sweeter because it’s forbidden.

“All right,” I said. “I talked to him and he told me what you said. And you said you weren’t going to tell him those things – but now you did. What the heck happened?”

“I just… it just came out. It was just something I had to say.” I ask why, what had changed since she said she didn’t want to hurt him with harsh facts. “It started off with the counselor asking us questions,” she said, taking sips from her cup. “Mmm, this is good. But anyway, he was asking us questions and so we were talking to him, and then it really just came to a point where we were talking back and forth to each other and not to the counselor.”

I nod, almost sloshing wine down my jacket as she turns onto the main road. “Did he specifically ASK you about that?” I wonder aloud.

She sighs. “Kind of. But not.” We let it go at that and sip the wine, stopping for a refill at a stoplight. She abruptly lurches right. “Let’s get chocolate martinis!”

Breaking no-drinking vow? In for the penny, in for the pound. This is all about solidarity.

In the Applebee’s parking lot (I told you, we’re classy girls), we park among three cop cars and keep working on the bottle of Riesling, giggling about nothing and saving the crucial conversation for the hard liquor.

“Hi, can I help you ladies with—“

“Two chocolate martinis,” she says quickly. When they land on our table, we swirl the chocolate syrup from the bottom with our straws. “Now,” she says, turning to me mischievously, “now we can talk.”

“Okay. So you told him. WHY?”

“I was mad.”

“And…?”

She sighs and savors a hefty sip of chocolatey goodness. “Bek, he was SO condescending! Said that I could move out, be on my own and just ‘get it out of my system’ like it was some sort of phase, and he insisted that I’d get over this ‘independence thing’ and come back home and be a family again.” I sip and nod in agreement. Ohhhh, the chocolate is making me happy. “It’s like he didn’t take me seriously, like he just had to humor me for a few months and then I’d get over it. Like I hadn’t thought this through already, like I couldn’t possibly make a decision and stick to it.”

“Well, he wants to give you space, Mel, he doesn’t want to pressure you to try and stay right now because that would obviously be counterproductive…”

“I don’t know, it was just the way he said it, like he was treating me like a child, saying ‘Go, go, you’ll be back’ and I KNOW I’m not going back and frankly, I want him to know that. I didn’t know how else to get it through his head.”

“So you told him.”

“So I told him.”

Long, slow swallows of chocolate. Oh, so good. We look at each other and I can tell she’s asking me not to judge her and she can tell I’m trying not to. “I guess you did what you had to do,” I say finally. “I guess it’s kind of like what I did with Bear.”

“You told him the same thing?”

“No. I felt the same thing. I never said it. I couldn’t bring myself to tell a man who loved me, who I loved but was not in love with anymore, that I was no longer emotionally or physically attracted to him. He would have blamed himself for everything that was wrong instead of blaming me, and I was the one who deserved the blame for what went wrong with us.”

“I had to tell him. It just came out.” She signals the waiter for another round of martinis. Tasty drinks are dangerous like that. “But I can’t be stuck in a marriage like that, a marriage where I have to fake the most important things. I’ve been trying Bek, I have, but I can’t fake it anymore.”

“I faked it with Bear sometimes. And I loved him, but we were never super great at… that. But we were practically kids. I thought it would get better.”

“Yeah well, we’ve been together for ten years.”

“But don’t tell me you’ve been faking ten years. That’s not true and you know it and I don’t believe it. You guys have had great times, don’t just write those off because the last six months or a year have been rough. I mean, come on, how many times have you told me how much you love your husband, how you guys have such a great sex life and all that? I mean, walk out of this if you want to but don’t say there was never anything good there.”

She covers her face with her hands as though that will magically make the next round of martinis appear, and then peeks at me through her fingers like a child. “Maybe I wasn’t always telling the whole truth.”

“MEL!” I lean across the table at her. “What the heck?” The waiter brings the martinis and we mumble “thank you” in unison and I get back in her face. “Why would you lie about that? It’s not like I ever just came up and asked you about your sex life, so why even bring it up and brag on it?” And why is everybody lying about being in love these days anyway?

“Because it sounded better than the truth.”

At this we grab greedily at the martinis, both of us feeling the buzz off the wine and the first round. “And the truth, then?” I probe.

“The truth is I don’t know if I should have gotten married so young. Or to him at all. And I did love him and I wanted to make that commitment to him but… Bek, I’m just done. It felt like it could be the right thing at the time but I can see now that it’s not.”

I drink because I’m not sure what to say. So much of this draws me back five years to the wedding I was supposed to have just one month before Melissa’s, to the relationship I ended before I could regret marrying the wrong guy, marrying too young, and having to fake the most important things in life. This could have been me. I have a strong suspicion that it WOULD have been me, with a husband, a baby, a job, and an unshakable feeling of claustrophobia and regret.

I remember my friend Bella, on leaving a marriage begun when she was only 21 or 22, went right out and launched into an affair with someone she said she felt more connected to than she had to her husband for a long time. God, she was funny when she went back into the dating world, going on and on about how this guy understood her and listened to her, and by the way, was extremely well-endowed and knew what to do with it. It was Bella like I’d never seen her before, high on her new freedom and regrets be damned. It’s what I did when I ended my engagement – well, minus the super well-endowed guy.

During the third round, Mel asks about E and I tell her about the events of the last few days. We ponder the mess, what we’ve taken to calling the beautiful mess of our lives. “This is what it means to be a single girl,” I warn her.

I call E when we get back to the car, giddy from three martinis each. Mel doesn’t really want to go home, so we invite her in for awhile and the three of us sit on the porch and talk about her plans for getting a new apartment, getting furniture. Getting a future all her own.

After she leaves, E and I get ready for sleep. “What’s this?” I ask when I see the bubble bath out on the counter. “Were you getting pretty while I was gone?” I tease.

“I was going to make you a bubble bath.” He looks a tiny bit embarrassed and does not meet my eyes. “I thought you’d probably be all stressed. But,” he says, nipping at my waist, “you’re all sloshed and not stressed, so I think I’ll take you to bed instead.”

“Mmm, yes please.”

He’d even done the dishes.