Talk has turned to completion of all the repairs that have been taken on and we can begin planning our departure day. But what a difference a day makes. We have gone from sub-freezing night time temperatures to the Lion of March rearing its head, spawning a powerful mix of thunderstorms and freezing rain. Our first opportunity to head south appears it will be blocked by what both the local and national weathermen are calling a "significant and potentially dangerous group of storms stretching from coast to coast."
The last thing to finish before we could go is the repositioning and re-cabling of the interior dome emitter for our cell phone booster. Even with express shipping it took a number of days to custom fabricate the cable and get it to us and then the fishing of the new cable through its route to the new termination point turned out to be a challenge for the service specialist. But I have to give him credit, he stayed at it and exhibited an enormous amount of patience to get the job done. However this was at least a couple more days of work at a labor rate of a minimum of $95/hr and the thought of paying the repair bill is looming large in my mind. I have called the credit card company to give them advance warning of a significant charge, possibly five figures, in the next 48 hours.
It has been a couple of days now and it is a Thursday. The repairs are winding up and they are telling us we will be ready to go at the end of the day. The weatherman's predictions are coming to be, multi-car pile ups, eighteen wheelers blown off the road, flooded roads and all directly in the path we need to take. There is no route south that looks like a good idea to take. But New Horizons to the rescue again. They said; "No problem, just stay hooked up here until the weather clears." They just wanted us to move from in front of the service center around to where the factory does delivery of its new rigs to their owners. This also put us parked next to our customer lounge companions with the decapitated roof. They too were finishing up. It had been six weeks for them and they couldn't wait to get back in their own rig and on their way. Cyndee and I can't imagine, we had only been getting through this repair thing for two weeks, they were at three times that! Their first direction of travel was to be west on I-70 to Denver and then Colorado Springs. The roads were clear in that direction, they would be getting out of here before us.
It's Friday morning, time to pay the damages. The sky is brilliant blue and last night's cold snap has my breath visible two feet in front of me as I make the walk to the billing department. Even with the sting of the cold my gait shows no sign of hurry. My hand on the door, I pause, my head and shoulders drop. I take a deep breath and tell myself; "Aahh, it's only money" and go inside.
The clerk sees me and starts looking in her folders to get the invoice out but comes up empty handed. She asks me to wait while she checked with Ken the service manager to see if he had not finished the paperwork yet. In a couple of minutes Ken appeared and waived me over. I approached and jokingly asked if the bill was so big that they ran out of paper. He chuckled and replied; "Nah, there is no bill because there will be no charge." I stood there, slack-jawed, stunned. "Wait, what?" "Yeah" he said; "Let's call it even for the inconvenience you have had." Still stunned I was hard pressed to even express a simple thank you. Eventually I had the urge to jump on him and give him a big ol' wet kiss but thought better of it before acting. Instead I just kept saying thanks and thinking maybe I should go before he had second thoughts. The return to the rig was very different than my departure, there was a skip in my step and I have no recollection of the cold. I guess that is my reaction to shock.
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