Tri-Star Collision

When some idiot redneck trashed my car with a stolen thirty-​foot trailer one morning by dragging the entire length of the thing along my driver-​side door and fender, I was left in an awful situation: my door would only open about a foot, and I’m built like a refrigerator only not as short. The other place my insurance company referred me to refused to give me a quote (
), so I went to Tri-​Star, the next-​closest place.
Immediately after seeing the damage to my car, Bruce, the main estimator there, disappeared back into his office. He emerged a moment later, wielding what looked like a cross between heavy-​duty garden trowel and something you’d use to hack through jungle underbrush. «I guess we can’t do anything to fuck up this fender any more,» he announced, and then attacked it with the trowel. After a few seconds of grunting and prying at the mangled steel, he removed the trowel-​thing, looked me in the eye, and said, «There. Your door opens now – let’s get you an estimate.» I’m not going to claim that this entire building is staffed by total badasses, but Bruce would enough to make up for the rest of them even if every one of the mechanics stuffed their lockers full of teddy bears and plastered Justin Bieber posters over every surface.
This is the kind of place where, if you get there after they’ve locked up and they’re all in the parking lot, they’ll go back inside to open up the garage door so you can park inside. Unfortunately, for that kind of service there’s always a wait. Here it’s a little over two weeks, and it took another two weeks to get my car back.
I’d hold that against them, but they did such a good job that my landlady yelled at me for not telling her about what she thought was a new car in the parkade, and she had to check in my files to make sure it was the same one.