Deep seeded frustration....all because of my "not so" Smart Car

Remember a while back, I mentioned a little problem with our new Smart Car, and the alarm system? Well, let me give you a little update. We've owned the car for exactly 66 days as of today, and it has spent 12 days in the shop because of the alarm system. If, by chance, you missed my little report about the alarm system, here's a quickie update-in a nutshell- the darn thing goes off in the middle of the night, for no reason, night, after night, after night.

When we've talked it in to get it looked at, the response has been, "We're sorry, but we can't duplicate the problem" and since they can't seem to duplicate the problem, apparently they do nothing to fix the problem. This does not make me happy. In fact, this makes me very, very angry. We picked the car up from it's most recent stay at the dealership this past Saturday, after it had been sitting there since Tuesday. Same response..."we can't seem to make it malfunction here." So, again we bring it home, with the hopes of having a good night of sleep. We go out with friends, have dinner, see a movie, come home, and hit the sack. Low and behold, we sleep through the night, and awake on Sunday morning overjoyed at the prospect of maybe, somehow, they have fixed something.

That was short lived. At 1:45am Monday morning, it goes off again. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, someone must be outside messing around with the car, trying to break in or something. This time, luckily, my hubby and I both make a note of the exact time, before he runs out to disable the alarm. Later Monday morning...oh, around 7:00am or so, we go to our computer, and pull up the recordings from our surveillance camera at the exact time we heard the alarm start. There it is, plain as day - NOTHING disturbing the car at all. Not a bird. Not a cat, not a mouse...not so much as a moth landing on the thing - yet there it is - lights flashing, siren going. Frustration mounts. We make a copy of the recording to take to the dealership. Neither of us was able to get to there though, we both had swamped days. "We'll take it in tomorrow," we tell ourselves...

So, again, we go to bed last night, with fingers crossed, hoping for a good, quiet night. These nights remind me of when we had newborn babies, and would get them to sleep, and pray for them to sleep through the night. Our Smart car did not sleep through the night. It woke up at 12:50am, disturbing the whole house, and probably a good part of the neighborhood. Now, I don't know about you, but once I get woken up in the middle of the night, I can't just drop back off to sleep. I stay awake for a long time. Last night (or rather, this morning) when it happened, I was awake for HOURS thinking about the frustration of it all, my temper flaring, mind racing, blood pressure rising. Not good.

Without getting into too many more details, as I've probably already bored you to tears, I took the car back to the Mercedes dealership, brought the videos of the last two nights of the alarm going off, sat there as the service rep. watched them, told him that I either want a completely new alarm system, or a new car...his choice. So, once again, we will wait to hear back so see what they come up with. This time, it'd better be good, real good. Or I will get mad....really mad...which reminds me of a movie preview I saw the other day..."The Incredible Hulk"...that guy's got nothing on my when I haven't slept in a couple of nights!