So.. I finally get a much needed vacation, and about 3:00 today I dropped my wife off at work. I came home parked the STR. And came inside for about an hour to do a few things before i ran some errands. I come out at about 5 and low and behold, a nice big dent on my hood above the washer from what looks to be a baseball. And.. now theres no kids outside.... like its a fricken ghost town.

So tomorrow, I get to take the STR to the body shop to see how much a paintless dent removal is going to cost me on my vacation. im guessing $200

Doesnt anyone teach their kids to own up to **** anymore? damn im pissed.

 

This is just wrong , I am sorry to hear about that nasty incident . Parents should learn their childiren how not to make bad things but actually it must be in their nature knowing that they're about to make a bad thing

 

You could always go door to door. Be very polite and never angry. You might be surprised. I certainly hope so. It's not a good thing for you to have such opinions about other people's children even if they're justified. It's poisonous.

Non car type people frequently don't get it.

Good luck.

 

To me its about respect. Its the same where i park at home as it is in a mall. People who ding your door and just walk off have no respect for other peoples property. One reason im usually the guy parked out in the middle of nowhere. And it seems it is what people are teaching their kids by not setting a good example. I Try to teach my son to be better by setting an example, I damage something, I take care of it. I do something I own up to it. But who knows, maybe he'll miss the point too. All we can do is try.
Im not going to go door to door to find out who did it. I have a few suspects in mind but no real proof. I dont really feel like hearing... "my son damaged your car? oh not my angel." So theres no real point. I know a good place that removes dents without painting and their pretty reasonable, I just needed to vent a bit. Im all good now. Ill find out how much they can fix it for and when tomorrow.

 

Hmm...I can kind of relate a little to Maddyns comments. Not ALL people bring their children up the same way.
Mince were brought up to have manners and discipline and respect for their elders.....thats fast becoming a thing of the past.

I was sitting in the house one day, when a neighbour came to my door with a complaint ( a rare occurence ) saying that my kids had been throwing stones and one of them had hit her car, she was quite angry of course.
My reaction was...my kids??
She again re iterated saying how they were running around, causing a fuss and had damaged her car....
My reaction again was....My kids????
Anyhow, I said I would find my boys and ask them about it and call to see her in 10 mins or so. I found my boys and asked the question ( they know how I hate lying )...I said to them, think very carefully before you answer beacuse we will be visiting this person shortly, so make sure you tell the truth.
They swore blind it wasn't them, they weren't even there, so I was prepared to argue their case and stand behind them.
Got to the door and immediately her face fell, she apologised immediately saying it wasn't my boys and she was so sorry.

Unfortunately, we have other neighbours who let think its ok to let their children play football in the street, where the ball can be bouncing off cars at £30k - £40k

This was ok maybe 30+ years ago in council estates where I used to live, but not now in more modern times and much better areas where it costs much more to live.

Unortunately, not everyone has the same ideals

 

That's not the way to go about it. Don't accuse just ask if they know what may have happened? You might hear something later on who knows.

Don't even get me started on door dings ...

 

I have the same set of neighbors with the football play in the streets. If and when something happens to my car their house will be the first one I visit.

 

ok, so slightly off topic a little.....

I'm not a huge fan of pets ( dogs or cats )....I like them, don't get me wrong but I just dont have the time or energy to devote to them, so think its unfair all round to have one.

Some of my neighbours have dogs and cats.
The dogs ( 3 in one household - 1 large and 2 small ) sometimes bark incessantly all day long, at the postman, cars going by and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. When the 3 ofthem get going its a real racket thatc an reverberate around the street.
Others have cats, which trawl around the place crapping everywhere, but their own back yard and then caterwailing at all times of the night and into the early hours. Don't forget of course the cats that like to sit on the bonnet of a car freshly arrived home to get the heat = scratch marks.....nice

If they want to have pets, thats fine, its a free country, but must they inflict all their negatives on everyone else?

Rant over.......

Maybe we should start a neighbours thread? We could post into it about the good / great neighbours and the not so good ones too.
I''d bet there'd be some great stories and some horrors too

 

Never had kids. My observation is that people that do somehow think everyone else in the world is supposed to deal with them. Much like Jim's observations about pet owners.

 

Jim I have found in the past a nice well aimed garden hose with strong spray attachment works wonders on those damn neighborhood cats!!!

 

I feel your pain, and I hope it works out for you. But that reason alone is why I bought vandalism insurance with a $50 deductable.

 

That would make me irate in short order.

I dropped the SAAB off last night to have a few small dings worked out via paintless dent removal. $200 is probably in the neighborhood if it is not on a crease or compound curve.

I have a very small ding on the roof of the SAAB from a rock thrown by a dump truck ahead of me, he didn't have his tarp on. To work it out they quoted me $500 - have to remove the headliner and stuff. I'll live with it.

If you live near bfsgross - his rock throwin' boy would be my prime suspect! LOL...

 

Well, itll be $175 to remove it, and the PDR guy goes to the shop i use on wednesdays. So i drop off tomorrow by 9 am and theyll have it done by 3.

Let me say that this is a bs way to spend ones vacation.. sigh. On that note, im going to find a pool and go swim. to bad the pool im thinking of(the gym) doesnt have a bar or fruity drinks with umbrellas

Edit: Got a call, they moved it to thursday.

 

Jim, you want to get the cats off of your car, try this trick:

-park your car at home and then take about a 3 foot (1 meter) long piece of duct tape and lay it across your hood with the sticky side up. May want to use a little bit of scotch tape to hold down the ends or do this on a calm night. See if the tape is there in the morning. If a cat walks across the hood of your car, they are more than likely going to step into the tape and they are going to fight like hell to get the tape off of their feet as the hate the feeling of the tape there. They will quickly learn that your car is not a safe place to be.

just a thought. I want to get a cat, but I am looking at getting something like a Puma. I want a real cat. Going to name it Kitty. LMAO.

 

thermo, I can see a downside to your plan...a couple paws get the sticky tape, then it starts to slide on the paint, paws 3 and 4 extend claws for more traction, panic ensues, directions and normal physics no longer apply; paws 1 through 4 do the flinstones-rubble thing on paint trying to get the heck off. sure, it'll never come back again, but at what cost to the rest of the paint. I dunno, normally, i'm more optimistic, but this one makes gives me the mental DANGER sign.

 

Thermo's advice reminded me of the very 1st James Bond movie , Sean Connery took off his hair and put it on the door to see if his door opens or now w/o his notice . If the hair is off when he take a look at it that means somebody intruded in his room ,nice trick lol

 

I know that I am very lucky and live in a time warp type of bubble. On two occasions in the past when not so near neighbours kids have caused damage that at the time I was unaware of.

My first knowledge of a problem was when their fathers knocked on the door together with the offending kids to inform me about the incidents and offer restitution and apologies.

I became good friends with the parents, and now that the then kids have their own children they still call in to visit when they are in the area.

As for pets, I agree, I can't have another dog (my St Bernard died a couple of years ago) because now I am on my own and could not give it the time required. I don't believe in leaving an animal alone all day.

Living where I do, I don't have any neighbourhood cats, but only yesterday, a neighbour across the valley accidentally let out his pack of hunting dogs. Sure enough they came to visit.

Didn't think anything of it, but an hour later I could hear barking coming from a disused building.

Hmm, it seemed that a couple of the dogs had entered (probably on the scent of rats or whatever) and they had disturbed a whole heap of junk, which had fallen on top of them, leaving them trapped underneath.

I phoned the owner on his mobile to explain the situation and to ask what the dogs were called, I'm not great at entering a building containing trapped and frantic strange dogs.

He told me that the name was Juno, OK says I, but what about the other one? He then told me that all the dogs in the pack were called Juno as it made it easier to call them all in from the fields. Makes sense to me.

He also apologised for not being able to come around and help, but at that time he had is arm inside a cow that was having a problem delivering a large calf.

Took the best part of he morning to empty the building to release the dogs, and then put all the junk back.

Spent a great evening with the farmer and his missus and was quite royally wined and dined.

I think I may have slightly drifted away from the original topic, sorry about that, but if folk tried to get along with their neighbour's even when things go wrong, they may be surprised at how much good can come from a bad situation.

And I'm sure that Maddyn would have had less pent up anger, had someone knocked and apologised. Accidents do happen. I know, I seem to have had a few.

 

Very true, I know accidents happen, and as much as I love my cars, in reality there just metal. People are what really matter. And its not really the cash out of pocket that bothers me.

In 1999 I bought a 2000 Celica GT-S. At the time I was in between houses so I was rooming with my mom for a few months. I came home from work at 5am and went right to bed, my mom left for work at 6am. Well, she was trying not to hit her mirror on the garage(she drove a chevy 1500 silverado) so she turned the wheel and backed out of garage on an angle. Yup you guessed it. She drove right up the hood of a 3 week old car. Around noon she called and woke me up to tell me what happened. My only questions were, are you alright? and.. how do you want to fix this? Then I told her I was going back to sleep, Id look at it later.

Im no stranger to the body shop or accidents. Im more likely to go balistic over a dent not owned up to or a door ding then if someone totals my car cause of an accident.

 

Now who was it who famously said,
"Anyone who hates kids and dawgs can't be all bad".
Leedsman.

 

Here's what you need. My youngest brother has a similar system and he can zoom all the way down the block. He lives on the northwest corner of an intersection and the camera is mounted on the southeast corner of the house. He also has a multi camera system that has a small tv monitor that rotates pics from all cameras. He lives in not the best of neighborhoods and these help him to "see" what's going around, it's more for his safety than anything else.
x-10 has many other systems, just look around...


X10's Vanguard - The Ultimate Surveillance Camera System