Unfiltered Story #314706

One day after work, I went to the drive-through pharmacy attached to a grocery store to pick up prenatal vitamins. There were a couple of cars ahead of me in line, so I turned off the engine. When it was my turn, my car wouldn’t turn back on. No lights, no sounds, completely dead. This was twenty years ago, before I had a cell phone. So I went inside the pharmacy to borrow their phone at the counter. First, I called my husband, who worked near there but couldn’t leave for a couple of hours. He told me to look for the phone number inside the car to call the roadside assistance service. Another trip out to the car to get the number, then back inside to borrow the phone. Meanwhile, other customers at the drive-through were starting to get annoyed because my car was partially blocking the lane. None of them offered to help me move the car, even though I was quite obviously too pregnant to want to push the car myself. I called the roadside assistance service, and they asked me for the mileage on the car. I don’t know anything about cars, and I’ve never paid attention to the mileage. Because the car was completely dead, there wasn’t even any way to look it up. So I told the customer service representative that I had no idea. They kept asking for a number, but I had no clue. Finally, the representative suggested a specific number, and asked me whether that could be it. I said it was possible, but I really don’t know. The representative said in that case, they couldn’t help me because I was no longer eligible for the service, and hung up. I called my husband back and told him what happened. He was furious that they wouldn’t help me, and promised to sort out the problem when he was able to leave work.
In the meantime, I was still trying to get my prescription filled at the pharmacy. Making the day even worse, my credit card was declined. After some confusion from other customers at the pharmacy counter who overheard my phone call to the roadside assistance service but thought I was calling the credit card company, I learned that no one’s credit cards were working. Although it seemed like nothing was going right that day, in the end everything turned out OK. My husband was able to leave work, push the car out of the way, and convince the roadside assistance service to come out to help (with strongly worded complaints about how they had tried to take advantage of me). The pharmacy’s credit card system came back online and I was finally able to pick up my prescription, and go home and relax after such a stressful day.