I took Scott to work this morning for Barnes & Noble’s after-Christmas doorbuster sale that starts today. I pulled in to my driveway and parked my 2007 Santa Fe and was fiddling around cleaning things up and I put a check that has Christmas money on it behind the visor. When I opened the visor everything that I had put there, mostly just coupons that were expired all came tumbling out and all over the place. No big thing, so I start picking up whats in the car and since I had the drivers door open some of the slips fell out onto the driveway. I got out of my car, bent over and started picking up the debris, as I’m not one for littering. I looked up and at a sharp angle back at my car and my eyes settled on the rear passenger window and the interior light was on, I noticed something out of place and opened the door and looked closer.

The ceiling mounted handle for passengers to enter and exit was pulled out on one side and hanging drunkenly askew. I looked all around it looking for damage, perhaps something pulled out of the frame or something else and all I saw was the screw that held it together lolling in it’s case as part of the handle. I opened the case with a fingernail and the screw shuffled out and onto the floor in the rear drivers passenger side. I went inside, searched high and low and found a serviceable phillips head screwdriver in the basement and went back outside. I reassembled the handle and screwed it back into the frame of my vehicle. I tightened it up and then went around to the other handles and tightened them up too. All in all, not a huge problem.

But what does bother me is that this happened to someone who I had in my car, a friend, and they didn’t report what happened to me so I could take care of it. I don’t know who used that handle, and I don’t know if it failed while they were using it or if they used it and then it just jostled apart, but those sort of things don’t just happen on their own. Ceiling mounted handles like that just don’t shimmy until they run out their screws and just fall on the floor. What bothers me is that nobody noticed and nobody thought to draw my attention to a problem with my car, just use it and if it’s broken, ignore it – that way maybe they thought to escape responsibility for their actions? How do I know? It’s not like I would have dragged them to a repair place and made them pay for damaging my car – it was just a screw, easy fix. It’s not really the severity of the damage either that upsets me, it’s that nobody took responsibility for it when it happened.

I can’t assign blame and perhaps the person who broke it doesn’t know they broke it, therefore nobody is to blame. It does strike me that people in general are rather unobservant at least, if a handle seems jiggly or shaky perhaps you should tell the owner that there might be a problem coming down the pike? Car handles, especially those ceiling mounted ones are supposed to be firmly affixed to their assemblies. Perhaps I ask too much of people to notice such things.

As it is, there are new rules for being a passenger in my car. I value my car and I’m still making payments on the vehicle, so since people won’t grace me with responsibility or even basic observational reports I will have to insist that all use of the ceiling handles be forthwith out of bounds. You will have to enter and exit my vehicle without them and if you can’t do that, then you should find some other vehicle to use. My car is important to me as is it’s value and it not being broken. I also will be making regular inspections now to ensure that my vehicle is respected by those that I transport with it, because nobody is observant enough or respects me enough to let me know when things are falling apart.

It’s a sad statement that I have to do this, but this isn’t the only mystery damage I’ve had to deal with either. Someone or something put a foot-sized hole in the drywall in the upstairs and never thought to even mention it until I discovered it later on. That was fixed many moons ago, but either I’m plagued with an occasional poltergeist who is out to mildly irritate me or I have someone in my midst who lacks the basic respect and responsibility of being an adult. One of those is more likely than the other. Since I don’t know who did what, I can’t address this open letter to anyone in particular. Know that I find your lack of respect, responsibility, and observation to be cowardly and shameful. Don’t come forward and don’t take the blame for it now, but in the future, and for anything else you may accidentally damage, think upon these words and be an adult.