Car Break-in

Thursday was supposed to be a perfect or at least a busy day. Our daughter had a doctor's appointment, I was scheduled to shadow a surgery and the rest of the day was to be spent working. The race of morning caught us all leaving our house, me ahead with Ben and Laura following close behind. As I descended the stairs, I looked out at our car sitting just in the parking lot with the front hood up. It took about 10 seconds for me to realize what had just happened, I thought someone had parked a similar car in parking spot and was doing maintenance on it. Once the connection was made that this was indeed our car, I noticed the smashed window and the missing battery. I'll called up to Laura that our car was broken in to and the next 5min was chaos.

I immediately called the police and I set about surveying the damage. The driver's side rear vent window was broken in and appears to be how they got in. The glove compartment was open, but from all appearances nothing else was damaged or taken from inside the car. The engine compartment was another matter. The battery was gone, which, if that was all that was done would have been a great blessing. Unfortunately, to remove the battery, the thieves decided to cut all the wires to the battery, so a simple replace the battery was out of the question.

About that time, the policeman showed up and did his thing. I called insurance about the glass and I was very grateful that we had just put complete glass coverage on our coverage. The replacement glass would have cost $617! As it was, it did not cost us a dime. The battery, however, is another story in and of itself.

Since the battery was cut out, we needed to replace the cables. Well, GM decided that the cables needed to be Original Equipment stuff, so a quick drive to Checker's was out of the question. We eventually found the cables and set about to put them in the car. Turns out 3 of the 4 cables were pretty easy. The fourth, however, turned out to be situated behind an engine mount in an extremely inaccessible place. There was no way I, with my feeble selection of tools, was going to get this cable situated. This is where our incredible ward members came to the rescue. An incredible auto mechanic in our ward was able to get the last cable in place in about an hour. If anyone needs a really, really good mechanic and are in Phoenix, let me know, I'll hook you up!

All told, the whole event set up back $150. Not bad, it could have been a lot worse, and, of course, I can think of an infinite number things to spend my $150 on, but none of us were hurt, which is the most important thing of all.