Dear Beaurepaires

I feel this letter may not end as well as I imagined it would, because you put stickers on my car.

I can’t believe the terrific service I had and high esteem in which I held your Kent Terrace establishment until 4.55pm today. I had the misfortune of discovering a totally flat tyre on my Audi yesterday morning, on the day it was due for it’s annual service, which unfortunately due to the age (gulp) of the car now has caused me much financial anxiety today. However, the shining light in all this was the service I received from your Kent Terrace store. In anticipation of the Audi dealer sourcing tyres for me (I knew they were all getting pretty bald, let alone the punctured one) I rang your shop a couple of times, first for a price on one tyre, then on all 4. Just in case. They guy was quite patient with me. When Audi rang me once they’d got the car in pieces to tell me I needed not one but 2 tyres, and what their price was, and the great list of other oils and belts and plugs and fluids, I decided that I would have to source the tyres myself, despite their recommendation that their tyres would be a lot better for the car. So, I’m in the city, my car’s in bits on the almost-suburbs, and as with Wellington the last 6 weeks, it was raining. So I rang my Beaurepaires man again and managed to get him to agree to go down the road to the Audi dealership when the car was put back together, take it back to your shop and put on the new tyres, and then drop it back so Audi could complete the warrant. Fantastic. What a great guy! What great service! I was so grateful – they guy didn’t know me from a bar of soap! He just told me to come in a pay later when I’d gone to pick the car up. It all worked like clockwork and I didn’t seem to piss the Audi guy off too much (the one that likes the car … which is obviously important!) so what started out to be a pretty bad car day (on top of all this other stuff it had no petrol and was filthy from the trip to Raetihi) was not so bad in the end.

Until I arrived at Audi and from the damn road could see a bumper sticker. What were you thinking? Was is all the other stickers on the car, you know ‘Vote for Obama’, ‘I like rainbows’, ‘Baby on board’, ‘Wake up with a Breeze’, ‘If you can read this you’re too f*&%#$@ close’, ‘My husband drives our big car’ etc that led you to believe I liked stickers? Or the haphazard stickering of others before you putting registration, warrant, tyre and oil stickers any goddamn place they liked on the windshield which meant that you stuck your SECOND sticker out to the SIDE? Did you not see the almost rulered line that the others followed? The ones that were there even? I suppose it’s my bad – I have trained Audi to put all non-legally required stickers on the inside of the driver’s door and not all over the windshield, and I never thought to tell you. Even though the stickers are orange (not that you have any choice really) I don’t feel at all enamoured with them. Lucky for you whether due to the rain, the newly washed and polished exterior or the talons I have for fingernails, the second highlight of my day was being able to get the sticker off the back hatch without leaving any residue.