I spent most of Sunday washing and doing minor fix-its on the trailer.

That trailer, I love it to pieces, but what a hassle sometimes.

And it’s not the actual vehicle that’s the problem. No, it’s the dealer I bought it from. Googlers, watch out for Dan Gamel RV. They can’t find their ass with both hands; why I expected them to be able to, you know, register my trailer is beyond me. It’s not like that’s something a dealer does every day now.

I bought the thing in October. It’s used, a ’95 model, and I think I got a decent price for a dealer. Only shafted a little versus a private sale, but they do financing, and I wanted that.

So about in April, I started to wonder where in the hell my registration was. That thing was sitting in front of my house with expired tags. So I checked the paper temp registration they taped in the window, and it said it was only good for 90 days.

Oh, that’s not good. I called the DMV first, to see if something was pending, and they said no action had been taken to register it in my name.

Crap. So I started calling Dan Gamel. Couldn’t get competent help to save my life. After I finally got transferred to their corporate offices, I thought everything would be fixed. But no. Apparently they had lost my paperwork, and had no idea what to do. They wanted me to bring the trailer in so they could do a VIN verification. Uh, no. I’m not taking a whole day off to drag that thing down to a dealer two hours away from me to fix their screw up. I suggested that they could just send someone up here to look at it.

Well, that never happened, and they never bothered to call me and tell me it wasn’t going to happen, so I started to get a little pissed. I finally got someone to agree to let me read off the VIN over the phone. I don’t think that’s legal, but what the hell? They should have had it done when the trailer was on their lot.

So another month or two go by. I’m giving them time to get the registration through the DMV. Then I started getting suspicious again, and called the DMV myself. Still no action. By now, not only has the tag expired, but the actual registration, which was for one more year than the tag said, has expired too. So I’ve got a truly useless trailer out on the street in front of my house. I can’t take it anywhere; why am I paying the big bucks for it?

I got pissed. This damn company will refer you all over their phone system without actually giving out phone numbers or full contact names. I finally got a sympathetic operator to forward me to what I hope is a general manager, and I laid my story on him, emphasizing the uselessness of the trailer, the lack of help on their end, and my general state of pissed-offedness.

I think that may have had some small impact, because later that day, I got a phone call (finally!) from some person in charge of registering vehicles. Of course, she claimed to be new on the job, but had tracked down some of my paperwork. Seems the previous moron had thought my trailer was an out of state vehicle, which it’s not, and the whole VIN verification rigmarole was completely useless. Oh, and they may have found some paperwork, but apparently not the actual registration. So this new girl has overnighted something for the previous owner to sign to release it (boy, I bet he was surprised when he got the DMV bill for it this year!) and with any luck they can push it through.

They better, because I have every intention of going camping next month.

My old trailer was more useful than this one, even if I could see the ground through the bathroom wall. What’s a little dry rot compared to incompetent boobs?