Updates on "Free"

We still have our free Ford Focus. The evaluation lasts one more week, and then we will have to go back to putting miles on our own cars and paying for insurance on two cars again. It’s been fun while it lasted.

A couple of times we’ve had to take the Focus in so engineers could fly down from Ford headquarters in Detroit to make some changes and check some things out based on our survey comments. During these inspections, Ford gives us a free rental car. The first experience was with a Ford Expedition. Although John loves driving cars that sit so tall over the road, it was a bit ridiculous driving around that behemoth with the two of us sitting up in the front seats with about 20 feet of empty space behind us. The second rental was much more practical…or at least, we made great use of it: a Ford F-150 super extended cab something or other. It just so happens that we had it over the weekend, and it also just so happens that we are doing a lot of remodeling at our house…still.

So, it made perfect sense last Thursday night and Saturday to spend hours upon hours at Lowe’s and Home Depot buying things like 12-foot long pieces of crown moulding and baseboards and large boxes of faux wood plantation blinds for all the windows in our house. Granted, it was pouring cats and dogs when we had to return some of the door casing to Lowe’s on Sunday, but it was ever so much more convenient with a free truck to haul the things around in.

Oh, and we finally got our compensation from Ford for agreeing to do this evaluation of the Focus. Let’s just say the baseboards, door frames, and crown moulding in our home are compliments of Ford, including the means of transportation to get them from the store to our house.

This last weekend of "Free" also included free tickets to the Dallas symphony on Friday night, which we drove to in our free truck and parked at in the free parking garage provided by John’s company across the street from the symphony hall.

Yesterday we almost got a free $400 bed frame from Bombay Company, but we responded a bit too late. Oh well. I guess not everything is free.

In a more frustrating instance of Free, our phone stopped working again last Thursday. This time Time Warner said they couldn’t make it out to fix anything for 4 days! This is the second time in the last two months of our “no-risk trial period” that our digital phone has stopped working. By now, the phone works once again and John got Time Warner to give us almost all our money back from the past two months. Plus, yesterday in the mail we found that Time Warner sent us a coupon for a free ticket to Six Flags with the purchase of a $15 off ticket because we’re “valued” customers. All this said, we still would never recommend Time Warner to anyone, not even an enemy.

This ends the tale of "Free." If anyone knows John, none of this news will come as a surprise, but John still wishes to share the entertaining story. Even with all this "Free," nothing has yet to supersede the free computer; that one has been reigning champion of "Free" for nine years now.