Wrong Restroom and $500 of Repairs Required for My Car

Today I went to get my Honda Civic serviced. There was a recall noticed and they needed to replace my airbag. I actually received this notice some time last year, just never really got around to acting on it. Anyway, the service was going to take 4 hours, so I decided to drop by Factoria mall and hang around there. Turns out there’s really not much to do there or I just suck at shopping.

I got Jamba Juice for lunch; went to Big 5 and purchased some knee pads; even went to Target and purchased some workout gloves (I was getting blisters from lifting weights). With that all said and done, I had only spent an hour so far. 3 more to kill.

Anyway, when I was about to leave the main Factoria mall and try other stores on that street, I needed to use the restroom. Found the restrooms on their map and went for it. I was sure I saw the men’s sign before entering the restroom, but once opening the door I noticed something strange. There were only stalls, no urinals. I stepped back outside and looked at the sign again. Turns out I entered the women’s restroom. %$#@! Good thing no one was around or outside the stalls. I quickly left and went further down and found the men’s restroom.

I walked around some more. Turns out they were selling girl scout cookies in front of QFC, so I purchased 2 boxes of thin mints. I felt bad that I didn’t have $8 and needed them to break a $50, but all in all, I now have 2 boxes of thin mints in my freezer.

Anyway, walking around aimlessly for 1 more hour, I explored all of Factoria and found many stores/restaurants I never knew existed. But even then I still had 2 hours to kill. I thought next time this happens I should bring a laptop and find a coffee shop. I found a plaza across from Factoria that had 2 Star Bucks, literally ~10 stores apart. I would’ve expected that in a major downtown city, but Factoria? I ended up playing games on my cell phone to kill another hour.

For the last hour, hoping they would be done early as I’ve got to be somewhere later tonight, I walked back and sat in the customer lounge. My car was ready around 1:45pm, but there was some bad news. Apparently they found tears in my suspension as well as tears in some boot. Cost to fix is ~$500. He also suggested with my car’s age, I should probably consider getting my timing belt replaced (usually every 7 years or 110,000 miles, whichever comes first; my car is 10 years old, but has less than 70k miles on it). He said that would cost around $500-700 depending on the package I select. I scheduled an appointment for Tuesday to get all this stuff done.