All I needed was a jump for my car. This towing company's number was given to me by the city police. It even says on their website that they can handle any problem 24 hours a day. Apparently, jumping a car is much too difficult of a task to perform in the brutal hour of 10 AM.
It took them an hour and a half to drive two miles from their base to get to my car. They sent a young kid who looked like he barely knew how to drive the truck. And although their website claims they have the best trucks in the area, this truck didn't look like it had enough power to jump a go cart.
When the kid hooked up the grimey jumper cables to the truck's "charging" machine, the positive and negative cables didn't even produce a spark when touched together. It took a few minutes of playing with the connection before finally the weakest of sparks was produced.
After hooking up my car and several minutes of "charging", my car would barely turn over. This is when the kid proceeds to ask me, "What do you want to do?" I was shocked. I called him to start my car. If I could wink and wiggle my nose to the start the car, I would have done that already. So I told him the car runs fine, the battery is just dead. So he told me to walk over to the local Wal-Mart and get a new battery. He then got into his truck and I proceeded to walk over.
Forty five minutes later, a man from the company called me up and asked me if I wanted to put that on a charge card. I asked him "What for?" And he told me that it would be $47 for the kid to come out and look at the car. I told him that he did not get the car started. He said, "But the driver was there for 20 minutes." I asked him if he knew what kind of hourly rate that was, and he gave me a snotty remark about how I don't pay their gas or insurance. I told him there was absolutely no reason for me to pay the company since no service was performed for me. He said that was not the way it worked and threatened to call the police.in my anger at both not being able to jump my car and then getting charged for services I did not receive, I just gave him my credit card number.
In retrospect, I should not have given him any money. It is not a crime to not pay for services not received, neither the police nor the city would have done anything. It is merely the company's policy to receive payment whether they performed a service or not. But the man angered me, and then frustrated me to the point where I gave him money I shouldn't have.
Vitalone's towing and is a very poor business organization, and they expect to get paid for incompetence. They think they are entitled to a free lunch. I have many old cars, and I will not be using any of their towing services, nor will I be taking any of my cars to their detailing and reconditioning services. And I think it is an absolute crime that they have the police referring customers to them.
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