Here comes another rant. Save yourselves - click away now!


Today's mail brought a notice from the Nissan dealer that my car is due for scheduled service. I know it is, I just sort of have other, more pressing things to attend to right now, yanno, and it's due but not overdue. But that's not the rant - the rant is that the notice for service is addressed to MY HUSBAND.


My husband does not own this vehicle, I do. I bought it after he was already sick and housebound in a wheelchair, and I needed something to transport him to radiation and doctors and such, because he could not climb in and out of my tall SUV. He did not participate in the purchase in any way, his name is not on the title, nor on the loan, NOR was his name associated with any of my previous vehicles, including the SUV I traded in on this. It's quite simple - I buy my own cars, and this IS NOT HIS CAR. Never has been. He did, however, buy a DIFFERENT car from this Nissan dealer a couple of years ago, before he got sick, but got sick before it ever even went there for service, so I can't even excuse this as some sort of computer brainfart - the service department has just made an executive decision that every Nissan in the house must belong to my husband.


I like this dealership - I've taken MY car to them for service a couple of times, I was treated with respect and they were quite nice, they have great hours, do good work, are in a good location, they're wonderful folks, except that I still don't exist to them. Last time I went in there I even made sure that they had MY name and MY phone numbers in their system, associated with MY vehicle, after receiving a previous notice like this telling my husband that my car needs service. I politely corrected them and asked them to fix it. This time I don't think I'll be quite as polite. It's time to talk to the manager and explain to him that little things like this can really piss off female customers. Even if the vehicle is jointly owned, it seems to me that the notices about its service and such could be addressed to the person who brings it to the dealership for service - be it husband or wife - again, my husband has never, ever been physically capable of going to the dealership with this car, so how in the HELL do they have his name associated with it in the computer, even though I've corrected them already?


Might seem like a trivial thing, but it's trivial things like this that can cause problems - a few years ago the DMV in its infinite wisdom re-registered my car - again, MY car, owned solely by me - in my husband's name, and I had to holler at them to fix it. Call me touchy, but when it's the vehicle I bought, make payments upon, and exclusively drive, I don't really appreciate seeing it reregistered to somebody else, even if it was my husband - what if we were estranged and I wanted to get rid of the car? Whoops, the registration isn't in my name....


But then, this is the South, where married women are appendages of their husbands in many circumstances. Don't get me started about buying a home in North Carolina...at least Florida has advanced beyond that "et ux" crap.