Wed, Jun 5, 2013    

STATS
Departure: Nashville, Tennessee
Arrival: Little Rock, Arkansas
Miles: 355 miles
Travel Time: 9 hours (Got stuck for over an hour in traffic)




No, we didn't stay. We packed up this morning and headed west on Interstate 40. We were making good time until we were about two hours from Little Rock, our destination for the day. There was road construction, and the traffic was backed up almost ten miles! And there was no way to get off the freeway. Barbara was driving at the time, and we sat, not moving, for five to ten minutes at a time. Then we got to move maybe a mile, then sit again. When we weren’t moving, we switched drivers, and I took a turn at sitting in the traffic.
We were able to do that several times more; one of the benefits of being stopped-dead in traffic.

So I promised to discuss the saga of the levelers today. I’ll recap for those of you who don’t remember or missed that entry. For those of you who don’t care, you can just skip to the next entry.

Hey, where’d everybody go?

Just in case someone is left, here’s the background: I finally bought levelers for the RV and had them installed last February. I had done lots of research, and I found Bullseye levelers to be the best choice. I took the RV to an RV shop in San Jose, and they ordered and installed the levelers for me.

They were just as wonderful as I had hoped! I pull into a spot, I dance over to the button ("La lala lala"), I press the button (George Jetson would be proud), and voila! The rig is level! Life is sweet! Life is good!

Until Atlanta.

As I was pulling out of the site in Atlanta to begin the journey to Nashville, I heard two clunks, which turned out to be the right-rear jack swinging down and hitting the asphalt, then bouncing and hitting it again. I won’t bore you with the details (although I don’t know why not—I’ve bored you with everything else in the blog). You can read the Atlanta entry if you’re the type who likes tearing your hair out and running screaming from the room.

We made it to Nashville and Camping World. We got great service from Cody Smith in the service department. He did everything humanly possible to get that jack, but the service guy at Bullseye was dragging his feet. He didn’t answer his phone. He didn’t answer emails. He didn’t return phone calls. I did, finally, get hold of him on the phone, and he explained to me that the damage was consistent with those jacks. It seems that there is a flaw in the manufacturing, which they’ve known about for some time. They used aluminum to hold up the stow-motor when they should have used steel, and the aluminum bracket breaks. They have a repair kit all made up (apparently a piece of steel that needs to be attached somehow to the aluminum) that he said he would send us. Then he didn’t send it.

Okay, now I understand that things break. I also understand that things can be engineered incorrectly. What I can’t understand is:

1.     Why is the customer service guy ignoring a customer problem? I certainly understand that replacement parts may not be in stock, so it could take a while to get the parts. I also understand that the parts might have to come from somewhere far away, like Saturn. But why is he just ignoring us?

2.     And why are they still selling their jacks with the sub-standard aluminum brackets? I just bought them in February. If they have known about this problem long enough to make up “kits”, why haven’t they fixed it? Why don’t they install the steel plates on the jacks that are sitting in their warehouse? It certainly appears that they intentionally sold me old stock that they knew would break.

Oh, and by the way, the service guy at Bullseye? He’s the president of the company. I don’t recommend Bullseye levelers, just in case you weren’t sure.

 Anybody know a good lawyer?