Around 11 pm tonight I got my phone out of my purse to charge it and noticed I had a voice mail. It turned out to be Brad, our new friend from Norman Dodge. (Why he didn't call the home phone, I'm not sure.) Brad sounded upbeat, which I took to be a good sign. Indeed, the upshot of the message was that the van, in their estimation, is fixed. No, that's not a typo. They've had it two days and claim to have repaired the problem already. No, "We don't have time" or "We can't duplicate the problem" or "It worked fine for us when we started it." None of that, just "We decided it needed a new computer. We put one in and drove it around. It appears to be fixed." Then Brad went on to say he planned to test drive it some more this afternoon and tomorrow morning.

So it appears that, as of Friday, I will have an allegedly repaired van back in my possession. I should be excited but perhaps, if you've been following the saga, you'll forgive me for being a bit gun-shy. If I pick the van up and drive around Norman to various places and it starts every time; if we drive it home and it doesn't stall in the middle of the highway, then I might do a happy dance. For now I'm taking it with a big grain of salt, waiting to hear from Brad again tomorrow with another report. Part of me, after reading all the horror stories online, believes it will never truly be fixed. But another part of me, the stupid, eternally-optimistic part, keeps thinking about how funny and, yes, not surprising it would be if the guys in Norman fixed the van in under 48 hours when the incompetent boobs here had it for a total of five weeks and couldn't even find the problem, much less repair it. Could it really be as simple as us having taken it to two previous mechanics who just didn't know what they were doing? One can only hope. What I do know is that none of my vehicles will ever be returning to either of the places here.

Oh, and get this: Brad said something about this being covered under the warranty, if I understood correctly. In fact, I MUST have understood correctly because they wouldn't have gone ahead and replaced the part without talking to me first if I was going to have to pay for it (I learned this from the Great Gas Tank Debacle, when they actually asked me if I wanted them to replace the gas tank despite the fact that the van was completely crippled and there was no way I was getting it home without having the work done). Now, what puzzles me is this van has 61k miles on it. I didn't know that any part of it might still be under warranty, but perhaps the computer system is covered for longer than the rest of the vehicle. So, if I that means what I think it means I get to go and pick up my van and not have to pay a red cent for it, which, WOW. Perhaps THAT is the reasoning behind all this trouble? Is that it, o cosmic universe? Did the first two garages fail so that the van would end up being fixed by people who knew what they were doing AND wouldn't charge me for it? That's just TOO good to be true, don't you think?

More updates as they arrive....