To celebrate National Car Care Month, Openbay hosted a photo contest, picking two winners who proved their #CarCareBoss status. Vincent was our first winner, and here’s Maggie, the second and final winner of $200 toward auto repair and maintenance on Openbay. Her car has had some odd issues, so she already knows what she wants to have done.
Where do you live and what do you drive?
I live in the North End of Boston, and I drive a 2007 Hyundai Elantra. I got it six years ago, when I was a senior in college. When I woke up in the morning, and saw the tweet that I won, I was so excited. Then, a while later, I checked my email, and got a notice that my car had been towed, because of street cleaning! I’m usually really organized about moving my car for street cleaning, but this week, my work schedule (I’m a nurse at MGH) had thrown me off, and I lost track of the days. What a pain – it was $130 for the tow, and then they get you with a $40 ticket. So I started the morning winning, and then got some bad news. But all in all, I’m still up $30 more than I woke up with, so I’ll take it!
Do you have any car-care habits worth sharing?
I do try to get my oil changed, based on the mileage. And I get them to rotate my tires every other time. My Dad always told me to do that, so I make a point to do it regularly now.
Do you have any issues with your car?
I’ve had weird fluke things happen, like my car alarm going off. Apparently some piece of plastic had worn down. So every time the wind would blow, my car alarm would go off. People started leaving notes on my car. Recently, someone had left me a lovely note – it wasn’t mean, it just said, “You need to have your car serviced.”
What kind of work do you think you might have done with Openbay?
The car has a leak in the back window. Every time it rains, I get a puddle in the back. I used to be able to fix it pretty quickly when I was still living at home in the suburbs – I’d go outside, get towels, stuff them in the back. … But now I’m parked in the city, on the street. So it might be two days before I remember that it’s rained before I go to check it out. I’ve got to have a shop check it out.
Before you discovered the magic of Openbay, how did you decide where to get your car serviced?
I’ve always gone to my family’s mechanic. Even for the last two years that I’ve lived in the city, every time I have to have some auto repair done, I bring it home, which is about 30 miles away, and can take more than an hour in traffic. It’s not crazy, but it’s kind of annoying, especially during car-alarm issue, when I was just about to go on vacation, and I couldn’t leave my car in Boston, and had to take it home. It was ridiculous.
All that’s saying I’m excited to find a great mechanic, closer to where I live, on Openbay.