YOUR SPACE: Car ding didn't dent this 'bull dog's' determination

You have one. Everybody does. A matter of a personal injustice that gnaws at you and forces you to make a choice: Get over it ­— or go forth to the bitter end.

For Jerry McAffrey, what happened to her car wasn’t a disaster. It was a $1,300 ding that festered for four months.

Jerry says her 2009 Subaru was damaged by the valet service at Memorial Hospital when her husband, Ed, was a patient in April.

The company denied fault, and she says she kept getting the runaround.

Friends told her to get a lawyer. She wasn’t interested in going that far, but the 70-year-old homemaker pressed on with what Ed calls the tenacity of a pit bull.

“It wasn’t the money, it was the principle,” she says. “I felt I was getting messed over. I wasn’t going to take that. I was in the right.”

Jerry knew her ding hardly made a dent in the valet service’s big picture.

About 271,000 cars a year are valet parked at Memorial, says hospital spokesman Chris Valentine. Round-trip to the parking tower, that’s a half-million rides in a dimly lit obstacle course of poles, signs and other cars.

“It’s nice to have the valet parking,” says Jerry, who stayed overnight with Ed. After 53 years of nights together, his pancreatitis couldn’t keep them apart. She only left for quick trips to check things at home.

“The day he was discharged, they wheel him down there and pull the car around,” she says. “The passenger doors had five-inch scrapes. The rearview mirror was pushed in.”

She says the valet manager on duty blamed her. “He said maybe I didn’t remember doing it. That kind of gets your dander up.”

She filed an accident report. “I had to get Ed home to give him his pain medication,” she says.

“Four days later I got a letter from the valet company denying the claim.” 

She called the company. She called the city. She went back to Memorial. She talked to anyone who’d listen and to answering machines.

“Regrettably, things like this sometimes happen,” Valentine says. “Filing a claim is a long process with a lot of people involved. It takes time. Be patient.”

Jerry wasn’t waiting. She paid the $500 deductible to fix the car; her insurance paid the rest. The damage was gone, but not forgotten. “Every time I’d get in the car I’d think, ‘You’re not going to get away with taking my $500,’” she says. “Ed kept shaking his head saying it was a waste of time.”

Victory recently came from an unlikely source: the valet manager. Not the one who’d blamed her ­— he’d since resigned — but his new replacement.

The company paid up. Jerry got her $500 justice.

But she isn’t gloating. “I feel sorry for the valet parkers,” she says. “They seem to be stressed all the time.”
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