No Radio Code For You
To give you a little background on the locked up radio, a few weeks prior to our visit to the car doctor I took the van to the grocery store. Upon my return from the store, I pulled into the driveway and was distracted by the neighbor’s little girl pretending to drive a gigantic four-wheeler. This amusing sight caused me to neglect to put the car in park before actually turning off the vehicle (something boneheads that are used to driving manual transmission do all too frequently). As a result of this parking error, I wrongfully assumed that the brake fuse would need to be replaced, as this had been the case the few times before when I had made the same error. Yes, I did it more than once for your information, and the first time resulted in my very first tow truck ride.
Being the resident handyman, Butterfinger went out to the van to change the fuse in the dark. Instead of taking out the fuse for the brakes, he removed the fuse for the entire front console, resetting the clock, miles, and radio. While it may seem like a simple task to reset the clock and radio, any Volkswagen owner can tell you that nothing is ever as easy as it seems.
Stephan was kind enough to remove the radio and give us the number, he was also going to contact the dealer himself, but it got too late in the day and they were closed by the time he made the call. No problem, we would just call them ourselves in the afternoon before we left, get the sequence, and be on our way. I tried 4 different places in our area, all of which told me I needed to make an appointment to bring the car in to have the radio removed and VIN # verified before they could give me the code. When I told them I had all of the information and would be more than happy to read it off to them, they told me I still needed to bring the car in to make sure that the car was not stolen. They could not give me the code over the phone because of security concerns, and we even had one guy tell us that it was not worth him “risking his job” to give us that kind of information over the telephone.
Stolen? Who would steal a Eurovan with 200k plus miles and dents in either side?! Car stealing aside, what kind of self-respecting radio thief would stoop so low as to lift an antiquated cassette player?! Unless there is some underground market for useless tape players, I am pretty sure no one in their right mind, or even drug-infected mind, would take the risk involved to remove such an item.
Surprisingly, this type of logic did not work with my “friendly” Volkswagen dealers, and even when I threw in the fact that we were leaving later that day to drive across the country, they showed no mercy. Each and every one responded with the same load of Volkswagen security b.s. and refused to punch a couple numbers into their almighty computer to assist me in the most elementary way possible.
Luckily the resident handyman also has a creative side, and we fashioned our own audio system without the use of the car radio and speakers. We used some extra computer speakers and our iPod loaded with songs we have heard a million times (all pre-2003) to get us across some pretty difficult terrain. It also helped that we have a power inverter to plug in all of our miscellaneous items – you never know when you may need to charge a cell phone or laptop, right? In the end all was not lost – except the 2 hours I spent trying to plead with the VW drones for the special code. Oh, and when we got to Texas, Tootsie called with the code : )