Lost And California

A disgruntled consumer tries to argue his case and receive compensation for losses he incurred while purchasing a new vehicle which was not delivered to specifications.

Timur Bey has bought himself a Tesla. In fact, as an ‘entrepreneur’ he bought it for his new business venture in vehicle rentals, all the way down in Miami, Florida. For some reason he seems to have bought the car from a dealership right across the country in California, and now that the car is found not to be up to specifications, he’s looking for a replacement, or compensation, or some resolution to the arrangement from the dealer. Bey alleges that the dealer had fiddled with the odometer on the car, and most likely to avoid a damaging lawsuit which could blow up in the Führer’s face (CEO, Elon Musk), the dealer says he’d buy the car back, if only Bey was in California.

Cue Bey taking a road trip across America, to get to California to hold the dealer to exactly what he says he will do, while trying to keep himself afloat and alive with no cash reserves and no income. We watch from the dashboard as Bey fills up at gas stations and heads out along the highways of the USA to fulfil his destiny. At the same time, we listen to his phone conversations through speakerphone or the Bluetooth connection in the cab, as he tries his best to talk to anyone who’ll listen and who’ll take his side in the multiple consumer gripes that he has going on at the same time. Around five minutes in, Bey then tries to talk to his storage company, who he also has issues with, even though he states freely that he didn’t pay his storage fees bill. These conversations continue ad nauseum as Bey witlessly wrestles with wage-slave telecoms operators who care little for his situation and cause.

The thing is, that Bey seems to be a forceful participant in his own demise; not paying his fees, not doing his due process, and not having the first inkling about the business world and its many bureaucracies before diving headlong into funding his fantasy of being an ‘entrepreneur’. He reveals that he went to college for a year before dropping out (!), telling himself that it was for the reason of becoming this fabled entrepreneurial person he’d just decided he’d always dreamed of being, when really it looks like it was just a masking of his failures. At every turn, Bey shows his ignorance and incompetence as a businessman, revealing that he’d already had another failed business in holiday lets which he also believed he was scammed out of, and so it’s no wonder no-one on the phone takes him seriously, when his claims are such obvious whiny nonsense that no legal professional could possibly in good faith defend.

All of this is relayed to us through the tinny speakerphone conversations we hear from inside the car, and from almost exclusively dashcam and GoPro shots of the road and Bey’s face. However, rather than creating an artistic film, or factual documentary piece, what Bey has actually filmed is substantial evidence of his many traffic violations committed whilst behind the wheel. It is astounding just how bad a driver Bey is, and just how little regard he has for his own safety and the safety of other road users, as he flouts traffic laws consistently throughout the ten-minutes we sit with him for behind the wheel. Continually throughout the piece we see Bey without his hands on the wheel, preening into his mirrors, checking his nails, drinking energy drinks, holding entire in-depth complaint and legal conversations, getting angry while doing so, using the phone hand-held, with his eyes forever flitting everywhere and anywhere but on the road. Instead of filming something that was intended to bring people onto his side, Bey may have inadvertently, yet again, been the architect of his own downfall, and shared evidence that could get him into more hot water.

Lost And California is intended to be a web-series chronicling the entire tale of “survival and determination” which Bey sees himself set upon, of which this eleven-minute piece is just the first episode. However, his YouTube channel has not yet had any other episodes uploaded, and so we don’t know how he has got on, or if he eventually managed to find a resolution to this, just one of his many self-inflicted troubles. Frankly though, this is no loss to anyone, as there’s no artistic vision for anyone to be interested in here, nor any factual insight into a real industry-wide problem that is being tackled by the lone consumer underdog. Bey’s problems run far further than a boring eleven-minute video of him whining down the phone trying to fix his own mistakes, so it would likely be beneficial to everyone if he gave up on the travelogue and instead invested his time and effort into litigating his problems in court, should they actually stand up to scrutiny, rather than trying to prosecute a multi-national run by a far-right, imbecilic man-baby, in a short, inconsequential web-series.