Thanks for all the replies guys. I took a full day to cool off and watched several YouTube videos on buffing out scratches in glass before I brought it up. Most of them can probably be removed or drastically improved with the Cerium stuff Grizz mentioned.
In the grand scheme of things, I value these relationships a whole lot more than I value the tank, and everyone was suuuuuuuper apologetic and felt awful. They thought they were being careful enough and had no idea what was happening. My roommate insisted on paying for whatever materials were necessary to get the scratches out.
Replacing the tank is off the table - if I'm going to go so far as to pull it out of the wall I'm definitely not putting one back in - the space is perfectly sized for a deep closet and that's what it would become. This thing has given me enough heart ache in the last year for me to probably not miss it much.
This is one more reason to do the re-do I've been wanting for the last 6 months or so.
In order to make myself feel better and try and get excited about it again, I picked up three new fish today. First new additions in at least a year. Got a small Copper Band and two juvenile/female christmas wrasses (the Halichoeres kind, not the Thalasoma kind). Would have liked to buy three but it's all he had.
The copper band is tiny, but plump, and was plucking mysis right out of my fingers 2 hours after going in to quarantine, and the two wrasses are passed out in a bowl of sand I put in the QT tank after what must have been days of not sleeping in the bare-bottom tank at the store. They make me care about the scratches a little less.
|