I would simply add that it is a very human tendency to stay invested in something if one has spent a lot of time involved in it. Once we’re emotionally tied to something (or someone) we tend to rationalize staying in a losing situation by arguing to ourselves that we’ve already given a lot of time and energy to it and that jumping ship would negate all of that effort. The logical inconsistency comes from concluding that the solution is to stick with it instead of cutting our losses. If we really want to solve the problem it requires not prolonging what hasn’t worked in the past. From what you’ve said I can’t see any evidence that anything is going to change with this problematic shop and your best bet is to look for an alternative.
It feels so good though to finally pull the plug, brush the dust off your pants and never look back. I’m thinking of a sweet little blonde 50 years ago. Mom was right. Tow it out of the shop.
Well, as you guys suggested I’m pulling out. Taking everything out of there as we speak. While I’m at it though, I’m missing one part for the motor that I haven’t bought yet. I was going to buy ID1300x injectors, but I don’t know which one to select for my LS next block. The website has a few options for Chevrolet (ls1/ls6/ls2 etc) which one am I supposed to pick?
Thanks again for everyone’s help and support
Glad to hear you’re through with that shop
Are you flatbedding the car and and all the parts to the competitor . . . the one who was laughing at the antics of the first shop?
Anyways . . . if I were you, I’d seriously considering writing a yelp and/or google review of the first shop. I and many others actually read those reviews before doing giving somebody our business
You are making the right move. Staying with those guys is just going to lead to more aggravation and loss of money.
Your story reminds me of a guy who worked (very, very briefly) at a dealer where I was the shop foreman. It turns out that he had been self employed before coming to work with us and that he had taken a 6 grand deposit to put a new engine into a Jaguar that belonged to an Air Force captain stationed at Tinker AFB. A month went by and the captain was getting stonewalled. One day the captain went by the shop and it was shut down. The car was still there but the crook and the 6 grand were gone.
We had a car coming in on a wrecker which had been worked on by that guy a week before. My orders to him were to not touch that car until I had a chance to look at it. When i came back from lunch that guy along with his toolbox had disappeared during lunch hour; never to be heard from or seen again.
I found his screwup and which should have been a 10 minute proper fix. He had “fixed” a burned fuel pump connector by baring about 3" of a piece of speaker wire on both ends and shoving it into the connectors. He didnt even have the decency to do a 2-wire twist with it. Just a snarled rat’s nest is all.
The car owner hit a railroad track, the speaker wire fell out, and next step was a tow truck. And for this I discovered that he had billed on the repair order “Repair fuel pump wiring. 300 bucks”.
It took me a lot of sucking up to pacify the lady who owned the car. She settled down at some point and thanked me for being honest about it all. We refunded all of her money and I personally repaired the pump connector with solder. The one bit of justice was that this guy never came back for his final paycheck which exceeded the cost of the comeback he was going to get hammered with.
People like that absolutely disgust me and unfortunately they reflect on everyone associated with them.
The only thing I will add to db4690’s comment about leaving reviews is that you do not call names, use profanity, and so on. Keep it brutally firm though. I have to wonder how many other people those guys have screwed over as i doubt that you are their first rodeo pulling something like this.
2 Likes
I appreciate everyone’s input. I am amazed to find that their reviews are all 5-star which makes me wonder whether or not they paid for their reviews… I also know for a fact that the so-called “rival shop” I mentioned actually gets a lot of the other shop’s mess-ups! Well look at this, it’s working the same way. What a story by the way. The same kind of people that I’ve been dealing with here.
EDIT: also wanted to mention that they’re picking up each and every part of it. Vehicle itself is being flat bedded and they’ve got two guys picking up the rest of the boxes of parts - boxes that are actually dusty.
Definitely. Spread the word. Guaranteed you aren’t the only guy this joker is screwing over, and he’s gonna do it again as long as he stays in business.
There might be something more nefarious to this . . .
Our local paper . . . and I live in one of the largest cities in the country, for what it’s worth . . . reported a few years back on yelp’s “unsavory” practices, in regards to reviews. It seems that they had allowed business owners who had gotten slammed to obtain the names and contact information of those reviewers who left the bad reviews. And then these business owners threatened all sorts of things, until the reviewers either deleted the reviews, or changed them to something which didn’t reflect the truth in any form whatsoever
It’s not hard to read through the lines with that kind of information available . . .
This is going to cost you a lot more money that it should have, no doubt about it. But one day you’ll enjoy driving that car, and you can tell all your friends and relatives what an adventure it was, to get it to that point 
+1
Keep the commentary factual, but devoid of profanity or other pejorative comments that might cause readers of your review to discount its validity.