Another story… Guy had someone basically leave a car on his property. It wasn’t a repair shop or anything but likely broke down going down the road so the car was parked on his land and the tags removed. No one would come get it. He finally figured out that if he parked it on a public road it would be impounded. After months of fighting to get rid of it he pulled it down to the county road and left it there where it was finally towed. It was a junker and not worth going through getting a title for abandoned property.
My assumption, right or wrong, is that anyone whining about 35 bucks up front on a PC repair is likely looking for one of two things:
- A free diagnosis so they can haul it home and fix, or botch, it themselves.
- Something simple on the fix so you’ll say “Nah, don’t worry about it. No big deal. Ten bucks or no charge…glad to help”.
Good idea on the security cameras; both as self-protection and as a service to others.
Those camera systems seem to getting more and more popular.
A good working relationship between mechanics, plumbers, doctors etc., is beneficial to both sides. I had a set of keys to a great many cars belonging to whole families who one by one found that they were happy with my work. Often cars were dropped off at night with notes on the dash and when the work was done the bill would be left on the dash and the car parked out front. One lady in particular handled car repairs for well over a dozen members of her extended family, many whom I never met but they left me a set of car keys. And one customer had several classics which I charged $20 to pick up and again to deliver to his house and locked in the garage. Getting paid was never questioned nor was satisfaction with the work.
Most people are quite honest but there are crooks and there are honest people who have been ripped off and have a difficult time trusting anyone to treat them fairly. Having a successful shop can be quite rewarding in many ways but success requires a great deal of tallent, honest effort, financial skills and an ability to tactfully avoid the crooks while being professionally pleasant to the honest.
I worked with a guy once that owned a junker of a car that he paid very little for. He did no maintenance on the car except to get it running. Drove it for a year until it broke down on a major highway. He signed the title and left it on the dash, and the car by the side of the road.
A college acquaintance had an old Ford Torino that had the truck floor rotted out. This would have allowed the gas tank to fall off had he not tossed in a wood 4x4 post across the trunk with wire around the gas tank to hold it in. The city had it towed by the private contracted towing company who called him wanting payment for the tow. He just told them to keep it. It wasn’t worth the $75 tow.
Called a ‘‘mechanic’s lien’’ we can still own that portion of their vehicle even if they’re driving it.
Our bi-annual repo auctions often include abandoned vehicles too.
Yes, the people wanting free estimates are those wanting to fix it themselves after I tell them what is wrong or just plain cheap. I get a lot of “It won’t turn on so it must be the power button,” Well it is a lot more complex than that and often the power button (for laptops) is part of the motherboard so it is costly to fix “Just the power button.”
Yes, there are people who I work with a lot. Unfortunately I have been burned by a few of them too. One guy brought me 4 computers at once. I repaired them all and then he abandoned them. One at a time is one thing but 4x is another. This isn’t fun or good for the finances short term. Long term it can be a windfall once they resell.
I pretty much charge the same for everyone including friends and family. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have time to do the work I need to do in order to pay my bills and feed myself. I understand this is a common problem for those who have a business and am sure mechanics get people wanting to fix their cars for nothing or just parts cost. I know a guy who runs an HVAC business and is sick of this too. He has all but gotten out of residential work because of all the problems. The law prevents him from removing parts that aren’t paid for and allows him no way to collect so there is no incentive to do this work without being paid in full upfront.
ok4450: Sad tale but far to common these days. At least the punk ended up with a TR7 so some justice was served.
Well mechanics liens work on houses too. If you fix a furnace and don’t get paid, you can put a lien on the property for it. Problem of course is you can’t force a sale of a house but you can block a sale until the lien is satisfied. Of course you have to file it with the Register of Deeds. I think the time frame, depending on the state is 90 days from the last work done. I was told of one guy that let the time lapse but went in and installed a switch plate in order to start the time frame all over again. Reminds me that I haven’t gotten the bill yet for my furnace tune up.
I did a weekend side job involving 4 steel overhead doors in a new building once. The stipulation was cash on the spot when the job was done. The contractor agreed.
The contractor was not so agreeable when the job was done and my hand was held out…
That led to my showing up at the building with papers to file a lien and immediately led to a very volatile “discussion” between the contractor and myself. He made a threat and I countered the threat by grabbing the first thing handy; a 3 foot piece of pipe off a welding truck and which he was told was going to be used to lay him out unless he shut the _____ up.
The building owner stepped in on my side and told the contractor he better not allow a lien to happen because the oil field company that was going to lease his building to would not move in and sue him for breach of agreement. In turn, he would have to sue the contractor for allowing that lien to happen.
So I got my money on the spot and the contractor said that if there were any trouble with the doors he was going to call. I reminded him of the potential problem with those doors that he was told about 2 months before he ordered them.
He was told to order 22’10" wide doors instead of 23" and there would be no problem. When they arrived they were 23’ of course and I refused to do the job.
A week or so later they came begging with hat in hand so I capitulated with the understanding that once installed there was no warranty on how well they operated.
He gladly agreed to those terms but as in many cases a short memory takes over…
The same thing on another side job involving a John Deere dealer on a 100’ wide X 16’ high door with 6 electric operators. The dealer was present most of the time and one friendly dude until 2 hours before this massive job was done. He then disappeared off the face of the Earth and it took the threat of a mechanic’s lien to get him to pony up what he owed.
A little off topic but we had some issues with the last house we built. The way it works is that the contractor gets lien releases from the subs and then you pay the contractor when he submits the bills. You have to trust that the subs get paid although there is nothing they can do at that point. Still I feel obligated to make sure everyone gets paid. Toward the end, things kinda went up in smoke so we had some loose ends. He’d just gotten $500 worth of propane that I don’t think he ever paid for and I know he didn’t pay for utilities but it was in his name. Rough grading had been done but when I called the guy myself for the final grading he said he hadn’t been paid for the rough grading. I paid him anyway. It wasn’t his fault. About three months after we moved in the electrical inspector wanted to know if he could come and do a final inspection that had never been called for. Sure. Just give me a day to take out the extra garage wiring in progress.
I think they just bid low to keep busy and tried to make it up with add ons but we were watching pennies pretty close. The next house which was his last was with a banker in town. He never even got the house closed in before he had burned through the entire house budget. The banker was in stitches with all the cost over-runs. I mean even bankers have limits and budgets. Its a tough business.
It is amazing how quickly people can forget about their short term memories. This is why I have them sign a form. I also love the ones who say “Well that doesn’t apply to me.” I say “It sure does.”
I also have a funny story about a car that got abandoned near where I grew up. IT was a 1980’s Ford LTD and the transmission looked like it was dragging on the ground. They parked it in one of the outer spots at a strip mall and just left it sit. There was a guy at my high school that drove the same car. He was always tearing something up and always busting out lights, lenses, and the like. He began to cannibalize the abandoned car for parts. I think he even swapped a few tires, the battery, and it had flats after a while. Anyway, with flats and many parts missing, I guess the city finally got after it. There was a police towing sticker on it for a while and then one day it was gone. I don’t think the property management of the shopping center must have cared as it was there a year or more. It was in the last row of parking spots no one ever used.
What’s really weird and downright frustrating is that there is a certain percentage of car owners who will bring a car in and authorize a repair or a certain amount of money to tear into something to see how bad the damage is. They will affix the legal signature of the name they were given at birth to the repair order and the process begins.
Afterwards, if they don’t like the sum total of the bill and dead-on estimate they were given or if the damage is found to be horrid some of them will claim and swear on a truckload of King James Bibles they authorized nothing and that we should never have proceeded or torn something down.
The really loopy ones are those that accused us of forgery.
We had one yo-yo who signed a repair order in 3 places and swore that he never inked a one of them.
Another guy swore we forged his signature on the repair order. When told to produce his drivers license for comparison purposes he started bitching that his license had nothing to do with anything and stomped out while grumbling that he “will never be back again”. Great! Adios forever.
“There was a guy at my high school that drove the same car. He was always tearing something up and always busting out lights, lenses, and the like. He began to cannibalize the abandoned car for parts”
Back in the '70s, the old guy who was our auto shop teacher was given a brand-new “flood car” by GM, with the stipulation that it was to be used only for educational purposes, and could not be registered or driven on public roads. It even had a large sticker on the dashboard, stating that it was a “flood car”, and was potentially unsafe to drive.
Within a couple of months, he bought himself an identical Chevy sedan as his personal car, but I didn’t place too much significance on the similarity until a couple of years later.
As his driving skills and/or vision deteriorated, he began scraping the sides of his own car when entering or leaving his home garage, and got into a few fender benders on the road. And–sure enough–body parts began disappearing from the “flood car” in the shop in order to replace the damaged…fenders…doors…bumpers…and tail lights of his personal car.
And–of course–the labor involved in swapping body parts was provided free-of-charge by his students! All in all, it was a pretty savvy decision on his part to buy a car that was identical to the flood car, and I guess that no laws were broken, but I am not so confident about the morality of what he did.
In any event, he had been in the automotive industry–as a parts man–since the early days of the industry and he had a lot of interesting stories to tell. He claimed to have known the Dodge Brothers, and he described them as “a couple of alcoholic bums”. Every time that I see one of those new Dodge commercials, I think of our old auto shop teacher, and wonder whether his characterization of the Dodge Brothers was accurate.
In regards to @ok4450 's most recent comment: probably another reason why there’s cameras everywhere nowadays. Somebody denies they signed the repair order? Roll video of them standing there, pen in hand, signing the paper, with full time & date stamp.
One of my brothers is a high-school teacher in NY. Another teacher was accused of sexual assault on a student. The girl filing the complaint didn’t know that over the summer the school had installed over 500 cameras. When asked where and when this alleged assault took place…they brought up the video…and saw the teacher standing there as the student was yelling and swearing and throwing things at the teacher because he gave her and F for not doing her homework. The teacher didn’t even know the cameras were there.
If I owned a business…I’d install cameras all over the place. They’re cheap these days…and you can store a couple months of data on a couple $300 terabyte drives.
Yes, this is one reason for my cameras. Also, the people who want an exact estimate over the phone are ones I have no interest in dealing with. I had a guy call me about an XBOX One that a dog had knocked over and it would no longer work. He insisted on getting the exact repair price. I told him 3 times I cannot speculate and will have to see the unit to tell.
Anyway after like 3 times of him insisting on a price, I gave him a range of $100 to more than the unit is worth new. He said he would think about it and hung up. Good riddance!
I saw this the other day at a shop. Some clunker Explorer was towed it with what was likely a bad starter. They could barely even push the thing around the lot because the front brakes were also dragging. She was asking what it would cost to fix her car before it was even dropped by the tow truck. Of course they had no idea.
I recently read about some psychological experiment where some store put mirrors at the registers so that the customer had a good view of themselves throughout the entire checkout process. I guess when they start flipping out and getting all irrational, seeing themselves acting like a fool helps cool them off quite a bit.
$300 would buy quite a few terabyte drives or larger models.
My next plan is to record phone conversations. Missouri is a “one party consent” state which means that as long as one in a party of X number in a conversation is aware the conversation is being recorded, it is perfectly legal. It sounds like there are quite a few android apps for this purpose. I just need to find the best one. Also, besides protecting myself, some of the conversations with the people offering sexual favors and such are pretty humorous!
Maybe I’m thinking of someone else but wasn’t it the Dodge boys that used to go out clubbing at night and end up in fist fights all the time? Wouldn’t read a letter if it was not addressed to both of them, etc.
“wasn’t it the Dodge boys that used to go out clubbing at night and end up in fist fights all the time?”
I honestly never heard that tale previously, but–based on how old Ed, our auto shop teacher, would screw up his face and almost spit the words when discussing the Dodge Brothers–it is entirely possible.
Another issue I have to deal with and was just reminded of are missed appointments without a phone call letting me know they can’t make it or won’t be around. This isn’t as big of a problem as some of the other issues but happens from time to time.
I bet that person wanting to pickup their car is surprised when they show up late or after you have closed and they can’t get it.