Does the weather bring out the @#% ? (:
1. A person calls our shop to simply say no one hit her car in her parking lot. OK…can you tell me what happened? She stated someone told her a person hit her parked car so she checked it out and it was the car parked next to hers. So out of the blue she called me to tell me her car did not get hit. That’s like calling the doctor to say “I don’t need to see you, I fell great!”
2. A person called the same day to say we worked on her car and now the left door does not open and she has to get out from the right door. I told her to bring it in so we could check it out and after a minute of research I told it most likely is not from a bad repair since we repaired the car 6 YEARS AGO. She then asked “what could it be?”
3. I was visiting an insurance agent today and they told me a customer of thiers drove his Chrysler Crossfire to work last Tuesday knowing a blizzard was coming. After the blizzard started he drove it home and got stuck several times so he parked it in a local grocery store parking lot and walked home. The car got buried in plowed snow which damaged the front bumper cover. Well now he’s mad his car has damage. This car has no business driving in any amount of snow especially since HE HAD A 4WD PICKUP IN THE DRIVEWAY.
This is the kind of stuff that should be written down and published after a long career in the automotive business.
I can’t believe that you ever come here. So you go to work and have to put up with that kind of insanity and then come here so you can read people’s posts that say “My car won’t start. What wrong with it?” You truly have some mental stamina.
I once had a lady call back complaining that the dome light in her car wouldn’t turn off after we changed the oil on her car. Had her open and close all of the doors and the light went out.
Also had a lady call after getting her oil changed upset and angry with us that her car wouldn’t start. Went over to check it out and found she was trying to start it with the gear shifter in Drive, put it in park and it started right up.
This kind of stuff happens all the time, nothing surprises me anymore.
I often wondered how the people that did this kind of stuff found their way to work and then were able to make enough money to both afford the car they brought to us and to pay me.
Just two, guy came back claiming we did not replace the fuel pump on his pickup like we claimed we did. His reasoning was based upon the fact that he saw no “work marks” on the straps that held the tank in and he knew we must drop the tank to replace the pump. We had removed the bed to do the job.
I used to fix those machines at the grocery store that gave you your coin change. Well we had a “cassette” filled with all different value coins for testing purposes (this was when I worked for Siemens in Switzerland). Other employees also fixed these machines and one employee reported that about 30 francs in coins were missing from the test cassette. Well the Boss came to me with a pretty stern attitude and told me I had needed to explain something (as I was the one last using the test cassette). I took one look at the piece of tape sitting on the table that was used to seal the cassette and showed the boss all the coins stuck to the tape. Boss bought me lunch for 2 weeks over this.Were these simple misunderstandings or did people jump to conclusions?
I once worked for a female principal who immediately believed the first person to tell her a tale about someone else, and who also immediately jumped to conclusions. Unfortunately, many of the tales were inaccurate, and almost all of her “conclusion jumping” was wrong.
As just one example, during my first year of teaching, I requested a personal business day so that I could get the gas tank replaced on my '66 Galaxie 500. It was leaking gas to the tune of…enough to set the entire parking lot on fire if someone tossed a cigarette butt in its vicinity. Since the tank on this model was located very high up above the rear axle, it necessitated removing the axle and…IIRC…possibly the anti-sway bar.
This female principal required us to write a mini-essay explaining why we needed to use one of our contractually-available personal business days, and I wrote something along the lines of, “I need to have vital safety-related repair work performed on my car and am unable to get to work without my car”.
Shortly after submitting my request for that personal business day, I received a phone call on the classroom intercom from the principal’s secretary, telling me that I had to meet with the principal during my very brief lunch period. When I met with her, she screwed up her face and barked, “Get your oil changed on your own time, Mister!”
I calmly stated that the “vital, safety-related repair work” was most definitely NOT an oil change. I then explained the nature of the repair work and stated, “since you are a chain-smoker, Miss Connelly, and since I frequently see you tossing cigarette butts in the parking lot, I simply want to help you avoid destroying most of the cars in that lot”. Her response was, “Sweet mother of God. Have that car repaired!”
Before she retired, I had the opportunity to make this fool look like the a-hole that she was on more than one occasion, and I actually did extract an apology from her on one occasion. However, she never learned from experience and until the day that she retired, she consistently screamed at people only to have to retract her vitriol once all of the facts were known.
Some people are just not fit for positions where they supervise others.
And–no, it’s not necessarily “the weather”.
Some people are just naturally bizarre, without any influence from weather conditions.