I was in a sears shop to buy tires, a lady came in with threadbare tires upset she had to by new ones complaining that if she had not had to drive across a gravel parking lot she could have gotten at least 3 more months out of the tires.
the phrase “penny wise, pound foolish” or “the cheapest person often pays the most” spring to mind
That is incredible, and what is just as weird is they are admitting they did that.
This is officially known as “run-to-failure” (RTF) maintenance, and is still practiced widely in third world countries, and by North American car owners who never budget for maintenance or read their owners manuals.
The brake job posts remind me of this… second gen 75-76? Monte Carlo comes in for a brake check. M/cylinder & both rear w/cylinders are leaking. Caliper pistons are hanging out and cocked. Both rotors are one sided and the fins are showing. Drums are more like a relief or topo map from grinding. Not a bit of material on pads and shoes. I thought I had a gravy job since back then I was the shop undercar specialist and GM brakes were the easiest in the world back then.
After writing the estimate the customer happily said thanks and I’ll let you know. The entire time I was putting on drums and rims I was shocked that she was so casual about it. Off she went happy as a lark and I missed the gravy job.
I’ve got two brake related stories and will split them up to make it easier to read.
Guy bring a Subaru in for a brake check. The fronts are gone, rotors and all.
He doesn’t like the price quote and blatantly says he’s going to take it to the brake shop one block down the street because “they can do it much cheaper”.
Following week this car comes in on the wrecker and after seeing the name on the ticket it rang a bell. Few minutes later it hit home. This was the guy who went elsewhere.
The right front wheel was canted a bit odd and after removing the wheel and getting into it I discovered that someone at the brake shop aparently did not know the caliper piston had to be screwed in as it was retracted.
From the looks of things they must have used an 8 foot cheater bar. They bent the caliper yoke, ruined the caliper, bent the strut, and the weirdest thing of all - they tweaked a cast iron steering knuckle.
The cost of the brake job now was about 6 times more than it was the week before due to his “getting it cheaper”.
Must have been a real Neanderthal working on this one.
The second brake story does not involve me. While at a local tire store one Sat. morning getting some new tires I noticed a GM brake rotor hanging on the wall behind the counter. The entire outer face of the rotor was gone and the only thing remaining was some of the back and a bunch of shredded cooling fins.
To the guy behind the counter I made the statement that surely someone did not drive a car in like that. He said come with me to the window. He then pointed out a by now fading black mark that led across the lot and down the street.
He said the caliper piston had protruded into the rotor cooling fins and the lady was determined to drive this car about 8 blocks to the closest shop; them.
The front wheel/tire was skidding all the way, leaving a black mark and smoking.
Right off the lot the tire finally gave up and blew out.
This did not deter her. She simply kept the engine screaming and forced the car on into the lot.
When the shop found the damaged brakes and questioned her she stated that: “No, I haven’t had any noises out of the brakes. No grinding or squealing”.
Ha.
I surprised the owner didn’t accuse you of sabotge.
At Ground Zero: "What thermo-nuclear explosion?!!!?
I hope he gave her a couple of signs
This is not a car but a bizarre customer. In came a couple with an exhaust leak and it was very apparent that the lady was the head of the house and she had a very large chip on her shoulder. The car was up in the air and every pipe had large gaping holes in it. I showed her the estimate AND each part that was bad. In less than a millisecond she got a wicked witch of the south look and shouted “Your ripping me off because I’m a woman” (which she was not) and stood there with her mouth open in an oval shape and flicking her tongue like a Cockatoo bird. YOU HAD TO BE THERE! We had in ground air over hydraulic lifts and she was standing right next to the valves. She stared at me and since I was right and totally honest I stared right back. I flipped the dump valve and a rush of air took her by surprise and she jumped back and said “what are you doing”?
“I’m letting your car down and getting it out of here” says I.
“But I want it fixed” says she.
“Not by me, no matter what I do you won’t be happy and you can see what the problem is” says I. I never talked to customers like this but I had had enough. Well, she said to go ahead and perform the repairs and I asked if she still thought I was ripping her off and she admitted I was not.
After the job was complete and she was leaving I again told her I was not ripping her off and she said softly that she knew it.
Customers need to be “wowed” with service but there are times when it is appropriate to fire a customer, this was one of them.
The one about a lady with a chip on her shoulder reminded me of older story from about 20 years ago. Neighbor had a mid 80s Subaru Brat 4WD and he worked in the oil field.
Both hubby and wife brought the vehicle over (only had about 40k miles on it) and the engine was wiped and knocking like crazy. Gave them an estimate for an overhaul and the wife then asked me to please try to talk some sense into the hubby because he was using this vehicle to drag other vehicles in and out of muddy oil field leases.
Picture that. A dinky 1.8 Subaru Brat not only dragging full sized pickups but according to the wife, he was even trying to pull 2 ton bobtails through mud that was 2 feet deep.
All I could do was warn him that if he did this after the overhaul he was going to be up the creek again with the same problem.
Working oil field rigs keep a dozer on call to drag people in and out of the well sites so I have no idea why this guy was doing this at all unless it was impatience from waiting on the dozer.
Anyway, overhauled the engine and told him to bring it back in a 1000 miles for a head bolt retorque and valve lash inspection. I always do this free for my own piece of mind more than anything else.
At that time it ran like a top and both he and the wife were happy.
Two months later they bring the Brat back in with a badly knocking engine and an attitude to match. The wife was accusing me of botching the rebuild but when I started hammering hubby about whether or not he was back to the old ways in the oil field he started stammering, turning red, and didn’t deny it, or even answer, when I asked if he was yanking bobtails around in the mud.
At that point the wife then started ripping hubby big time.
I did find out about a year or so later that hubby did indeed blow it up in the oil field mud again. The wife told me he 'fessed up on this about 6 months before she divorced his worthless hiney.
The word ‘creepy’ brought to mind one particular customer I have dealt with in the past…
Years ago, I cut my teeth in the repair business at a chain muffler and brake shop. The shop manager had been there for fifteen years and had a well-deserved reputation for being a master pipe bender and overall great guy and technician. He had quite the following of loyal customers who wanted nobody but him or a member of his crew touching their car. Anyway, the owner of the shop lost the business to the franchise for failing to make her royalty payments as well as foolish dealings with the business’s money. Corporate and the owner blamed the manager for everything that went wrong and cut the guy loose. He went on to greener pastures, of course, and took a lot of customers with him (not deliberately, they just followed him).
The creepy guy was one such customer. This guy was in his late forties, lived at home with his mom (who always paid for the repairs), looked like a child molester, and drove a very well-worn turd brown Lincoln Town Car he refused to get rid of. The car always smelled like dirty laundry and had a large collection of old newspapers and sales print covering the dashboard, floors, back seat, and rear parcel shelf. When he found out the manager was no longer at the shop, he decided to find him on his own. One Sunday afternoon, my old manager was working in his garage at home when you-know-who and his mom suddenly walked into his garage! This is no small feat considering he lives out in the middle of nowhere some 20 miles from the shop. His house is hard to find. He needed his car worked on and decided to track down the manager’s home address and bring it to his house on the weekend! If that’s not creepy enough, there’s more…
A couple years after that incident, my then-girlfriend-now-wife went on a date to a bookstore/coffee shop to get a bite to eat and read. I saw that turd brown Lincoln in the parking lot and immediately said, “I hope this guy’s not in here because I don’t really want to see him.” We ended up seeing him down an aisle looking through a book, he recognized me but said nothing and quickly walked out of the aisle. We found out the books he was looking at were about sexuality and the like. The only thing that would have made that situation more awkward would be if his mom was with him, which she was not, fortunately. After that, we got our drinks and books and sat down at a table. For some odd reason, Mr. Creepy Customer came over with a book about antiques and parked himself at our table, right across from us, buried his nose in the book, and never said a word or made eye contact.
If this guy’s not creepy or bizarre, I don’t know what is. Do I win for the creepy category?
My bizarre customer was a benign one, so at least that is better than the creepy type.
Circa 1969, I was working at the Citgo gas station located in the service area of the NJ Turnpike in Secaucus, NJ. Most of our customers were truckers and people driving long distance who just needed gas or who had an emergent repair need.
We were able to do things like changing belts, repairing tires, and replacing clogged air filters or fouled spark plugs, but no heavy-duty repairs. Once in a while, we were able to talk someone into an oil change if we noted that their dipstick revealed heavy sludge-laden oil, but even oil changes were few and far between at our facility.
One Sunday morning, a strange little guy drove in with a Rambler with NY license plates. He had one bad tire, and he wanted to buy a replacement tire from us. Luckily, in our somewhat limited stock of tires, we had one in the correct size.
Of course, you have to bear in mind that we normally sold tires only to people in emergency situations, and what we stocked was essentially the lowest-end of the Goodyear line, sold at either list price or–more likely–above list price. Even if they did not like the price, they had no real option other than to buy a low-end tire from us at inflated prices, due to their emergency situation.
Well, fast forward a week or two, and the strange little guy came back and announced that he wanted to buy three more of those same tires! We did not have three more in the correct size, so the manager ordered three of our usual low-end tires and gave the guy a price quote that just about knocked my socks off. The little guy didn’t blink an eye, gave a deposit, and drove off. Sure enough, he came back on the following Sunday, had his tires installed by us (with only static balancing, since we had no dynamic balancing equipment), happily paid the ridiculously high price for those tires, and drove off.
Periodically after that, he came back to our NJ Turnpike station for oil changes and lubes!
Why this guy chose to have his car’s service needs taken care of on the NJ Turnpike was a mystery to all of us at the station, and that remains a mystery to this day.
Me customer. I used to do a lot of my own work, not any more. Anyhow, I went into this shop because I knew I needed a new power steering pump. Lots of bearing noise,
not enough pressure, etc. Anyway, so the guy put it up on the hoist, and took off the PS belt. Fluid began pouring out of the pump. I knew him fairly well, so I thought I’d be funny, and yelled “You broke it!”. His face started turning red–he thought I was serious.
This was a girl I used to know from a bar I used to go to. Well, she wanted me to look at her headlights that weren’t coming on, one rainy, windy, miserable night. The car was an old Grand Prix with 2 low-beam, and two high-beam lights. Freezing my butt off, I checked voltage at the headlights and found 12V. Thinking it might be a bad ground somehow common to the system, I tested the ground on one of the lights and found it good as well. Thoroughly puzzled, but not thinking clearly and my constitution slipping as the rain pelted down, we called it a night and I drove her home. The next day she was angry for me not correctly finding the problem, as she had taken it to a local shop. She had driven the car without replacing burned out headlights until she finally all the lights were burned out. Both high-beams, and both of the high and low-beam filaments on each of the low beam lamps. Of course she never mentioned that she only had one light that worked before.
Her unexpected behavior and indifference completely trumped any diagnostic logic I could have summoned up that night.
Creepy, you win.
That Honey seems to have left a bitter taste in your mouth.
Wonderful stories, I am an admitted recovering shade tree mechanic from when cars had points, non radial tires that thumped when cold and my parents 54 ford that was cool because you could lift up the floormat and see the road going by. I am an IT guy, mostly but had a lady much like the wicked witch of the west described previously that swore as soon as I fixed her computer at work her van had problems, and blamed me for the problems on the van. Looking forward to more stories!
Couldn’t fix her high beams, eh? She wanted you to look at her headlights? You knew her from a bar? Sorry . . had to say it. Rocketman