You need to figure out if it’s burning copius amounts of oil or they forgot to fill it. But if you add oil yourself you can forget about holding JL responsible because the evidence is erased. I would call them and explain you think they forgot to fill it after service. They may tow it in or instruct you to add oil and drive it in. Then you have your bases covered.
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You mean you would call them…after you traveled back in time 5 years… right @TwinTurbo ?
I am pretty sure that he was responding to lynneholman38, who re-opened this old thread approximately 6 hours ago.
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hehe… I know… Im just being an idiot. Hey man… you gotta go with what you’re good at n all that…
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Amazingly, the foreman at the JL near me does just that, and checks the washer fluid too since that’s supposed to filled. Any shop can be poorly run, and there was a spate of poor service at a number of Cali JLs a few years back. I believe there was an expose of that particular problem. I don’t go there anymore, but the cost on a full synthetic service is more than twice that of the mineral oil service. That cost different is ridiculous, and I won’t put up with it.
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To the best of my knowledge, most of those JLs are franchises, so there is undoubtedly some variation from one to another.
The one nearest to my house (NO, I don’t go there!!) was shut down for a couple of months, after a very observant local cop decided to investigate a car that was parked in back of their shop after business hours. Inside, he found the shop’s manager and one of the employees sharing “nose candy”.
IIRC, the Cali JLs I mentioned above were all owned by one franchisee. The one I went to was one of a couple-a-three owned by a franchise owner. They used to have a fair number of corporate owned shops in MD, but that was before Shell Oil bought them.
Happened with my first car right out of high school. I thought I was being a good son, going to take my brand new car to get serviced at its first interval. Guess what? The clowns at JL put the wrong oil filter on, cross-threaded it, which led to an oil leak over several weeks. The engine started pinging and I brought it back in. The guy told me I was missing a lot of oil because the previous mechanic cross threaded the filter. I was 17 at the time. I’m 31 now. I would have done things much differently these days.
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Sometimes that’s the only way to learn
From mistakes
Even if it was somebody else that made the mistake 
I think we’ve all learned the hard way . . . who NOT to do business with
Yeah lessons come hard. I learned from my dad when he changed oil on our 58 Chevy, so I was about 10 years old. He failed to put the drain plug back in and dumped all the new oil on the gravel drive. Some harsh words were spoken and I just can’t remember how he got more oil. It would have been about a mile walk to the farm store for another gallon and usually just bought a gallon at a time. Maybe I even took my bike to get more oil, that part is fuzzy. At any rate he got the job done and I always check to make sure I put the plug back in plus I never change oil unless I have a spare filter and another 5 quarts of oil on hand. Seared in my brain for 60 years. We didn’t have Iffy Lubes back then, we were our own quick change experts.
I saw that happen a few times over the years
The worst time was when one of the dealership’s foremen was demoted to mechanic
I’m not sure why he simply didn’t retire or seek a job somewhere else. By my estimation, his finances were enviable. A paid off house in the good part of town, plenty of money in 401(k) and so forth
I happened to be working right next to him
Several times he asked me for advice . . . this was a little disturbing, since he was a lot older than me, and it should have been the other way around
Anyways, it wasn’t my job to watch him
One day, he was doing an oil change and poured the fresh oil in the crankcase . . . without having put the drain plug back
I don’t know who reported it . . . I believe I had taken the day off or was out sick . . . but that was the last straw, and he was out of there. Later I learned that there had been several such instances
I never knew what happened to him after that
We used to call that having FY money. Once you get to that point no one has any control over you.
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Being that he was several years older, he was able to buy a house in that nice part of town on a blue-collar man’s salary
And when I came in . . . some 20 years later, by my estimation . . . not even a husband and wife both working and earning a decent living could have bought a house in that nice part of town, not even if they stretched their mortgage payment to the very edge
By the time I came around, that part of town was only attainable for doctors, very successful lawyers, police officers, firemen and maybe rns.