Ehhh, I took it as the joke it was meant to be. But thanks for looking out for me.
You know, we mechanics have to stick together!!! ha ha.
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As promised in August, my turn coming up in November.
Many moons ago, I worked summers in college at ATV/motorcycle/boat dealerships. We had all sorts of interesting characters come through.
A customer came in one day wanting to buy a very expensive Crownline boat, with cash. He had a gorgeous blonde on his arm, and a fresh, still bleeding, tattoo on his leg. Turns out heâd just won some sort of settlement, and it was time to go shopping.
Another day a young man came into the shop and purchased a Kawasaki street bike, with cash heâd apparently saved up for a while. When the deal was done, one of the mechanics rolled the bike around to the shop for oil, gas, etc. After the final prep, the young man fired up the motorcycle, said goodbye to his pretty girlfriend, turned right out of the shopâŠand laid the bike on its side. Turns out the kid had never ridden a motorcycle before, and he had the nerve to ask the dealershipâs owner if he would give the kid his money back on the bike. Uh, no.
Our dealership sold Kawasakis and Suzukis, but there was a Honda/Yamaha shop on the other side of town. I was stunned at how many customers would come in, throw a random part (or better yet, a cable) on the counter and say âyou got one of these?â More often than not the customer would have no clue what kind of machine he had (âWell, itâs redâŠâ) or, better yet, the customer knew he had a Honda/Yamaha and just didnât want to drive across town.
This is my favorite customer story, though. One day a young man came in wanting to buy a âbrain boxâ for a Kawasaki Mule. He was convinced he needed one, and wanted it ASAP. Of course, he didnât have any idea what year model Mule he had, and as fate would have it, the part numbers were different for his best guesses on the year model. We didnât keep these âbrain boxesâ in stock because they were around $600-700 each, and being both an electronic and special order item, there were absolutely no returns. We made all this clear to him, and he insisted on ordering one overnight, signed the ticket, and away we went. Next day he came to pick up the part. A few days later⊠the young man comes back into the store wanting to return the brain box; it didnât fix his problem. We reminded him of the no return policy, and showed him the ticket he signed acknowledging the policy. So of course he pulls out his cell phone to call his father, and then he tries passing the phone to me to talk to his father. This was beyond my paygrade, so I went and got the shop owner. He talked to the father, informing him of the return policy, and shortly thereafter the young man stormed out of the store. I kid you not, though: a week after that the young man came back into the store trying to return the brain box again, as if we didnât remember him. Of course we turned him down again, and he left without a fight.
Another time a customer brought in an ATV, saying the engine wouldnât start. The mechanics tore it down, and it turns out the engine was full of mud. The young man had been âmuddingâ the ATV and sucked mud into the air intake, ruining the engine. They fixed it, though, to the tune of several thousand $$. Within 2 weeks, the ATV was brought back into the shop again for the exact same problem. Both times the young manâs father showed up and just wrote checks for the charges.
And finallyâŠa parts guy whoâd worked at another dealership once told me a story. Summertime is crazy for the repair shop because customers bring in their boats/personal watercraft for repairs, and obviously they want the vehicles back ASAP. The owner of this other shop got sick of customers complaining about the long repair times due to volume, so he implemented a new policy: weâll put your vehicle to the front of the line if youâre willing to pay double price for the parts and extra for overnight shipping. My friend said he was shocked at how many impatient customers took advantage of the offer. Wow.
Good times.
It has been my experience that folks who are deficient in gray matter automatically make the assumption that everyone else is just as dumb as they are.
More than likely, that yahoo couldnât remember events from one day to the next, and he assumed that everyone else was a âdimâ as he was.
on the other side of the coin:
I was on a church trip out of town, when the church van died in the hotel parking lot. A little bit of diagnoses, and I easily determined that the fuel pump picked that moment to quit. I was out of town,. had nothing more than a tire pressure gauge to my name tool wise, and looked in the yellow pages for a nearby shop.
Just down the street was a place that rhymes with Beb Poys, and I figured that I could trust them to put in a fuel pump in a Chevy van. I had the van towed to them, told them to put in a fuel pump, and they said they would check it out.
I clearly told them that I was not gonna pay a diagnoses fee- just replace the fuel pump and fuel filter.
The next day they call me and tell me the fuel pump is fine, and that I have the wrong ignition key. I very politely informed them that they were nuttier than my great grammaâs fruit cake, that the van doesnât require a key with a chip in it, and again- requested they just put a fuel pump in it.
They refused. I was flabbergasted. I had good money to pay them to put a fuel pump in. I informed them that I was a trained mechanic, and I knew the van just needed a fuel pump. they still refused.
So, I had the van towed out of there- did not pay a diagnoses fee, and had it towed less than a mile away to a Chevy dealership- where they put a fuel pump in it (at twice the labor charge, and at their convenience- they didnât care that it took 3 days,) and 8 years later- it is still running.
And Iâm still using the same ignition keyâŠ
Yes, I suppose that Pep Boys deserves credit for not trying to steal your money, but they lost points BIGLY (thatâs a new word, coined by one of the candidates for POTUS) as a result of their very poor diagnostic skills.
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Ok, one more âcrazy customerâ story from me. I like to go to flea markets, so a couple months ago Iâm at one, and one vendor is selling houseplants for very good prices. 50 cents to $3 each, depending on what you buy. Itâs a flea market, so the plants are sort of arranged on a tarp ordered from less expensive to most expensive, but thereâs some ambiguity b/c people are moving them around to look at them. One customer, a middle-age lady, picks a $3 item â a nice fuchsia â and ponies up $2 to buy it. The vendor says âoh, sorry, that plant is $3, not $2â. So the lady says âWell, itâs in the $2 location!!!â The vendor politely informs her that another customer must have moved it.
Just then another customer places 6 of the $1 plants on the table and asks if he can get a $1 discount on the lot, so $5 for 6 plants. The vendors says âok, that worksâ. You know, a common thing to barter a bit in flea markets, even if the items are already priced cheap. Then the lady buying the $3 fuchsia says âWhy did you give him a discount, and not meâ? The vendor says âB/c he purchased 6 plants. You are only buying 1 plant. Would you like to buy some more, then I can give you a discount. If you buy another of the $3 plants, Iâll give them both to you for $5.â
The lady says âNo, I only want this one plant! I donât want any more of your damn plants!â, puts her $3 on the table, and walks away indignantly. ⊠lol .
I liked that story, but I have to take exception to one point.
I donât think that the term âladyâ is appropriate for that customer.
âWomanâ?
Definitely
âFemale personâ?
Sure!
Nasty broad?
Perhaps
ButâŠâladyâ?
I donât think soâŠ
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I wouldnât be too harsh on her. Why would she want two? I usually buy the discount cards for $20 when they come around for the football team, chior, etc., then usually throw them in the trash. Most of the time its buy one burger and get one free or one pizza or one blizzard etc. So who wants two usually? So I can understand why someone would want just one plant instead of two, especially when you are paying more for two than for one. But to get back to cars, Iâm sure she did drive to the flea market.
What a great idea! In northern regions the season is very short. Losing 3-4 weeks (1/3 of the season) waiting on a repair versus 2x charges for parts and labor? No brainer if you have the lootâŠ
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It isnât just retail customersâŠ
I was the engineer responsible for shocks and struts for a musclecar made by a major manufacturer. The car had been in production for about 6 years at this point but some evolution parts, bigger wheels and tires, bigger stabilizer bars, ect, were planned for introduction for the next model year. The manufacturer was running some lab durability tests on the new front end parts. That involves mounting the car to a fixture and using hydraulic rams to stroke the suspension the full amount to simulate really hard use testing for the suspension stops and everything else. I supplied struts for the test that complemented the new parts but were the same travel dimensions used for 6 years.
I got a phone call from the test engineer saying the struts were leaking after about 20% of the test and that they were obviously out of spec and what was I going to do about it? He filed an official âtest incident reportâ that would force me to answer these charges. I asked him to send the parts back so they could be analyzed and to use another pair of struts Iâd sent to continue the testing. Since I was pretty new to this car model I talked to the senior engineer that designed the original struts for this car. This particular strut design violated our usual practice of making the strut rod just long enough so it will not allow internal bottoming of the piston.
I received the test parts, cut them apart and found the piston had bottomed internally removing its ability to actually provide damping and filling the strut with metal shards. Hmm, leakage, yeah, no WONder. During the original design process, a big Monte-Carlo study was done on all the carâs parts that proved it was nearly impossible for the piston to bottom with the tolerances of all the parts considered. If we would just suspend our design practice and make the rod a little longer, the study showed all would be just great. BTW, the suspensionâs solid stop was between the control arm and the crossmember, not between the strut and its mount, also not a common practice. The original design engineer informed me that the crossmemberâs supplier had difficulty making the part to spec and that the only ones made to spec were probably the first 50 supplied for early build cars and then never after. He suggested I respond the the test engineerâs demand to âfixâ our part by asking him to measure the crossmember.
I responded to the official test incident report that the struts were built to spec and that the crossmember should be measured for compliance before any design revisions were executed. The test incident report was closed by the test engineer with the cause being an out of spec crossmember.
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Yep nothing wrong with paying extra for immediate service. I had a furnace issue on the weekend a few years ago. Called the 24 hour number and the guy asked if I wanted someone out now for the higher overtime rate or if I wanted to wait until Monday morning. I had the choice and it wasnât that cold so I just waited. Still if I wanted someone out Saturday night, I could have gotten it. I really think more businesses should do it. Want a tire fixed on Sunday? Iâll pay extra.
I guess it just depends on the situation. The furnace going out on a cold winterâs day would be a âhave to get fixed ASAPâ situation at my house, according to my wife. Riding a PWC or boat is not âmandatoryâ to my way of thinking, so I wouldnât pay the overtime/extra charges for that.
A few years ago a family member had to call out the plumber on Mothers Day. She was having a house full of guests over for lunch, and the kitchen sink solidly plugged up. She couldnât get in touch with her husband for help, so sadly he came home to the bill. But sometimes you just have to pay somebody to fix something you canât.
Well, it depends. If your only vacation all year is 10 days fishing and crabbing with your family at the ocean and your truck breaks down on the way or on the second day your boat engine develops trouble, I imagine you would pay dearly to salvage your trip.
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Iâm guessing the guy lives close to the shop and has such an incredibly hard time setting priorities that he wanted the alignment before the belt.
I know that if Whitey ever decided to put together a book of customer tales Iâd be first in line to buy a copy. My gut feeling is that it could easily lead to late night infomercials offering a 12 Disc box set for 5 easy payments of 39.95⊠
Divide the tales up into humorous, weird, and the more serious tales involving violence or a tragic outcome. Thankfully the latter are not nearly as common as the 2 former categories.
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OK you Car Talk folks, you keep egging me on. Hereâs another
A fast food restaurant I frequent offers a Turkey sandwich during the Thanksgiving holidays. Turkey, lettuce, mayo, cranberry sauce between two sliced of french bread. hmmm ⊠thinking Iâll probably go there for one next month, sound good.
Anway Iâm there one day when a customer comes in and orders one, says âTurkey sandwich, no jamâ. The girl who took the order I guess hasnât a clue what âno jamâ means, so ignores it. The customer has had one before, and is thinking the cranberry sauce is jam I guess. When the sandwich arrives, the customer takes a bite, screams out âI told you NO JAM!!â, and throws the rest of the sandwich at the poor girl.
Ya know I have a story, this hungarian waiter that kept a list of his favorite dictators, accidentally? got wrapped in plastic wrap and thrown in the freezer, brought a live turkey in for his favorite customers on thanksgiving day, sorry frank, the bird has to go, and also you. Now we kept him on as one never knows when a guy who would do anything for you might be needed, but the liabilites were too great.
@GeorgeSanJose that is beyond ridiculous!
Well I have a sort of unhappy customer story if I can remember it. Kinda car related since the police drove up. Probably told it a few years ago. At any rate a guy was at the truck stop to sell some pot to a couple guys. Instead they took the pot and didnât pay him. So he called the police on them. Of course the police arrested both him and the other guys when they caught up to him. Maybe this fits more stupid criminals than crazy customers.
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I stopped in a local convenience store many years ago that was run by some very nice South Koreans. Some mullet-haired yokel was in front of me asking for some cigarettes. At the time President Clinton and Congress had recently raised taxes on smokes quite a bit.
The guy looked half wasted and started giving this 90 pound Korean lady behind the counter a lot of crap about the price of cigarettes. He started insisting that she give him a huge discount. She kept politely stating that she could not do so and the guy got more and more belligerent. At this point I thought this 200 pound guy was going to assault her and she was getting both irate and nervous.
There was a display of bottled beer right beside me so I picked a bottle out and stepped up closely behind the redneck.
My feeling was that if he raised one hand to her I was going to lay him out and start stomping. He stepped forward, raised his finger to her face, and made a threat so I rared back with the bottle of beer and prepared to end this BS.
Thankfully, at that point he thought better of it, mumbled some profanity to her, and stalked out; never paying for the smokes. He never even knew I was behind him through all of this.
The little Korean gal was shaking like a leaf but thanked me profusely for having her back. It was on a Saturday and I had no particular place to be so I told her Iâd hang around a while in case the yokel came back. After half an hour I figured he was gone to score more meth so I went ahead and left.
She even offered me a free six-pack of beer for my concern over her but I refused as thatâs not what Iâm about.
The wonderful world of retail⊠
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