All We Can As technicians, we need to realize that people pay us good money to make their problems our problems, at least to an extent, right? We all like the gravy jobs: the routine maintenance operations that pay so well and don't require much figuring out. It's a foregone conclusion that some tough troubleshooting jobs will kick even the best technician around, and some labor hours just can't -- or shouldn't -- be billed to the customer. But there are shops that take the customer's money anyway and send them packing with the same or even a worse problem.
I once replaced a single spark plug and fixed a car that two shops had said needed a new carburetor. Another customer had taken his Econoline to several different shops, where he had been charged about $700 for first one part and then another. Finally as a last resort, he brought the van to the dealership where I worked. I found a wire harness chafing on a bracket, and the repair cost was $25.
Our tool salesman told me that a local diesel shop had charged him $1,700 to replace his injectors and fuel injector pump, but his tool truck still didn't run right. They took his money, patted him on the back and told him to live with the problem because they had done everything they knew how to do.
Is a dollar in our pocket worth more to us than a good name and a clear conscience?One of my fellow instructors owns a 1997 Ford F-150 that lost oil pressure. A shop replaced the crank bearings at a cost of $1,500, but the repair only lasted 8,000 miles. He went back to the shop, prepared to pay again, but was told to take the truck somewhere else. The next shop claimed that the first shop had put the rod caps on backwards and charged him another $1,700 to do the job over again. A few thousand miles later, the oil pressure problem returned. Neither shop had replaced the cam bearings, which is where I found the real problem.
One of the worst stories yet comes from my friend's daughter who had taken her rough-running Stratus to a shop in northern Florida. She was charged $450 for repairs but told that her car had an oil leak that had "whacked out their machine" (whatever that means). As a result she would need to have the repairs completed somewhere else. How they could look this woman in the eye and tell her such nonsense is sickening.
They had replaced the spark plugs and the coil pack, but the car still had an annoying misfire on acceleration. One of my students replaced the coil pack with a better quality brand and fixed the car. The student also discovered nine quarts of oil in a five quart crankcase. How any of these concerns could "whack out" their machine remains a mystery, but the car ran like a dream when we were done.
What's wrong with these pictures? We've all got to eat, but is a dollar in our pocket worth more to us than a good name and a clear conscience?
Remember, what goes around, comes around. Whatever we plant, we'll harvest. Customers will talk for years, even decades to anyone who will listen about a bad experience. Unscrupulous practices on our part will always lose more dollars for us than they gain in the long run, and the profession gets a black eye every time. Count on it.
