Oddball Update

No matter where I go, my Trans Am continually and consistently receives lousy treatment at area shops. It seems like I’ve taken that car through the wringer. I feel like I’ve had one huge, expensive operation after another, but in reality, I’ve mostly just had tire rotations and headlamp door motor repairs. It’s just that even these piddly little simple things somehow escalate into recurring problems, thanks to the “magic touch” of south Florida auto shops.

My tires have been in bad need of alignment for some time, and it’s always near-impossible to get anything done to your car down here because 99.9% of all the auto shops are open only during business hours on weekdays. I mean, I’m at my damn computer in the office for every minute they’re actually open for business. With the exception of a few shops, so that’s where I go.

Today, on Saturday, when both of us were in bad need of some rejuvenating sleep, my wife and I both had to get at 6:30 a.m. so we could go down to one of the shops we frequently visit. This shop seems to do a better job than the others I’ve been to. But they don’t take appointments, so we have to get out of bed and schlep in there at their 7:30 opening time to make sure we can get a good place in line. Well, today, we arrive, and the guy asks, “Do you have an appointment?” Uh, no. You don’t take them, remember? Well, they do now. So it’s going to be four hours before they can get my tires rotated and aligned. My wife wanted them to change the oil in her car, too, and it was going to take an hour and a half to do that.

Fuck that, I think. I had lots of other stuff I needed them to check out while they were rotating my tires, and now they’re not going to have time for it? More important stuff, even, like discerning why the brakes shimmy horribly whenever I stop, or why the suspension perpetually sounds like it’s about to disintegrate into sixteen bajillion pieces. I try to make sure my car doesn’t go straight to hell by getting on top of these problems, but I swear to Christ I can never get any service. Dealers don’t find anything wrong. Or, they claim to fix a bunch of shit that never takes care of the problem I told them about. Or, I simply run into stupid shit like today.

Anyway, I figured a rotation/balance/alignment was better than nothing, so I told them to do it, and to do a cursory check of the brakes while they have the wheels off. We then left in my wife’s car, deciding to skip the oil change. Amusingly, we then drove down the street to another local shop that we’ve never been to before (honestly, we just picked it out as we drove past), and they changed the oil in my wife’s car in basically fifteen minutes, and for a reasonable price. Plus, that shop is open until 7 p.m. on Saturday. I took one of their business cards.

For the next few hours, we picked up groceries for next week, had a great breakfast at a local place called the Trail Cafe, and then headed home. A couple hours after that, around 12:30 in the afternoon, I decided to call the auto shop where my car was being looked at. They close around 1:30, and no one had called me all day. So I call up to see how it’s going.

“Well, pal, we got a car stuck on the alignment rack right now,” says the guy who answers the phone. “Doesn’t look like we’re gonna be able to get it off until Monday, so we can’t really do anything.”

“It’s not my car, is it?” I demanded, since I had a feeling the guy wouldn’t have told me unless I’d asked.

“No, it’s not yours. It’s the guy ahead of you. But you might as well come pick it up. We’re not going to be able to do anything.”

So that was that. We drove all the way back down there, picked up my car, and came home. My car had not moved from the parking spot I’d left it in that morning. Wow. What a goddamn waste of time.

And I mean…stuck on the alignment rack? Does this make me ever want to go back to that shop again? No, it doesn’t! What if I’d actually made an appointment that morning and got there before the dude in front of me? Would my car have been the one to get stuck on the alignment rack? Perhaps this was a sign from above—my car should not ever be taken to that shop again!

Well, the morning wasn’t entirely wasted—at least we got fresh oil in the other Poncho, and we did get our grocery shopping finished several hours before we usually even wake up on Saturday. But once again, my abused Trans Am comes up with the short straw. Since we’re going out of town next weekend with friends, I’m going to have to wait for another two weeks before I can try this again. I guess I’ll go to the Goodyear shop next time, despite the fact that it’s somewhere around fifteen miles away and will probably take almost 40 minutes to get to.

When I got that Trans Am five years ago, it was meant to be a treasure that I would keep with me for the rest of my life. At this rate, it’s going to fall apart before I turn thirty.

Anybody down here know a good mechanic?

Categorized as Rants