Are customers really that thick?

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nametooshort
Posts: 146
Joined: 22 Mar 2012, 09:22
Location: Cali/Sometimes south UK
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Re: Are customers really that thick?

Post by nametooshort »

While of course people are often stupid, there is the other side of the coin too. There is nothing quiet like people assuming that you are stupider than you are.

I am not claiming to be particularly smart, im not, im actually quiet dumb and only have a career due to being greedy, ambitious, and right place/right time. I work in the music industry by the way. I do however know my way around cars, since I been messing with old cars since I was a kid, I always liked them.

These days I most often get other people to do stuff because its easier/less time consuming and im busy, but back in the bad old days when we were starting out and were poor I used to do everything myself. Not just basic maintenance but complex tasks, because me and my crew were all poor but we needed running vehicles otherwise we would get even more poorer, so we did all types of stuff ourselves. Nobody learned anything officially, I think out of all those people we had one who even made it to high-school graduation. But, I learned my way around cars the hard way like that.

The amount of time I went into 'decent' car repair shops to get something fixed up on my car, only for the guy to give me such utter bull its painful to listen. I guess I look like I don't know anything at all about ANYTHING. Iv had it ALL. My DIESEL 6-cylinder car needed 8 new spark plugs. My chain or gear driven cam engined cars seem to regularly need their cam belts to be changed. One time my stick-shift car needed a new torque converter.

It got so tedious that eventually we started doing that on our days off for entertainment. We would loosen the fan belt just a little so it squeaks, and book one of my vintage cars in saying it's squeaking. I have NEVER yet had a estimate less than $1000 for a squeaky fan belt. The squeak was diagnosed to be all types of stuff, all the way from cracked cylinder heads (both of them!) to low oil pressure (?!) to transmission failures to an air conditioning problem (in a car which doesn't have air conditioning?!). One time some dealer/mechanic told me that all old cars are basically crap and all make noises, but if I give him a extra few bucks and trade my old worn-out car in, he will sell me a nice new one. The 'old worn out' car of course being worth considerably more than the new little korean box one he was trying to sell me. I always keep a straight face too, its more funny that way.

I find that society works in weird ways. Due to my genetic makeup I am down with both the Caribbean and the Latin communities, and I found that the best way to actually find someone to fix your car is to show up to the worst part of the city, find the worst looking place, where every car looks at least a little bit stolen, and just be like yo fix that. They fix it. If you give them some beer money then they are even happier to fix it next time. The loose fan belt trick doesn't even work there, they just be like 'the belt is a little loose its all'' and tighten it up for free.

Life is full of ironies.

My favorite one was when I had this vintage British car and I took it to a shop that specializes in them because the engine was leaking out of the rocker cover, because the rocker cover had a poor quality cheap pattern gasket which didn't fit properly, and I didn't have the time to sort it myself. They said it's the main oil seals leaking, and they would have to tear down the entire engine to change them, which will cost a lot. At this point, I was still holding a straight face, but my buddy just couldn't take it, he said ''that engine does not have oil seals'' (it's true, it was one of those old British engines which have no oil seals at all, just scroll threads, they DO exist) and which point the manager of that particular repair shop smugly said ''how would a person like you know that'', to which my buddy replied that he knows because me and him built that engine personally with our own bare hands a weekend ago, and also something which I probably should not post here, which covers all aspects of criticism including their affinity for ones own mother, their physical stature, their ethnicity, their dress sense, and the alleged mis-placement of anatomy from other regions of their body to their head, and so forth.

Thats one way to look at it from the other direction anyways.
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