Today’s rant is about quality of work. Giving a damn about your job, that kind of thing. Today’s rant is going to star a certain very hapless mechanic. We’ll call him mechanic X. He works at a fairly overpriced garage, which we’ll call garage Y.
Now, garage Y usually does pretty good work. They get all the parts back in the right places, they don’t break things, and they generally seem more or less clued. In other words, they’re far from the worst. They charge about three times what the going price is down at the AutoZone for any given part, however. But one gets used to this, and really, in today’s world, they probably have to do that in order to stay in the black.
I went in to Garage Y prior to taking a extended road trip, with a long laundry list of things I wanted done to the car. Most of them were done correctly, no problem. But there were two minor sticking points. The first was that I wanted the CV joints changed. They’d been on there 80 thousand miles, and were starting to make that distinct clacking noise that CV joints make when they’re nearing the end of their useful life.
Garage Y didn’t agree with this decision. Rather than put two new shafts on (parts cost, ~ $300), they wanted to put new boots on, 4. I was in a hurry, didn’t have time to argue with them, so I let them. They claimed to have done a visual inspection on the joints, and they claimed they were fine.
Now, friends, it doesn’t take a visual inspection to know when a CV has had it. They have a limited life, and you can just put the car in the air and spin a wheel and you’ll know if they’re beyond it or not. In addition, on a car like the Integra, pushing the gas hard while turning gives one a very definite and clear picture of whether or not the CV joints are a bit on the toasted side.
But I digress.
What makes me really annoyed is that I called Garage Y a week later (for reasons that will be detailed in a few minutes – the reasons that I’ll never be using Garage Y again, as it happens) and they protested that they had visually inspected the joints, and they were fine.
Now, friends, I KNOW those joints had been on there for at least 80 thousand miles of very hard driving. And the sound of a worn CV joint on a Honda driveline is NOT subtle. We’re not talking about a click that could have been mistaken for a turn signal here.. But no, insisted Mechanic X, those CV joints were fine.
Okay, now there’s a few possibilities here. Either mechanic X is so slow that he doesn’t realize that he’s lying (possible, he did after all manage to cut off his hand on a table saw..) or he just doesn’t care about losing me as a customer. If it’s A, sorry, I apologize, stupid people have a right to earn a living too. But Mechanic X doesn’t _sound_ slow… He seems to be a fairly bright fellow, at least he comes off that way.
Personally, I’m voting for B. But whatever happened to wanting to do a good job?
Anyway, all of this is just a sideline on the way to my main point. My main point is thus:
I asked the mechanics to do a Vis. inspection of the timing belt. For those of you who don’t have Hondas, almost every Honda engine from 87 – 91 (and possibly quite a bit after that, I don’t know, never having owned a Honda newer than that) can be visually inspected by removing two bolts and popping off a plastic cover. And you should do this visual inspection every 20k miles or so, because the damn things wear out, and bad things can happen when they do.
But, sir 20 years of experience said, ‘it’s almost as much work to do a visual inspection as it is to change it’. At this point, I made two very bad mistakes.
1) I assumed he knew what he was talking about. After all, this was a Acura, not a Honda… Maybe things were different. I’d never had the Vis. inspection port open on this one…
2) I backed down.
This is a bad habit of mine. When I’m told by a (quote) authority figure that I’m wrong, I’ll often just curl up and accept it. When the bank says I owe them sixty bucks, I just nod and pay. When the cop says I was following too close, I nod and say ‘Sorry officer’. Usually, however, this bad habit doesn’t cost me very much, and it makes it easier to get along with people.
This time it would cost me my car.
For you see, all was not hunky dorey in timing belt land. A little spring loaded roller called a tensioner had come loose. How? Who knows… Might have even had something to do with the valve job that Mechanic X had just done. But it was no longer putting tension on the timing belt.. and the timing belt was a disaster waiting to happen.
A visual inspection would have revealed this immediately – in fact, a visual inspection was what finally did reveal it, after the car came to a mysterious stop by the side of I-76 in PA.
Now, I don’t have to tell you that I-76 is not a good place to find out your timing belt isn’t being held firmly in place. A mechanic’s shop, before the belt has jumped, while repairing the damage is still just a matter of buying a new tensioner and putting it on, is a much better place. But Mechanic X, despite having 20 years of experience as a mechanic, didn’t know that you could easily look at the timing belt on a Honda – something that a 25-year-old high school dropout with little more than a passing interest in cars knew.
It’s not that this scares me or anything.. but we are now finally getting to the point. The point, ladies and gentlemen, is that Mechanic X talked me _out of_ getting a timing belt change. He wouldn’t do a visual inspection – when in fact he could have made himself some money by doing one. I can’t guess why he didn’t want to fix my problem – other than that it might involve actually thinking – or working – when changing brake pads and charging three times over for the parts doesn’t.
But what I’m left with is the following observation: this mechanic didn’t want my car on the road.
I came to him having done all the hard work – telling him exactly what the likely problems with the car were, and where to go to fix them. He didn’t fix THREE! (he also decided he couldn’t change the oxygen sensor because it was too firmly screwed in. If he’d removed it while he had the radiator out, he would have had no problem undoing it – however, this would have involved thinking through the problem before he approached it with a tool).
He argued with me – not forcibly, but disagreeing with me heartily none the less – about what service the car needed. Me, the customer, the guy who drives the thing every day.
This is his JOB! This is what he does to put food on the table, and he approaches it with the sincere desire to NOT do it!
Does he not give a shit what happens with the machine when it leaves his garage? Personally, I can’t look at the inside of a engine without feeling a strange mystical feeling… Just like opening the hood of a quad P-III. All that power, all that precision, the finest man can do. I couldn’t close the hood again on a car knowing I’d not done everything it needed – nor could I put new boots on worn CV joints in good conscience.
But that’s just what this guy did.
Nor is he alone. In fact, I have YET to find a mechanic that I didn’t eventually get heartily sick of… they just don’t care.
And it’s not just mechanics. While the dot com failures were partially due to bad business models and excessive spending for chairs for offices, they were also partially because half the sysadmins, three quarters of the programmers, and fully ninety percent of the sales people out there are effin’ incompetents who don’t give a shit about the work they do, and who want to just put in their eight hours and get the hell out of there. People who truly don’t care about the work they do.
People, if you don’t give a shit about the work you do, here’s a novel idea: DON’T DO IT! Because it’s probably not worth doing! Go invent something better – you, yes you over there flipping burgers! Open your own burger joint, and use real meat! You over there wrenching cars for a Mechanic X – open your own garage, and actually guarantee your work!
I’m so sick of this mediocrity – of this utter lack of quality anywhere, anywhen, ever…
Just my $0.02.
