Week 34-1: Not the augury-test story ever told, auto-warn you; gimme a brake, don't flame or nothin'
Trigger warning (for me only, since I have a real problem with shit catching fire): Shit catches fire.
Until this week, I went to one particular auto shop in this area for most of my repair needs. It wasn't because they were particularly good at mechanic work. It's because they were conveniently located, reasonably fast, and usually pretty cheap. Most of my "needs" involved basic things like tire rotation and oil changes anyway, things which they were reasonably competent at achieving.
For more sophisticated problems beyond "whoops, it's been over 3k miles since my last oil change," I've usually tried to avoid using this shop. I get the impression that they do most of their business on rote, easy things like oil changes and brake pad replacement, and that no one there is really smart enough to handle more serious business.
But historically speaking, when I've taken the car to another local shop which seems to do business mostly in meatier repairs, the results are usually far worse. There are sure a lot of horrible auto shops around here.
Earlier this spring, my car started making a wacky clunking sound from the front left tire when braking to a stop. My last experience with a local "real" mechanic was so bloody terrible that I put off getting it dealt with for some time.
At the point where the noise began to drive me completely nuts, maybe around March or so, I went ahead and took it to my Oil Change Shop of Choice, figuring that I'd give them a shot. I didn't know where else to go, and I was so tired of looking online for yet another mechanic on which to gamble.
The Oil Change Shop of Choice diagnosed the problem visually: ripped CV axle boot. They showed it to me on the hoist and I saw it clear as day. Made sense, looked right, gave them the go-ahead. Two hundred bucks-- but the problem wasn't solved.
I brought the car back in hoping that they could maybe work me a deal on the actual fix. Maybe they did, I don't know. The total cost for this fix was another $90. Not horrible, I guess.
More importantly: this approach worked.
...for about ten days, at which time the wacky clunking sound resumed with a vengeance.
I drove the car around for another couple months like this. I had every intention of going back and getting their too-briefly-effective work fixed under their 1-year repair warranty, but not a lot of spare time to stop and sit in a waiting room for a few hours. Clearly, neither I nor the car were in mortal danger from these symptoms.
Months passed, clunk-clunk-CLUNK. In mid-June, I developed another set of symptoms... this time, 180 degrees across, coming from the right rear wheelwell. These symptoms / noises were more like a network of symptoms / noises, quite interactive with one another in particular ways and under particular conditions. In the interest of not boring you to death, I'll spare you the five-paragraph full explanation and/or flowchart of the noise- / operation-pattern I observed.
But I was gradually convinced, as the noises diversified and the flowchart in my head grew whole new series of boxes and flow-arrows, that there was something unusual and probably multi-system-involved going on back there.
Since the car still seemed to be braking fine, I semi-irresponsibly put it off until this past Monday, when my schedule got a lot easier. I dropped the car off at the Oil Change of Choice shop around noon on Monday. I told them they needed to fix their previous now-broken repair at the front left under warranty, and asked them to look at whatever craziness was going on at the rear right. My wife picked me up and we went to have lunch.
While at lunch, I got a call from the OCoC shop. They suddenly knew nothing about the past repair that worked and then didn't... and said, accordingly, that there was nothing to fix under warranty.
They also hadn't evaluated my mental flowchart re: the rear-wheel problems in any depth, but were convinced all of my problems would be 100% solved with a brand new set of brake pads, front and back. They were busy today, so I'd have to leave the car with them and pick it up in the morning.
Delay aside, this answer did not please me. These guys made the bulk of their living on easy stuff like brake pad replacement. What I knew about the problem at the rear right did not seem to lend itself to the simple explanation of "the brake pads are bad." The guy on the phone sure couldn't explain the connection either. I wasn't mad, but I told them I'd be in to pick up the car in 45 minutes, please do nothing to it, I needed a second opinion before proceeding.
At 2pm or so, I picked up the car. They reminded me that if I brought it back later that day to get the work done, it would have to stay there overnight. Fine, I said, and drove off.
Before looking for yet another alternative car shop, I made sure to post a long-awaited full review of my Oil Change Shop of Choice online. While reasonable and calm / measured in tone, it was not what you'd call positive overall.
After stabbing myself through the eyesocket with a screwdriver, in hopes of lobotomizing away the pain of endless mechanic-searching once and for all, I found another shop up the road from me with a couple glowing reviews (not that this means a damn thing, of course). I dropped in to see them around 4pm.
The lead mechanic hopped in the car with me and drove it for a few minutes. He listened to the noise-network and also gave an in-car diagnosis of "bad brake pads."
I once again stated my doubts, having driven cars with bad pads before and "knowing" their behaviors to be much simpler. He retorted with some very reasonable-sounding explanations re: why these particular noises might connect to bad pads, and why it might sound distinct from what I'd previously experienced in cars with dead pads. Bring it back in in the morning, he said, and they'd take a careful look at everything.
Even without knowing for certain what the problem was, I was starting to feel a little bad about that online review of my Oil Change of Choice shop. They might be lousy at explaining their findings (and/or customer-repair database management), but maybe they weren't so horribly incomptetent at diagnosis after all.
Around 6:30p, I was headed home from my own "shop" / man-cave / home away from home. My usual route between shop and home takes me right past the Oil Change of Choice shop.
In the road, from a distance, I saw fire truck lights. Coming closer, I saw that they had a full blockade of the opposing lane, and that there were perhaps eight or nine fire trucks parked in the street on that side. The blockade was set up quite close to the dingy, shady little restaurant which I had always sort of expected to burn down sooner or later.
As I got closer to the fire trucks, I saw that they were centered not around the restaurant, but more closely to the OCoC shop-- the same shop where I was to have left my car in the bay overnight. Interesting. Maybe it was the pawn shop immediately next door.
Closer still, and I could finally see the source of the commotion: light smoke pouring out of the OCoC shop building from every direction.
The fire appeared to be mostly out. A fire inspector was busy taking pictures of the waiting area from the open front door, the smoke inside still too heavy to walk into. Half the windows in the waiting area were broken out, the others completely clouded in smoke residue.
Three customer cars were visible in the open shop bays. They were burned up as all hell. Had I not gotten miffed at the "misdiagnosis" and picked up my vehicle just a few hours prior, my car would probably have been among them.
The wife points out I probably would have gotten a "new" car out of the deal. But the actual replacement value of my car is in the toilet, as I'm sure the insurance folks would be happy to tell me when they wrote the check. Besides, I really like my car.
Four days on, I'm still pretty freaked out about all this.
Now, I can't be absolutely sure if the call from Captain Super-Shady-Explanation at OCoC was a perfectly-timed harbinger of fiery auto-doom. My rational side rightly oppresses my inner witchy-woo THINGS HAPPEN FOR A REASON OoOoOoOoO dumbass in such matters, because the universe runs on nothing but raw chaos, etc.
Still, it seems to me that the folks working at OCoC that day were unusually dumb even by that shop's not-exactly-MENSA-certified standards, so it makes some sense, maybe. Having interacted with several of Monday's mouth-breathin' work crew, I could've easily seen the day's staff doing something like leaving a massive lit spliff next to a car with a copious gas leak right before closing time.
My inner paranoiac just hopes they don't come to the conclusion that it was arson, and take a GOOD HARD LOOK at that not-exactly-scathing online review posted just three hours before the fire by nothing more than completely insane coincidence. I would never be capable of such a thing, ever, listen, you gotta believe me... not even if I was actually mad (and I wasn't!). But it would just be my typical luck to escape my car's destruction, only to end up arrested as an innocent man, all for spending ten minutes mildly bitching on Angie's List.
Oh, and whaddaya know, for all that, it was my brake pads. But it was only the rears. The fronts were just fine, per mechanic #2, so it only cost me $93 instead of $200. He even fixed the problem with the front clunk-clunk-clunk by un-doing part of OCoC's past botched repair.
So I guess, at minimum, that OCoC phone call was an ominous augury... of mild ripoffery. Not only did my beloved car not burn to death, but I saved like a hundred bucks. Woot. I think.
Until this week, I went to one particular auto shop in this area for most of my repair needs. It wasn't because they were particularly good at mechanic work. It's because they were conveniently located, reasonably fast, and usually pretty cheap. Most of my "needs" involved basic things like tire rotation and oil changes anyway, things which they were reasonably competent at achieving.
For more sophisticated problems beyond "whoops, it's been over 3k miles since my last oil change," I've usually tried to avoid using this shop. I get the impression that they do most of their business on rote, easy things like oil changes and brake pad replacement, and that no one there is really smart enough to handle more serious business.
But historically speaking, when I've taken the car to another local shop which seems to do business mostly in meatier repairs, the results are usually far worse. There are sure a lot of horrible auto shops around here.
Earlier this spring, my car started making a wacky clunking sound from the front left tire when braking to a stop. My last experience with a local "real" mechanic was so bloody terrible that I put off getting it dealt with for some time.
At the point where the noise began to drive me completely nuts, maybe around March or so, I went ahead and took it to my Oil Change Shop of Choice, figuring that I'd give them a shot. I didn't know where else to go, and I was so tired of looking online for yet another mechanic on which to gamble.
The Oil Change Shop of Choice diagnosed the problem visually: ripped CV axle boot. They showed it to me on the hoist and I saw it clear as day. Made sense, looked right, gave them the go-ahead. Two hundred bucks-- but the problem wasn't solved.
I brought the car back in hoping that they could maybe work me a deal on the actual fix. Maybe they did, I don't know. The total cost for this fix was another $90. Not horrible, I guess.
More importantly: this approach worked.
...for about ten days, at which time the wacky clunking sound resumed with a vengeance.
I drove the car around for another couple months like this. I had every intention of going back and getting their too-briefly-effective work fixed under their 1-year repair warranty, but not a lot of spare time to stop and sit in a waiting room for a few hours. Clearly, neither I nor the car were in mortal danger from these symptoms.
Months passed, clunk-clunk-CLUNK. In mid-June, I developed another set of symptoms... this time, 180 degrees across, coming from the right rear wheelwell. These symptoms / noises were more like a network of symptoms / noises, quite interactive with one another in particular ways and under particular conditions. In the interest of not boring you to death, I'll spare you the five-paragraph full explanation and/or flowchart of the noise- / operation-pattern I observed.
But I was gradually convinced, as the noises diversified and the flowchart in my head grew whole new series of boxes and flow-arrows, that there was something unusual and probably multi-system-involved going on back there.
Since the car still seemed to be braking fine, I semi-irresponsibly put it off until this past Monday, when my schedule got a lot easier. I dropped the car off at the Oil Change of Choice shop around noon on Monday. I told them they needed to fix their previous now-broken repair at the front left under warranty, and asked them to look at whatever craziness was going on at the rear right. My wife picked me up and we went to have lunch.
While at lunch, I got a call from the OCoC shop. They suddenly knew nothing about the past repair that worked and then didn't... and said, accordingly, that there was nothing to fix under warranty.
They also hadn't evaluated my mental flowchart re: the rear-wheel problems in any depth, but were convinced all of my problems would be 100% solved with a brand new set of brake pads, front and back. They were busy today, so I'd have to leave the car with them and pick it up in the morning.
Delay aside, this answer did not please me. These guys made the bulk of their living on easy stuff like brake pad replacement. What I knew about the problem at the rear right did not seem to lend itself to the simple explanation of "the brake pads are bad." The guy on the phone sure couldn't explain the connection either. I wasn't mad, but I told them I'd be in to pick up the car in 45 minutes, please do nothing to it, I needed a second opinion before proceeding.
At 2pm or so, I picked up the car. They reminded me that if I brought it back later that day to get the work done, it would have to stay there overnight. Fine, I said, and drove off.
Before looking for yet another alternative car shop, I made sure to post a long-awaited full review of my Oil Change Shop of Choice online. While reasonable and calm / measured in tone, it was not what you'd call positive overall.
After stabbing myself through the eyesocket with a screwdriver, in hopes of lobotomizing away the pain of endless mechanic-searching once and for all, I found another shop up the road from me with a couple glowing reviews (not that this means a damn thing, of course). I dropped in to see them around 4pm.
The lead mechanic hopped in the car with me and drove it for a few minutes. He listened to the noise-network and also gave an in-car diagnosis of "bad brake pads."
I once again stated my doubts, having driven cars with bad pads before and "knowing" their behaviors to be much simpler. He retorted with some very reasonable-sounding explanations re: why these particular noises might connect to bad pads, and why it might sound distinct from what I'd previously experienced in cars with dead pads. Bring it back in in the morning, he said, and they'd take a careful look at everything.
Even without knowing for certain what the problem was, I was starting to feel a little bad about that online review of my Oil Change of Choice shop. They might be lousy at explaining their findings (and/or customer-repair database management), but maybe they weren't so horribly incomptetent at diagnosis after all.
Around 6:30p, I was headed home from my own "shop" / man-cave / home away from home. My usual route between shop and home takes me right past the Oil Change of Choice shop.
In the road, from a distance, I saw fire truck lights. Coming closer, I saw that they had a full blockade of the opposing lane, and that there were perhaps eight or nine fire trucks parked in the street on that side. The blockade was set up quite close to the dingy, shady little restaurant which I had always sort of expected to burn down sooner or later.
As I got closer to the fire trucks, I saw that they were centered not around the restaurant, but more closely to the OCoC shop-- the same shop where I was to have left my car in the bay overnight. Interesting. Maybe it was the pawn shop immediately next door.
Closer still, and I could finally see the source of the commotion: light smoke pouring out of the OCoC shop building from every direction.
The fire appeared to be mostly out. A fire inspector was busy taking pictures of the waiting area from the open front door, the smoke inside still too heavy to walk into. Half the windows in the waiting area were broken out, the others completely clouded in smoke residue.
Three customer cars were visible in the open shop bays. They were burned up as all hell. Had I not gotten miffed at the "misdiagnosis" and picked up my vehicle just a few hours prior, my car would probably have been among them.
The wife points out I probably would have gotten a "new" car out of the deal. But the actual replacement value of my car is in the toilet, as I'm sure the insurance folks would be happy to tell me when they wrote the check. Besides, I really like my car.
Four days on, I'm still pretty freaked out about all this.
Now, I can't be absolutely sure if the call from Captain Super-Shady-Explanation at OCoC was a perfectly-timed harbinger of fiery auto-doom. My rational side rightly oppresses my inner witchy-woo THINGS HAPPEN FOR A REASON OoOoOoOoO dumbass in such matters, because the universe runs on nothing but raw chaos, etc.
Still, it seems to me that the folks working at OCoC that day were unusually dumb even by that shop's not-exactly-MENSA-certified standards, so it makes some sense, maybe. Having interacted with several of Monday's mouth-breathin' work crew, I could've easily seen the day's staff doing something like leaving a massive lit spliff next to a car with a copious gas leak right before closing time.
My inner paranoiac just hopes they don't come to the conclusion that it was arson, and take a GOOD HARD LOOK at that not-exactly-scathing online review posted just three hours before the fire by nothing more than completely insane coincidence. I would never be capable of such a thing, ever, listen, you gotta believe me... not even if I was actually mad (and I wasn't!). But it would just be my typical luck to escape my car's destruction, only to end up arrested as an innocent man, all for spending ten minutes mildly bitching on Angie's List.
Oh, and whaddaya know, for all that, it was my brake pads. But it was only the rears. The fronts were just fine, per mechanic #2, so it only cost me $93 instead of $200. He even fixed the problem with the front clunk-clunk-clunk by un-doing part of OCoC's past botched repair.
So I guess, at minimum, that OCoC phone call was an ominous augury... of mild ripoffery. Not only did my beloved car not burn to death, but I saved like a hundred bucks. Woot. I think.