[200q20v] Beware of Dealers

[Doyt W. Echelberger]

Good story, Rob. Incidently, if I had a car like yours, I would be a very 
happy person and I think I would cherish it like you do.  But the story got 
me thinking.  Bad idea, probably.

So, why do we put up with that sort of thing? ( Dealers and mechanics 
wrecking our cars).  Let's form an internet club and all get together and 
share ideas and parts and just do our own maintenance and repairs. We could 
avoid the dealers. We could call it Audifans or Quattro or 200q20v or 
something:~)  Anything would be better than letting 'those guys' get their 
hands on our cars.

So your friend wrecked the front of his car and took it in to get it 
fixed.  And the guy that fixed it wrecked it also. For the people involved 
it was two horror stories. Two guys who wrecked cars accidently and 
probably felt terrible about it and will never really forget it......Sounds 
like real people I know.  Even happened to me a few times. Didn't like any 
part of it.

I really don't see mechanics generally as being superior beings that have 
extra-human characteristics.  A few grow and mature and flourish and 
specialize and seem to have a knack for doing the right thing most of the 
time, so they stay at it long enough to get a lot of great experience. And 
then the engineers make it all obsolete.  But half the ones I know are 
divorced, eccentric, drink too much, and use drugs on the job. And they 
started out as fairly well organized average stable people of normal 
intelligence, like all 1,500 of us. I think the job had a lot to do with 
their decline. And lots of other jobs probably do the same things to people.

Think about it.......crawling and creeping around under cars with a wrench 
and a hammer, or laying on your back under a dashboard in a maze of wires 
and tubes and levers, wearing safety goggles, all day long, every day of 
the week, year after year,working on stranger's cars, with your boss 
expecting you to perform miracles and ready to fire you if you mess up just 
once,or if you get some black marks on the steering wheel or your 
footprints on the headliner. And the customer expecting you to be perfect 
and fast and happy and pleasant and clean and alert and able to see through 
walls and leap tall buildings with a single bound. That's the kind of 
mechanic everybody wants.

Sounds like a recipe for disaster.  It may be humanly impossible to keep 
today's world fleet of marvelously complex engineering miracles running 
well most of the time for more than just a few years after they are built, 
in an environment of salt, water, snow, ice, mud, sand, cinders, rocks, and 
drivers who do nothing but drive the cars and ignore them until they break. 
When my VCR breaks, I get another one. No one fixes VCR's any more. Cars 
are just VCR's with wheels and engines and......which stay outside most of 
the time, in the salt, water, snow.....

Anyone for a Hummer?

I think we have a forum like this for lots of good reasons, and I 
appreciate it every day more than I ever imagined a few years ago. And I 
want to thank all those exceptional people, mechanics or not, who keep the 
forum going. That includes you, Rob. There aren't any dealers around here I 
can count on.  And only a few really brilliant independents, booked solid 
for weeks in advance.  So rally round, guys and share....it's our only hope 
for survival.

Now why did I write all that?   Everybody already knows it.   Oh well, I 
feel better now. Flame suit on,......probably should take a few months off 
and get away from cars for awhile, and salt, water, snow......VCR's......click

Doyt Echelberger



 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
At 06:19 PM 9/26/00 -0400, you wrote:
Ah, Pass & Weisz. Let me tell MY story then.

My friend here at work has a Boxster he bought from them a couple years
back. He took in to have the front air dam fixed (ran over a curb in the
snow). They replaced the whole nose part, ahead of the hood. Ok, fine. He
gets it back and the lights and a couple other things are not even hooked
up - you can see the connectors and wires hanging down. He takes it back to
have them fix it, and tells them to replace the brakes while they are at it.
It takes them 3 days, and he demands it is done by Friday at 3PM. They call
at 2:30PM and say it WAS done, then one of the mechanics RAN IT INTO A
FENCE!!!! So they had to replace the front piece again. Incredible.

Rob Winchell
91 200Q20V