MANAGING A GENERAL MOTORS LABOR AND DELIVERY

Att: Joe Dingbang, General Manager – The Acme Wondertruck Emporium

Dear Mr. Dingbang:

Please include this letter in my customer service file. Your lawyers will need it for the trial. What trial? Oh, there´s always a trial. Sooner or later, whenever humans and machines try to live together, one or the other or both go haywire. This happens when either the humans or the machines attempt to perform tasks the others aren´t prepared for or designed to handle.

Yesterday I brought my new (used) pickup in to your service department at The Acme Wondertruck Emporium. This was to be my first experience with your fix-it boys since buying the truck from The AWE last month. It was with no small degree of trepidation that I drove up, parked, went in and approached the service desk.

That was the first time I´d been back to any car dealer´s service department in ten years. As you know from my trade-in, I´d had that vehicle for 11 years, and I stopped going to its dealer service department shortly after I bought it new, opting instead (when I´ve been lucky enough to find one) for that professional "shade tree mechanic" – the one who loves his work, incurs reasonable charges, and knows automobiles as well as any manual-savvy, horse-sense deprived, factory-trained upstart.

But, these days that´s getting harder to do, because automakers have long realized that their dealer service & parts departments are highly profitable, so they´ve increasingly designed and made our vehicles to be irreparable by any independent operator.

We all know what happens when an "unauthorized agent" replaces our Acme Wondertruck´s thingamabob with a Widgeteer Brand whatchamacallit, and the resulting de-flubberized bell housing (even though it cost us less and works better) voids our warranty.

You know what a warranty is: that piece of paper that guarantees what it won´t do for us when we most need it at a price we can´t afford.

And, please pardon my use of less than technical jargon. When it comes to mechanical savvy, I operate from the ghost-hamster-on-a-treadmill premise. I believe that machines in general and motorcars in particular are haunted.

I don´t deny the importance of regularly scheduled maintenance, oil changes and parts adjustments and/or replacements, but standard practices for keeping our buggies in tip-top shape must also include targeted doses of body English and an assortment of gender-specific plea bargains that often include exorcism.

For example, thrusting one´s pelvis forward and to the right while shaking the wheel and begging our ignition to: "Please, baby ... just turn over one more time and Big Daddy will fill his Beauty Queen full of Quaker State!" is a must for cold-weather operation.

In the world of gadget repair, I´ve been known to use a hammer as a chisel, a chisel as a screwdriver, and a screwdriver as a hammer. Mr. Goodwrench, I´m not. I only resort to such mis-tooling after the warranty has expired on the offending gizmo, which, as noted above, is the day after it´s issued.

My favorite dealer service department rip-off happened many years ago, when I took another old truck in for a major repair to a car dealer which shall go unnamed everywhere except here: Seacoast Mazda. When I returned to pick up the vehicle, I was informed that I owed ten hours labor when the truck had only been there for five hours. And, it had spent the first two of those five hours sitting in the parking lot where I´d left it. I know, because I´d gone back later to check.

Incredibly, and even lying about the lie itself, the service manager said: "We had two mechanics working on it for five hours; that´s how we got the ten hours." He told me this without missing a beat, and he managed, to his credit, to say it with a straight face.

It looked very similar to the face I saw yesterday when I entered The Acme WonderTruck Emporium´s Service Department to get the inspection sticker on my now fully registered, new used truck. With all due paraphrase and respect to Yogi Berra, it was the second time in a decade that I´d had déjà vu all over again.

I was trying hard to ignore the voice in my head of your salesman, who´d told me three weeks before as I was poising my pen above the dotted line: "Just bring her in when you register it and we´ll throw a sticker on it."

That curveball was apparently not forwarded to The AWE´s service department guy, because he informed me: "It´s not lick n´ stick anymore; we have to run it through the computer and the whole process takes forty-five minutes."

He told me this after I´d reminded him of your sign outside that promises a five-to-ten minute "express lane" service on vehicle inspections and oil changes.

My dear Mr. Dingbang: It may take The Acme Wondertruck Emporium 45 minutes to inspect a vehicle, but the "whole process", in fact, takes less than 10 minutes. You might advise your guy that despite my apparent advancing age and having all the mechanical prowess of a Pampered Lego engineer, I´m aware of indoor plumbing, horseless carriages, and the fact that newfangled vehicle inspections have indeed changed from what used to be a simple process ("lick n´ stick") to a more cyber-savvy hook-up. I´m hip. I´m also aware of smoke, especially when it´s blown in my face.

For the record, I left unstickered and took my new used WonderTruck to my shade tree mechanic´s garage. Eighteen minutes after I´d gone in unannounced, I emerged stickered. It took longer than usual because we first all went out in the yard and admired his new vintage pristine ´66 Bonneville, a classic car built in the days when men were men and a lick stuck on the spot.

Meanwhile, you´ll forgive me if I don´t return for your promised "five free oil changes in the first year."

I can´t afford it.

Syndicated humor columnist B. Elwin Sherman writes from the New Hampshire north country. You may contact him via his website. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary internet links to this column at his Toolkit In Paradise website may be distributed without written permission. Copyright 2009 by B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved. Used here with permission.