Car repair
We just drove Mary's 1990 Subaru (a fantastic
hand-me-down from my mom) to Alaska and back, and for the most part the car
performed admirably, especially for a car with $195,000 miles on it. However,
it did start to overheat once, so we discovered it had a coolant leak,
somewhere. Our solution was just to add a bit of coolant to the radiator every
300 miles or so.
Once we got home, we
figured we might as well address the problem. Normally when any of our cars
need work, we take them to our buddy Dave, who is a competent and conscientious
mechanic. Alas, as such, he's also swamped, so there tends to be a two week
queue for getting something fixed. So in this case I decided to take it to Pep
Boys. That's one of those chain fix-it places. I actually like them for
straightforward stuff. They're cheap, dependable, and fast. Not too bright, so
if there's diagnosis involved, I'll pass, but in this case I already knew the
radiator needed replacing. They agreed to do it for about $129 for the radiator
and $78 for labor, which seemed
fair.
Alas, it was not to be so easy.
They had to order the radiator, which would arrive the next morning. It turns
out a lot can change in that time. The call we got early the next morning was,
"Sorry, Pep Boys Corporate has just informed us that they're closing up this
shop, so we can't fix your car." Poo! You'd think they'd give a little warning,
huh?
There's another Pep Boys 6 miles
away, but I hate driving, so I just started calling closer places until I found
one that could fix it quickly. If I had a brain, I would have gotten an
estimate on the phone, too, because after I went through the effort of bringing
it in, I found that they were going to charge almost $400, instead of a little
over $200. Since I've only got 12 days left here before moving to Hong Kong, I
opted to just pay the extra -- I figured I'd probably get better quality for the
extra money, anyway.
They fixed it
promptly, overcharged us, and we left. But on Mary's very first trip (just
across town), the transmission started slipping. She called me to rescue her,
and I found that when the mechanics had re-attached the transmission fluid
cooling hose to the radiator, they had torn a hold in it, allowing all the
tranny fluid to spray out.
Better
quality. Pah.
So Howard and I spent a
couple of hours replacing the hose and refilling the fluid on the side of the
road, but after our repairs, the transmission was still slipping. So I just had
it towed back to the loser shop. My hope is that there's nothing seriously
wrong; there's just a trick to bleeding the air from the transmission that I
don't know. I'll be peeved if their incompetence has destroyed my
transmission.
I don't have time for
this.
Filed Fri - August 1, 2003, 11:34 AM in
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