The Barber.

This was an event that will forever be burned into my memory. It shows how circumstances can change in an instant and a repair event goes from something that we had some pride in providing to a customer to a “What Just Happened?”

Not long after we had opened our shop we had a fellow show up for some work on his classic car, that included making new transmission cooler lines.  Being able to make them by hand and result in an aesthetically pleasing, while functional result was really important because the owner takes this ride to car cruises and likes to show it off. Some of the rest of the work centered on improving the quality of the engines idle operation, which would have essentially amounted to a tune-up back when this car was new.

The owner was thrilled with the results. He had heard about what we could do and deliver, and we met those expectations and even exceeded them.

A couple months went by and he approached us about his daughter-in-laws car. It was a Chevrolet Lumina 3.1 Liter and had a misfire and a severe loss of power. The diagnostics were pretty straight forward; two cylinders didn’t have any spark. This engine used one of the early versions of “C3I” or distributor less ignition. The module and coils were mounted on the left hand side of the engine below the exhaust manifold. You had three short plug wires for the front or left hand head, and three long wires for the rear head. One module controlled all three coils, and each coil provided spark to two cylinders. The system was widely regarded as a waste spark because the spark had to jump two spark plugs, one on the power stroke which fired that cylinder, while its companion was on its exhaust stroke which was simply part of the circuit path at that point. The center coil which provided the spark for cylinders three and six wasn’t firing. Using an oscilloscope and the low amps probe the coil current event for that coil was missing from the parade. The coil was removed from the module so that the module itself was tested and it was confirmed to have failed. Further inspection of components showed that the plugs were still the originals, and had eroded gaps exceeding one hundred thousandths of an inch. The specification was forty-five to fifty thousandths so it needed new plugs, and secondary voltage testing of the rest of the system showed that the remaining operational coils in the ignition system needed to produce over thirty-five thousand volts to fire their spark plugs.

As a tech these numbers are very significant because this car had a pattern failure due to neglect. The high secondary demand voltage causes the coils to fail, and then we have that secondary voltage get discharged through the ignition module which kills it. This car simply needed what we used to call a tune-up. But what brought them in the door was the final failure of the module when it completely lost two cylinders.

The estimate was written to reflect exactly what the failure was. It had to have the module and the one coil. To really run right it needed new plugs and wires, because that is what caused the module to fail. It is also a pretty good idea, but not required to replace the other two coils. So we had a good, better, best situation and add in some other routine items like the fuel filter, (also still the original) and the air filter and we were going to be able to give them back a car that would run the way that it’s supposed to.

The choice was all up to the customer at that point what he wanted to do. We don’t force people to buy things, we just lay the facts on the table and they decide. The potential problem that they had to consider is that the other two coils have been stressed just like the first one that had already failed and took out the original module. There would be a chance that should they not replace those coils they could lose another ignition module. The only difference pricewise was the second and third coil, the labor was the same since the whole system had to be removed and reinstalled to replace the module. The customer chose to replace all three coils and have the car properly tuned up. As part of that routine I also cleaned the throttle plate and reset the minimum air rate and TPS sensor adjustment at no extra charge. The total bill including the diagnostics was just over $750.

So the next afternoon the customer comes to pick up the car, and I know that it’s running perfectly. Basically I can’t wait for them to take it for a ride because with everything that was wrong with it when it came in they haven’t felt the way it’s supposed to run in quite some time. There was a woman, and another older guy with the customer. Out of the blue he starts jumping all over us because of what we charged the customer. It went from him insisting to see the slip from the parts store so that he could see what we paid for the parts, to seeing what the replaced parts were, and another whole group of demands. As I mentioned earlier, the customer brought in his daughter in laws car to have us work on it. The woman who came in was his daughter in law, and the old guy raising hell was her father. He claimed that he used to be the service manager at what was then a dealership that had sold out a few years prior, so he knew all about our price mark-ups. He grabbed the keys to the car and handed them to his daughter who was also screaming about the price and he told her to leave with the car. The customer who brought us the car, and was going to pay the bill that he approved said very little the whole time. The old guy even told him to just leave and we would have to sue him to get the money for the work that we did. At one point the old guy threatened to get physical when he wanted me to go outside across the street with him. He even threatened to call the police on us, for what I don’t know but he was doing everything that he could to make us change the bill. His reasoning was that he would have done everything that we did for just the cost of the parts and that would have been a lot less than what we were charging.

Now what would you do if you were suddenly in a position like this. We had only been in business about six months, and this had never happened to us before. We always strive to make the customers happy, and gave him very clear choices and he took plenty of time to decide what to do. Looking back, what we should have done was call the police ourselves, and today that’s exactly what we would do about the threat of physical violence.  In some ways I really wanted to oblige him in going across the street, but my luck would have resulted in that old guy probably having a heart attack or something stupid like that. No matter what I did or was going to do this job had just went from something to be proud of to simply an event that the quickest way to make it go away that we could find the better. So I cut the bill by $125 just to get rid of them before I finally did lose my temper and made things worse.

The really sad part of that is, doing that only helped to make it look even more like we were in the wrong and ever since that day the barber and this other guy have trash talked about our shop. I must say though if you ever believed in Karma you’ll appreciate the fact that about six months later a bad summer storm blew a tree down on top of the car and totaled it. But for me even that can’t erase the hurt that we felt when they walked into the shop. I can let the quality of the work that we do speak for itself and overcome their attempts to sabotage our shop, and in that respect what they think really isn’t relevant. But nothing can undo the fact that through the years they really have hurt us some, but at least from today on people get to see the other side of their story.