We Take It Back: Let Someone ELSE Fix Your Car
I submitted this story about my friend and his inability to work on his car. This story is about his decked-out Honda Prelude and his inability to understand how cars work mechanically.
My car buddy did work hard throughout high school for his money to do what he wanted with his car, and he liked the idea of making his car one of a kind in the area — body kit, exhaust, intake, headers, lowering kit, lightweight flywheel, new paint, and so on. (All this work he either had a mechanic do or we helped him.) He put a lot of his money into the car, and it looked great and ran great.
He wanted to get a short-shift kit for the car. He was looking at kits in his magazines and trying to decide which one to buy the last time I talked to him.
A few days later, my car buddy and a mutual friend of ours stopped by my house. He was excited about how he’d done the work himself, putting on a short-shift kit for his car. It surprised me that he was capable of doing such work on his own, so I was leery about it right off the bat.
What he didn’t do was actually buy a short-shift kit. Here’s what he did.
He unscrewed the shifter knob, cut the shifter down to half its stock length using a Dremel tool, and then glued the shifter knob back onto the shorted shifter lever.
He was pumped that he had a shorter throw for the shifter so he could shift faster. Our mutual friend and I told him that the shifter itself wasn’t supposed to be cut and that short-shifter kits are specially designed for the car to allow the transmission to work as it should like it still has stock parts on it without any problems. Cutting the shifter was going to cause problems with synchros, gears, and transmission. He said it was working and would be fine.
Fast forward a few days. I was at work, getting ready to start working, and in walked our mutual friend to start his shift; we all worked there.
Friend: “I have to help [Car Buddy] take his Prelude to the mechanic after work because the car won’t shift into first gear or third gear. He has to start it in second gear and jump to fourth gear… or stay slow enough to only be in second.”
Our car buddy had to spend all his summer money that year to get his Prelude fixed because he was too cheap to get a short-shift kit for his car, thinking he could do the work on his own.
Question of the Week
Have you ever served a bad customer who got what they deserved?
