For those of us that work within the industry the sentence “but it wasn’t like that before I bought the car to you” is heard all to often and has been known to result in feuds between block head mechanics who struggle to articulate what they mean and usually a person of high ignorance.
This is a frequent situation that raises in the industry due to a lack of knowledge and understanding from the client. Thats acceptable, after all this is why we take our cars to mechanics. They are the experts and we are not, therefore we pay them to deal with that which we do not understand. Ironically if something then presents itself as troublesome after the mechanic has had the vehicle the average consumer seems to feel suddenly enlightened and overnight gains a substantial amount of automotive knowledge.
The client here need to slow the whole process up, granted accidents happen and from time to time mistakes do enter into the work we do . We have looked at some of those issues in previous blog articles which you can review below if you wish.
Trust in the Automotive Industry
Faltering Trust in the Automotive Industry
The implication that most consumers are stating weather they intend to or not is this.
“i feel you have deliberately done something to ruin my car”
lets evaluate this. In a round about way the client is accusing the mechanic of behaving like a mafia boss and deliberately tampering with a vehicle. A person who more than likely collects photographs of twentieth century telegraph poles has now decided they need to educate their mechanic about their deliberate attempt to sabotage their car.
Human beings simply do not do this. Unfortunately unethical up selling and charging for repairs not done are things that do sometimes occur and Tracy Grimshaw takes great delight in informing the world when these things happen. People who do this, don’t get away with it for long and very quickly become exposed for being scrotums of the world. However deliberate tampering of any part of someones car simply does not happen.
Even the greatest douch bags of the world would not do such a thing. The only time anyone would willing tamper with someones vehicle is when the desired result is that the driver of that vehicle needs to meet a grim ending. Blokes who change oil for a living have no desire to off soccer Mums by introducing strange suspension noises into your car when you come in to have your tail light bulb replaced.
Before uttering the words “ever since you had my car” or “it wasn’t there before you had my car”. Stop and evaluate what it is you are actually accusing the mechanic of. Fitting two rear tyres does not cause your radiator to start leaking no matter which way you look at it. Likewise replacing brake light bulbs will not result in check engine warning lights coming on three days latter. Consumers need to evaluate what it is they are actually stating. Your throw away sentence that you have uttered has directly attacked another persons integrity and no one responds positively to this.
When this happens the consumers desired result is the car fixed and usually free of charge as they believe an error has occurred whilst the mechanic was working on the vehicle. There are diplomatic ways to approach this.Indirectly accusing your local mechanic of behaving like Richard Kuklinski is not the correct approach. Mechanics are not resolving human corpses in 44 Gallon drums nor are they getting information out of snitches by letting hungry rats devour their limbs. Your bold “ever since” statement gets your mechanic upset, you upset and no one makes any progress in resolving the issue.
Think about what it is you are indirectly saying. You either trust this bloke or you don’t. If you don’t, you need to find someone else. If you do, give them the benefit of the doubt and approach it more diplomatically. All it takes is to change one sentence of your dialog and 9 times out of 10 you will get what you want anyway.
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