Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Good Plans….Some Work, Some Don’t


Fservice
Monday I went over to the local Ford Dealership, Karl Flammer Ford, and talk to a service representative.  I tell him that I wanted to have a tune-up, have the belts and hoses checked out, and that it probably needed a front-end brake job since there is a slight squeak when I break at speeds under 20 MPH.  The kicker is, I need it out by Wednesday, Thursday noon at the latest.  “No problem,” he says, and I make reservations for bringing it in first thing Tuesday morning.  Promptly at 7:30 am we get it over there…takes about 20 minutes to get all the information into the computer, and Marcia, Skruffy and I head over to the Orlando area in the HHR to see her brother who was having surgery on Wednesday.

Cell_Phone

All day while we are gone I await the phone call to verify the work that needed to be done, or in other words, sign-off on hundreds of dollars of work.  We get back home around 5:30 p.m. with no phone call.  I call over to the dealership, and our service guy is gone for the day, working the early shift, and I should call around 9:00 a.m.  Well, three calls between 9:15 and 10:00 only get me an answering machine….so at 10 I head over to the dealership to find……

image

…the motorhome in the parking lot, hadn’t been touched for the entire 27 hours that it had been there except to move it to the rear, fenced in parking lot.  I talk to the service rep again, and he told me that they were too busy yesterday, and that it would be in a bay by noon, and he would call me by 1:00 pm.  Marcia, Skruffy and I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond, and headed back around 2:00, with still no phone call.  Call from me again got his voice mail, so I just kept driving and went directly to Karl Flammer Ford.  This time, motorhome was in service bay, but the hood wasn’t even up.  I asked our service rep, he said they had not got to it yet, and I said, “Pull it out, we are taking it away….I told you that we had to have it today, tomorrow noon at the latest.  You have had it for 31 hours, 17 1/2 business working hours, and nothing has been done.

mh

So Friday we head to Houston, then up to Arkansas, then out to California.  There, we will have the work done.  Until then, I will be watching the gauges very closely.  It drove very well from Houston to here, and I feel it will drive fine to California.  Now why these dealerships are so shoddily run, and lie right to your face until you catch them in their deceitfulness, that I cannot explain.
dean
As for Marcia’s brother Dean, right now he probably feels something like this guy pictured above.  He has had a Aortic Aneurysm for many years, and it finally grew to the point that something needed to be done.  They put a “Y” shaped stent in, and also performed a Angioplasty procedure to open up another area near his heart.  He is doing very well…and we are all glad that they did not have to cut him open and separate his ribs which would take much longer to heal.
heart_doctor

It is amazing what they heart doctors can do these days.

6 comments:

  1. Looks like you've got a spammer as your first comment. Just wanted to say that I feel your pain. We no longer ever go to dealerships for our work. 31 hours is ridiculous. You were more than patient. The mobile tech guys and cartalk.com recommended individual shops give us much better service. Safe travels!

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    1. Yes, spammer's get through now and then...but not for long. :) When we get back at the end of the year we will search for and find a place....it is so frustrating.

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  2. Glad you took the MH away. If they are like this before they look at, who knows what they will do to fix it.

    Good news for you about Marcia's brother:)

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  3. That is way too long for the dealership to keep you waiting. Promising to do the work and then not even returning phone calls is unprofessional but we've run into this countless times. You're certainly not alone. The fact that they always want the vehicle as soon as the shop opens because it's convenient for them to do all the paperwork in the morning even though they're not planning on doing the work at that time is especially galling. When we had to get work done recently I looked at all of the Google reviews and picked a dealership that had good reviews even though it was a little out of the way. We let them know that we picked them for that reason. We also hung out in the dealership a lot. I don't know if any of that helped but they were working on our RV most of the time that we were there.

    But none of that is important now because.....Road trip! Have a good time!

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  4. Good choice--very unprofessional way to do business.

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  5. You really have to watch them like a hawk. I never leave - I stay right there, in The Palms, until they are ready to work on it. Then I watch them. If I go to the waiting room, I check from time to time to see where they are. I've found that's the only way they seem to get anything done. I can't believe the poor service more "service" shops have. I'm glad you took it and drove away. I wouldn't have trusted their work after that shoddy service. :)

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