Good Plans….Some Work, Some Don’t

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.

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……

…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.

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.

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.

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