Talented Mechanic

Written 4/16/08

Well people, Kyley and Andrew are gone on their Outerbanks field-trip. Rick and I were up until 2:00 am last night, and finished everything this morning to get them ready for a four-day-trip. Why were we up until 2:00am and still didn’t finish? Because we have only known about this trip for EIGHT MONTHS. That’s why.

Rick wanted me to report on his job. As you may know, he owns a used car-lot. Because Rick has a full-time mechanic at the shop, when he sells the car, he explains to the customer that if the car breaks-down, he will fix it for a much lower rate than a garage. This keeps the customer happy, which in turn, brings him more customers through word of mouth advertising. Happy customers = More customers. So now for the story:

He had a customer coming in every-other week to make her payment. Every time she came, she was in the passenger seat of someone else’s car. He assumed that her son was using the car that she bought from Rick. After approximately 3 months of this, when she came in to make her payment, she said that the car had been broken-down for a few months, and she thought that she had saved enough money to get it fixed. Rick was shocked, and explained that he wished she would have told him, as he could have fixed her car and worked out a financial arrangement with her. He towed her car back to the shop that same day to fix it. She was quite surprised when he called her within 15 min. to tell her that her car was fixed, and it wasn’t going to cost her anything but the tow bill.
“Well, how did you fix it?” she asked.
“I put gas in it”

I would love to say that this is the only time this has happened. It’s not. Three times now this has occurred.

The lesson of this story? I’m not the only one who has to call Rick when I drive the car completely out of gas.