garages.
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Having my car repaired was never a big deal in
the south. There were plenty of big chain places around, like
Goodyear and Firestone, and they were open seven days a week and
usually had at least half a dozen bays. For non-emergency
maintenance you could drop it off whenever and pick it up later, or you
could wait for it. You could always assume that you could just go
there and wait for it, and the waiting rooms were big enough to
accommodate several people. Not luxurious, but not miserable
either.
As far as I can tell, places like this just don’t exist in New England. Most garages up here are mom and pop (err, maybe Vinnie and Guido?) operations with only one or two bays, so just getting someone to even look at your car is a crap shoot. Up here, they expect you to make appointments, and if they have a waiting area at all it’s usually one or two chairs in the corner of a tiny, overcrowded space that doubles as a miniature convenience store. Even at the dealership were I bought my current car, you had to make an appointment to do anything. Even better, most places up here aren’t open on Sundays, and some even have only limited hours on Saturday. Apparently the grease monkeys didn’t get the memo that they are a service industry and should therefore expect to be working when the rest of us are not (and vice versa). I mean, would you expect a grocery store to be closed on the weekends? Through some miracle of scheduling, I can get milk anytime I want, but if my car breaks down on a Saturday afternoon I’m not getting to work on Monday? In preparation for a road trip last month, we took my wife’s car to a garage around the corner from here at nine a.m. on a Saturday morning. We had been there once before to have the car inspected, and at the time they actually seemed like a pretty decent shop. We just wanted an oil change and for someone to do a once-over to make sure nothing needed replacing before we set out on our 2,200 mile adventure. So, we left the car and our phone number, and went off to run some errands. We started getting nervous when they hadn’t called after lunch, so we looked up their number and called them. I got an answering service; turns out this shop is only open until noon on Saturdays, and they’re closed on Sundays. We missed the hours, which, to be fair, are actually posted in the front of the store if you look closely. But the cretins didn’t even call us when they were closing up; we could have at least given them a credit card number over the phone and had them lock the keys in the car. So, we’re out of luck until they open at 7:30 on Monday. Needless to say we won’t be going back. The things you take for granted… |