A friend of mine had to take her car in for service last week, which of course got me to thinking about the insanity of getting your car repaired.  I don’t know if men have this problem, but as a woman, it can be difficult to be taken seriously at a car repair shop.  When I find a shop where the staff actually think women have a brain, I become a loyal customer.

A couple situations come to mind when I think about stupid car repair experiences I’ve had.  The first one was a number of years ago.  My car started to die on me – in traffic – for no apparent reason.  Over the course of two days, I took it to a repair shop twice.  Of course, when I was at the shop, the car ran just fine.

Oh, the mechanic looked at everything and once I believe he adjusted the timing, but for the most part he did everything but pat me on the head and tell me to take two aspirin.  Really!  Did he think I was imagining the car stalling?

Then, I decided to take a man with me just to see what would happen.  In this particular situation, the mechanics were not only chauvinistic, but also pretty dumb.  We were all gazing intently under the hood of the car, and one of the mechanics was repeating his theory that everything was really fine, and looking for confirmation from my male reinforcement.

After a few minutes, my male companion stood up straight from his crouched position under the hood and said, “Has anyone noticed that this car doesn’t have an alternator belt?”

Well, actually the car did have an alternator belt, but it was broken and tangled in something which prevented it from falling off the car altogether.  It certainly wasn’t doing its job.

The mechanics were a bit chagrined.  But I often wonder if they’d have noticed the problem if they’d been a bit more diligent, secure in the knowledge that the car was really stalling out, so something must be wrong.

I had another car that started stalling on me in traffic.  With this one, though, no amount of going into neutral and restarting the engine worked.  And, besides that, it was a new car.  So, back to the dealership I went.  They kept the car overnight for diagnosis and repair.  When I went to pick it up, I was assured that it was now working perfectly.

I was turning out of the parking lot, and you got it.  The car stalled.  So, I walked back to the dealership, madder than a . . .  well, really mad.   When you’re in the middle of rush hour traffic, this is not an inconvenience, it’s an accident waiting to happen.  No forward motion, no power steering, no nothing!  The service manager walked back to the car with me and we took a little drive.  I told him that it seemed like the car tended to stall when going around a corner.

The manager drove.  We wound through the neighborhood streets behind the dealership.  We turned this way and that and the car performed beautifully.   We were just about to go back to the dealership, and the manager was trying hard to wipe that “I told you so” grin off his face when all of a sudden – thankfully – the car stalled.   The only explanation I can think of is that I take corners faster than the manager did!

Now, the manager became a believer and I was stuck without a car for some period of time.  I got the car back and never had another problem with it.  Is it just because I have strange things happen to my vehicles?  So, if the symptoms aren’t something that the mechanics have seen before, they just decide that it isn’t so?  Or, does it have something to do with my gender??  I’ll probably never know for sure.

In case you’re wondering….  What can go wrong with a car that makes it stall during turns?  As it happened, the computer was broken.  When the tilt of going around a turn was large enough, it shorted out and shut down the engine.

Other than that, of course, “As Far As I Can See, It’s Working Fine.”