Lets hear it for the mechanics

[Andy Zarse]

Here below a letter I sent just last week to the robbing bastards at Gatwick Subaru. I used to have a Honda and it was an absolute pleasure to deal with the dealer in Crawley. But these people really take the biscuit, permanently trying to stitch up their customers. They charge £67.50 per hour plus VAT for a grunting spotty teenager, who resembles and smells like a badly shaved oran-utang, to change the oil and filter and prod a few bits and bobs with an old screwdriver.

Anyway, they tucked me up like a kipper last year on the 10,000 miler, so I took my own oil rather than pay the £48.00 plus VAT per gallon they charge for Castrol GTX. IE, they charged me £20 for two Rust Proof Stamps. I asked what had happened to the old ones, had they dropped of the bottom of the car? Oh no Sir, these are the stamps we put in your service book to show the Corrision Inspection has been carried out. I open the book to see two stickers sized 1 inch x 1/2 inch that just said "Subaru" on them. Nothing else, no code, hologram, nothing. £20 for christ's sake!!! And why two of the buggers?

Anyway I was ready for them this time, I just knew this would happen:

Gatwick Subaru
X
X
X


26 February 2004
 


Dear Sirs,

Subaru Impreza WRX GX52 xxx
Invoice Noxxxxx

I refer to the invoice posted last week in respect of the 20,000 mile service carried out on 17 February.

I have the following queries:

• Can you please explain why I have been invoiced for 2.2 hours of labour when the vehicle was only in your possession for exactly 1.5 hours? This is taken from the time I dropped the keys over the counter until the time your member of staff called me to tell me the vehicle was ready for collection. I was by that time sitting in your reception area waving at him from behind the coffee machine. Unless there was a tremor in the space/time continum, and of which I was unaware, I assume the extra time invoiced must be a clerical error.
 
• I was somewhat surprised to note that you had been able use 1 x unit of screen wash @ £1.92 per unit plus VAT. The reason for my surprise is that that very morning I had personally topped up the washer bottle to the point that it would have not been possible to get so much as a further teaspoonful of washer fluid in there. I wonder therefore if you could explain to me this apparent discrepancy.

• When checking the screen wash, I was similarly careful to check the level of other under bonnet fluids and they were all on or at maximum capacity. I was therefore unable to understand how you were able to use a unit of brake fluid. Reference is made in the invoice to the cleaning and adjustment of the brakes, but unless they have been bled (which is not on the invoice) I do not see how this amount of fluid could have been used. Incidentally, what constitutes 1 unit? At £10.98 plus VAT per unit, it must be very special brake fluid indeed.

• I am unsure as to what is a “Pitstop OL”. I’m sure it’s vital, and you’ve used 1 x unit of it, but can you please let me know what it is, because I'm losing sleep about it.

Upon receipt of your revised invoice and explanations I will be happy to pay for the work by return. Having said the above, your increasingly imaginative attempts at fleecing your customers never fails to amaze and amuse.

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.

Yours truly,


Andrew Zarse
Director



So there you have it. I'll let you know their response.

PS Guys, nyone know what a Pitstop OL is? I reckon it's that bit of a broken plastic you always find they've left in the ashtray, and whose origin and purpose is know only to a selct few.

[BigH]

Wotcher Andy,
Well, the best of luck, but I think we know what the outcome will be, main dealers are kipper stitchers extraordinaire.
I guess it's fair to say you're not one of the many that puts Subaru up there in the JD customer satisfaction surveys every year then.
Hands up any one who has left a main dealer, after shelling out his own hard-earned, thinking "my, what wonderful service, and a bargain too, I wonder how they can do it for that price, I must return here sharpish"
H

[BigH]

I am unsure as to what is a “Pitstop OL”.

I think you've read it wrong Andy. It's obviously a reference to the fact that your car was seviced over the pits by Topol, that well know grizzled Czech hambone of an actor. Who can forget his performance in Fiddler on the Roof? How the mighty have fallen eh, if you'd been in the workshop instead of reception you'd have seen him hammering in your spark plugs with his battered old Oscar.

There's a joke in there, somewhere between 'battered old Oscar' and 'underbonnet fluids', but I think i've popped my rectum again, and I better be off....
H

[Andy Zarse]

Thanks for the advice H, I never looked at it like that. Now you mention it, I thought I heard the MD of the dealership, a rather portly and swarthy looking foreign gentleman, whistling "If I was a rich man". Fiddler on the Hoof more like. The bastard.

However, I can't help feeling you wouldn't be being so pleasant if you'd seen what i had posted here:

http://www.clubarnage.com/yabbse/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=1413;start=15

Sorry for letting the cat out the bag.

[BigH]

Zarse, you're incorrigible. Or is it corrugated.
Our whole party in the public domain. I mean, really.
You have to admit though, some of them are pretty damn cute. Apart from our pimp that is, I'm sure it's Geoffrey Dahmer.
Co-incidentally, I was in a ladies afro wig specialist on Walthamstow High Street on Saturday night, I picked up a lovely little number with mid length ringlets for £20. The asking price was £25, so we reckoned it was a bit of a bargain, human hair and all. It looked lovely on the tube.
H

[Mr. Rick]

It looked lovely on the tube.
H

 

Thought you were supposed to wear them on your head ... unless it's THAT sort of wig!!!

[BigH]

Well, I didn't bring up merkins!

[Mr. Rick]

http://www.clubarnage.com/yabbse/index.php?board=4;action=display;threadid=1413;start=15

Sorry for letting the cat out the bag.

Thanks for the lookalike Andy - however if you really want to see what I look like as a girl, below is a photo taken of me at 17 (a few weeks after my first LM - there's as tory in there, more of that in a mo'). This picture appeared in my local rag back then to highlight the 250 miles I'd cycled over 3 days for the local hospital. This caused my Maths teacher and her husband to have a furious row apparently as he staunchly refused to believe that the photo was of a young man!

As for the story of looking like this at LM, anyone who was there in 1981 will remember it for there not being a cloud in sight all weekend (v. similar to 2000). By Sunday I was bollocksed and taking a well deserved nap in the wooded area down by the Esses. Shirt was a buttoned affair and this was undone to reveal my chest (no man-tits in those days, I was a skinny fecker) and I awoke to 2 dirty old bastards trying to get a glimpse down my top!!

 

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[BigH]

My Lord! I do believe I have an erection!
H

[Brian(Liverpool boys)]

My Lord! I do believe I have an erection!
H

H, do you have an Elswick Chopper?Remember them they weighed in at about half a ton, not built for speed.

[gibberish]

Gibbo, I don't believe you. Had you been drinking?

Sorry H, it's all true    As for drinking.......well I did discover a nice local brewery, but that's another story  

[Andy Zarse]

Rick, that looks uncannily like me circa the same era. I was still at school then, and I had the obligatory lank hair and centre pating. Actually, I still do have the parting, it's just that its about four inches wider these days....

H, I think I need some sort of Afro wig too, although I would choose to wear it on me bonce and not on my tube. Walthamstow you say? Is that the shop next to the International House of Merkins?

Brian, I thought Elswick Chopper is a genito-urinary disease. Indeed one of our crew has recently had a dose of it due to "overuse".  Chris, whose face looks like a Japanese helicopter pilot, has taken the art of self manipulation to a whole new level. His devotion to the practice is such that he is lobbying the IOC to have it included as an Olympic sport. A Gold for GB in the bag if they agree. And people wonder why the Queen wears gloves when dishing out the gongs to sucessful sportsmen.

[BigH]

Is that the shop next to the International House of Merkins?

I never noticed it, but there may have been a small department round the back, as it were. It was next to a fruit stall/shop which appeared to sell only melons. After embarrasing ourselves with some Latvian women in an extremely rough pub watching the rugby, the melon stall proved a good hiding place.

See, I tried to start off a nice little thread where we could discuss motorsport talent in the UK, and within no time at all it's moved on to Latvian women, melons and the Queens attitudes toward bodily fluids.
H

[gibberish]

See, I tried to start off a nice little thread where we could discuss motorsport talent in the UK, and within no time at all it's moved on to Latvian women, melons and the Queens attitudes toward bodily fluids.
H

It always seems to go like that.  It's like life really.  You try to be serious, but it doesn't work, so you get drunk.  You try to get a tyre changed, and end up becoming an expert on pre-cambrian neanderthals.  Makes sense when you think of it.

Or maybe not.