A word of advice: Never have work done by a mechanic you don't know and trust. If you must, make him give you a signed estimate for services. If it goes over the estimate, he has to get your permission to proceed further. With the estimate in hand, he can't do what this sleazy weasel did.
A lady called that she was at a gas station on the trail close to Lake Park and needed help. We'll call it Maggot's Garage. The young lady had taken her Corvette it for a sweet deal tune up. I think about $25 bucks at the time. When she returned for the car, she found Maggot had disassembled the entire input system--carb, intake, fuel pump, the works--and wanted $200 before he would put it back together. He said the system was "dirty" and he'd had to clean it.
She didn't know the law and hadn't gotten an estimate. Moggot did know the law. He was one of those greasy rag mechanics you run into at some franchise brake and transmission shops. You take your car in for the advertised special, and no sooner get seated than here he comes out of the back, rubbing his hands on a greasy rag and shaking his head. "Shocks are gone," he'll say, or "cylinders ruined", whatever is the most convenient lie. He'll even show you the worn out hydraulic cylinders--that he's saved from another car. Or let you walk under the lift and look at the fluid dripping from your shocks. Fluid he's sprayed there with an oil can.
In the lady's case, we made Maggot an offer he couldn't refuse and he did the right thing. But sleazy weasel that he was, Maggot was soon at it again.
We'd had many complaints that folks had taken their car there to have the transmission fluid changed, and when they checked it, the fluid looked just like the old. So we put the ol' sting on Maggot, and had a civilian employee take a car through we'd doctored. When it was returned we checked and immediately took it back to him.
"Who says I didn't change that fluid?" Maggot raged. After we showed him the white, eggshell seal we'd placed on the drain plug, with my initials on it, he changed his tune, running to the back of the shop and yelling at a mechanic, "You rotten sonuvabitch, what're you trying to pull?"
"Just did what you told me to do," the mechanic replied.
Maggot got to think that one over in jail and pay a hefty fine. But, after he got out, he was so reformed that he wrangled a lucrative City towing contract.
Kinda made us wanna put someone else in jail.
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