Ouch! Too many slip and fall reports this year. A co-worker broke her wrist in a tumble in early December.

I delivered a letter and the bills that go with it to my neighborhood Chevy dealer. I finally got it written, let it sit, and tweaked it a few more times. The fellow I spoke with was not impressed, he has his side of it. I took the truck in to have an oil leak, dripping on the ground under the truck, fixed. The service guy said they'd do the obvious, check the oil filter, then if needed, pressurize the system with dye in the oil to see where it leaks. They called with an $850 estimate and named gaskets and a sensor as needing replacement. I took it home after the repair and realized they hadn't fixed the leak. Same oil fresh on the driveway, so I parked in a different spot for a week or two and confirmed it. Took it to my Goodyear place that does my oil changes and asked them to change the oil and look at the filter and elsewhere to see if they could find the leak. He said the filter was bad. (If Chevy had changed the oil during all of this work I'd have never known they didn't get the leak with all of the expensive work, they would have simply done what I wanted and I wouldn't be the wiser.)

So the yahoos at Chevy didn't look at the filter, and if when they called with the estimate they had said that it was the oil filter but all of these other gaskets needed changing, I would have told them to only do the oil change and I'd see if that stopped my problem. My mileage was fine, I wasn't adding extra oil, I had no complaints except for the small drip. So I wrote it down in the letter and said I knew the parts were in the truck, but I wanted them to refund the labor, because if they had done the simplest thing of looking all around, including the oil filter, that report would have been enough for me to decline the rest of the expensive repairs.

He didn't see it my way. I left the letter, told him to think about it, and I told him I'll put the whole thing up on facebook and twitter. He wanted to know if the age and the miles were going to go up as well. Fair question. They will. I'll do it tomorrow if he doesn't call with some kind of offer. I could have spent $30 instead of $822 (final price). I resent that they saw me coming and listed the expensive stuff that didn't need to be bothered with at this time.

SRS