Guess I’m a little behind. 🙃
Let’s see, one thing I forgot to mention that happened on the 7th, I believe. eHarmony. Remember them?
The ones who tried to renew my membership but gratefully my credit card company flagged at his fraud.
Yeah, so what did they do? They started harassing me with emails saying that I had a balance owed. That my membership had renewed until 2024, and that my payment didn’t go through, but I was still required to pay my membership fee.
😶
Uh… Excuse me? No. That’s not how this works. If I don’t renew, I don’t renew. The end. I didn’t pay for the service to continue, so I don’t get the service anymore. That’s… How it works.
Oh, but not at eHarmony. Nope Eddie Harmony, they consider your contract still in force. And if you don’t pay, they will harass you and say that you owe them the entire balance for the coming year. I started doing some googling about it, and apparently they’re practices led to a class action lawsuit that they settled years ago, but instead of cleaning up their act, they just changed their terms and conditions to make it so that people couldn’t do a class action lawsuit in the future. That you were agreeing to arbitration instead of class action if you ever had issues in the future.
Not only that, but angry customers had written about having eHarmony send them to collections for an unpaid bill because they chose not to renew. Even people who had actually chosen the don’t renew option when they signed up, like I’m pretty darn sure I had.
Talk about a predatory company. Good freaking gravy!
So apart from there being I think the most expensive of all the singles companies, and also providing an absolutely terrible product, their predatory on top of that.
This is the kind of thing where the message needs to get out far and why, in my opinion. Too many times I run into it here in the car business. People have absolutely terrible experiences with shops, but then they never write reviews. They never make their voice heard. So other people get to experience the same thing. But if people would just write bad reviews about their terrible experiences, then other customers would be properly warned, and it would say a whole lot of headache and money for a lot of people.
Don’t choose eHarmony. They’re massively expensive. Their product is actually atrocious, and they are predatory.
But I don’t have any strong feelings on the issue.
After several back and forth emails with me laying into them a little bit for what they were doing, they finally did me the “courtesy” of letting me out of my supposed contract.
Evil companies should be put out of business.
Anyway, the first car of the day was going back to that Lexus from a week or so ago, the guy who had the price in front of him but misread it And then was mad because when I did half the job that was originally quoted, he expected half the price, but he expected half the price of what he had misread instead of half the price of what was actually staring him in the face in the text message.
And then of course, he refused to go back and read the conversation, refused when I tried to show him that it was actually in the text message conversation written there in Plainview, but whatever.
Anyway, so he called saying that he was having awful sounds coming from his rear wheels which were the ones that I had done the breaks on.
Very rarely do I ever have come-back jobs. I bust my butt to do a darn good job on the work that I do, so it’s a pretty rare occasion that I have to go back and that it actually turns out to be a mistake of mine. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time that happened. I can remember times where I got called back and it turned out to be something else that wasn’t my fault, like that lady who thought I’d screwed up the brakes but just had forgotten to take her emergency brake off.
Gratefully, as with most others, I got out there and found that he had a big old nail stuck in his tire they was sticking out so far sideways that every time the tire passed his strut the nail smacked against the strut, so it made a metal on metal sound every single tire rotation.
I called the guy out there so I could show him before I took the nail out, and I think he felt a little embarrassed.
Given what had happened before, even though he offered to pay me, I didn’t charge him for going all the way out there. I figured it would be a good opportunity to show my good will and that I really wasn’t trying to take advantage of him at all last time like he thought I was.
He thanked me, and that was that.
From there, I drove up to Bella Vista, pulled off the blown rear tire off of a 2014 ram 1500 truck, put on their spare, and taught them how to do it themselves the next time. They’d never lowered a spare tire from the underside of a pickup truck bed before, so they had no idea how to do it. So I taught them how to do that, checked out some other things for them as well, and headed off to car number three.
The next one was a 2016 Ford 65 Shelby Cobra coupe replica car. Always like those cars. He wanted a battery replaced and to have a diagnosed as it was running rough, but I couldn’t find the battery anywhere on the car. 😅
It wasn’t under the hood. I expected it to be in the back by the rear hatch, and that’s where the jump cable posts were, but no, there was no access hole anywhere for a battery. I checked behind the seats a little bit, but nothing.
So I wasn’t able to replace the battery, and as far as the runability issues, it had a crankshaft position sensor code, but without the build book for the vehicle, it didn’t make much sense to me to try and do repairs. I need the build book, so I know what parts the kit car was built with originally.
So I did everything I was comfortable doing, and then I headed off to car number four.
Car number four was a Mercedes sprinter van that needed front brake pads. He needed rotors as well, but he didn’t want them, so I just put the pads on for him. Super nice guy from Nigeria. He was actually a political figure over there, having run for national office. We were talking a bit about my non-profit hopes, and he told me that if I actually followed through with that, I would end up in politics because people would try to get me to run for office eventually.
I’ve actually thought about that before. And I’ve thought about running for office before as well.
Car number 5 was a 2013 Dodge avenger that wouldn’t start, supposedly. It’s the one that I replaced the window on that one time when I accidentally damaged the bracket that holds the glass to the regulator.
Unfortunately for him, the car works just fine, so I wasn’t able to diagnose what was going on. It started every time and had no issues at all.
🤷
The last car of the day was that 1996 Ford F-150 radiator that I was supposed to do on Saturday but didn’t do because he said Monday would end up being better for him. So I went over to that truck, replace the radiator, and called it a day.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but summer hit all of the sudden all at once. I think we went from 65° or something one day to 89 degrees the next day.
So, welcome summer!
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 