Tire Fun (or, Three Stories in 24 Hours)

[PuckishOne]

If you saw my thread in Off Topic, you know that I'm currently sans auto due to some emergency tire repair. So I go to Tire Shop X yesterday and have them check it out, assess the damage and give me a quote for new tires, which they do. Clerk A tells me that they don't have my particular tires in stock, but they can get them for me in roughly 24 hours. No problem, I think, and I limp home on the spare tire to tell hubby the news.

Hubby takes my car in this morning to a different branch of Tire Shop X and speaks to Clerk B. This guy says that the tires are not only not in stock, but will take 4 or 5 days to get...he then mentions that the tires are in a city not 40 miles away. So now the tires will take a longer time to go a shorter distance. Mmmmkay. Hubby and I confer and decide that this ain't gonna work - we can't be down to a single vehicle for that long, so he calls this same branch again.

This time he gets Clerk C, who tells him that the tires are not only not in stock, but they are no longer in production, and only 13 sets exist in the entire country. Apparently quite a lot of things happened while I was at lunch today, wouldn't you say? Hubby, now fuming, asks why no one had mentioned that earlier and gets the Noncommital Verbal Shrug. He then asks if there are comparable tires that are in stock...wait for it!...and Clerk C tells him, why yes, there are!

Why not just tell us that to begin with?? Argh!! Needless to say, I'm keeping track of everything they do to the car and every scrap of paperwork. At the very least I'm going to complain about getting the runaround...if they so much as sneeze on my bumper it could get ugly. Does this make me an SC? I sincerely hope not.

Anyone have any similar stories?

[myswtghst]

Thankfully I don't, because we got my car from a dealership where my dad knows just about everybody--one of the guys he's worked with for several decades is married to a woman who works there, who introduced him to people when we bought my car. He also made friends very quickly at the car wash place we take the car for oil changes and such. I've now made the rounds with him at both places, so all his buddies know that I'm his daughter, and to take good care of me.

Granted, when my car got hit while I was in college, the insurance company sent it not to the VW dealership in town, but to the Buick and such dealership up the road for repairs. It took several months (while I thankfully drove one of the boy at the time's dad's extra cars--he was a mechanic, but didn't do foreign cars) and a few return trips before the car was finally declared fixed. Maybe sometime I'll post that story in another thread, now that you've got me thinking of it.