Sunday, November 02, 2003

The Lighter Side of People Fixing Things

Our Ford dealership is much more effective at repairs than the cable modem technicians. Friday, facing steep obstacles, they removed an inch-long nail from the right rear tire of Elie's Mustang and patched it up good as new in less time than it took our cable modem people to figure out how to fix what they did wrong.

The steep obstacle in question is a chunk of metal the size of a gumball that is used on Mustang tires instead of one of the lugnuts, to prevent theft of the aluminum wheels. This piece of metal cannot be removed with a standard lug wrench, which is why the Mustang came with a tool to remove it. Unfortunately, one of the previous--and more cablemodemlike--service centers neglected to return our tool after rotating the tires, so our current service techs have to rely on their "universal" set, which of course does not include anything that will remove our particular wheel lock. So they improvised.

Picture this: 3 Ford service technicians, one angry Ford Blue-Oval Certified Service Department manager, and one dealership owner standing around a fourth service technician who is banging on the aluminum wheel of a newly-detailed 2001 Mustang with a ball peen hammer.

As entertaining as this was to watch, the group might have done better to move the car into one of the service bays first, rather than bal-peening the aluminum wheels right in front of the picture window to the customer waiting area, where horrified Ford owners were mentally considering just what these service technicians were doing to their fancy new cars.

By the way, because of this wheel lock technology, anyone looking to illegally acquire a set of aluminum wheels will find it easier to steal the whole car than to try to get the wheels off. This is not what I would call a material improvement in overall automobile security.

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