Auto repair shops are not on the top of too many consumers’ list of a place to find a lot of laughs, but for us on this side of the counter, there are some stories I have that are just too good not to pass along.
I’m sure I saw it move. Once while working as a service manager at a very busy suburban dealership, we had a relatively new sedan towed in. The owner came along with the tow-truck operator and explained that they saw a groundhog near the vehicle and when they started it, they heard a loud and ominous noise from under the hood and fearing the worst, they turned off the engine and called for roadside assistance. When we popped the hood, we found an unfortunate furry victim trapped in the fan belt and deceased without any visible damage to the remains. Of course I assigned the task of removing the Caddyshack cadaver to the lowest being on the shop food chain (a garage gopher) and to check if any damage had been done to the vehicle.
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With gloves on and armed with an oversized set of adjustable pliers, our squeamish shop assistant approached the target. Standing close behind him, I sensed his apprehension. He asked if I had seen any movement or sign of life from our dearly departed. Just as the pliers were about to make contact, a well-timed “BOO!” was enough to make our shop assistant jump out of his skin. Yes, after I stopped laughing, I profusely apologized and bought our newly crowned vehicle varmint specialist a coffee break snack.
Critters trapped under the hood? Yep, it can and does happen.
Supplied, Fotolia
Never underestimate a talented tech. If I had a mean streak in those days, I came by it honestly. At one inner-city dealership service department I managed years ago, there was a particularly imaginative group of veteran techs who loved to sabotage the vehicles of unsuspecting fellow employees with what was known as the dreaded acetylene bomb. These ultimate noise makers were created by adding a small amount of acetylene welding gas to an empty pop can and then fitting it with an ordinary spark plug (warning, kids, don’t try this at home. Some details that require this to work have been left out). On older vehicles, it was easy to disconnect a spark plug wire and reconnect it to the pop-can device. When the vehicle was started, the spark plug would ignite the gas in the can with a very loud bang, leaving the driver scratching his or her head until they spotted the kids in the hall laughing.
This tech terror team had a full bag of tricks and saved the most ingenious for those victims who were marking their final day of employment before moving on to other areas in the company. At the end of my final day of assignment to this shop, I approached my little subcompact and I was prepared. I carefully unlocked the doors and popped the hood release waiting for some type of device to unleash an awful odour or paint bomb. When disaster didn’t strike, I carefully checked under the hood and car and, with no devices found, I figured my days of clean living and not dishing out any tech-antics got me off the hook. I still winced as I turned the key in the ignition but breathed a sigh of relief as my little steed started without a grumble and idled smoothly.
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I headed off into rush hour sunset and, within a few blocks, I noticed a large white cloud following me. From the hand signals and lip-read messages of drivers and pedestrians around me I quickly discovered my daily driver was the source of this mist on steroids. After an uber-embarrassing commute to a friend’s home, a more thorough examination of the vehicle revealed the source. Our extreme techs had hidden a small plastic bottle of automatic transmission fluid in the inner fender of my car and carefully ran a small black hose to the ported intake of my carbureted engine (pretty hard to duplicate this on today’s fuel injected vehicles). I was chided for not thanking my tech pests, as running this fluid through the engine’s valve-train was known to provide life-extending benefits to some cylinder head components.
