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As an RV owner, former customer service rep, and former repair-shop operator, I’ve been fortunate enough to see all the sides of these issues (albeit from a different industry). And, although the info was good, the frustration of the author was evident in the writing. It seemed angry and bitter. (”Cut them some slack”, indeed.)

The stories and concerns were a helpful beginning, but were only half of what is really needed. The last line is a good lead-in to a follow-up post on how to get the most from your repair center. Could you (maybe with the help of comment poster G.E. Maynor) offer specific tips and suggestions (in detail) on how to better communicate, how to speed up the process, and how to work within the service center’s parameters to make the experience more enjoyable and more efficient?

In other words your mechanic said “works for me” and dropped the problem on the floor rather then telling the customer “we fixed X, Y, and Z, but the horn was ok all along”. Sure that message might get “lost in the noise”, but many will get through. Sure sometimes the forever-unsatisfyed will rear their ugly head and yell “how can you not see it is broken!”, but I bet a more then a few of the “it broke on the road, now I’m Mr. Ugly!” will be perfectly calm and explain it is intermittent, or only breaks when it is raining, or whatever he forgot the first time.

(and yeah, I’m totally guilty of forgetting to explain everything to my mechanic, but I’m above the rest of the antics you describe…)

I have personal knowledge of the hazy lens incident that I believe is the source of your original hazed lens scenario. I can add details that make it a little less puzzling, but no less disturbing. A fact left out of the story is that the lens in question was an uncommon one that had to be ordered from the manufacturer, resulting in a ridiculous shipping charge. On top of that, the defective lens had to be shipped back to the manufacturer so they could return it to their supplier (so the original supplier can correct the problem in future lens they make, so the argument goes.) The overall cost of the foggy lens problem is escalating! Out-of-pocket cost to the dealer for packaging and shipping is now many times the actual cost of the lens. Not to mention the labor cost of diagnosing, installing, ordering, receiving, packaging and re-shipping. The $3.50 is a minor part of the cost. As pointed out, the whole thing defies logic. But, any way you look at it, this little episode costs the dealer money. It makes sense to do it for your own customer but not for the customer of some other, distant dealer.

Much of this would go away if it were possible for dealers to stock every “common part”. We try, but don’t even come close. Every manufacturer uses a different light fixture, different ones on different models, and then change from year to year.

In a perfect world, the man with the foggy lens would have removed it himself, stopped in at the dealership on his way to the grocery store and swapped it for a new lens, at no cost.