Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, June 21, 2005

22:00 - Endgame

(top)

I have a car again. And Bob Lewis is off the hook.

Let me make that clear again, so if anyone ends up googling for Bob Lewis horror stories: Bob Lewis is blameless in this affair, or certainly bears no more blame than any average car service place.

I called them this morning and got a quote for the Interstate battery that they stocked for those people who asked for an upgrade from the factory battery (which, for some damn reason, is more expensive, even though it's garbage). $95, they said�same as list. And the $120 for labor isn't just hooking up the red wire to the red bolt and the black wire to the black one with all the acid corrosion dribbling from it. It also involves thoroughly testing the charging and starting systems, checking for parasitic drains, and�oh yes�ensuring that the weird idle problem and the randomly blinking warning lights have gone away with the new battery.

I called up a friend who works in a garage; we'd planned that if Bob Lewis had quoted some outrageously inflated price for the Interstate battery, I'd have just gone and bought my own, met him there, and replaced the battery using his tools in the Bob Lewis parking lot while their service techs and salespeople grumbled. But it wasn't to be�their quoted parts price was certainly fair, and their labor price, my friend told me, actually sounded like a damn good deal what with everything that came with it. Certainly more reassuring than tinkering at it for hours with what tools fit in his truck.

So I gave them the go-ahead. And now my car is back in my hands; it's idling happily at 700 rpm, just like before, and the electrical system seems to be behaving itself nicely.

Whatever a bad battery has to do with regulating idle speed, it certainly seems to have fixed this problem; the invoice says "S11 directly related to Line A," where S11 is the idle problem and Line A is the bad battery. And over the past two weeks, I have noticed occasional little hesitations and hiccups on startup, which I had chalked up to the variations in power drain caused by various things being unplugged which shouldn't have been, but apparently was the result of the battery indeed being on its last legs. (Which, of course, casts some doubt on whether the mass airflow sensor needed to be replaced after all, or whether it was just getting a low voltage reading from the battery�but that's probably something we'll never know. If Bob Lewis replaced that part unnecessarily, it sucks, but it's understandable.)

But now we turn our attention to the stereo, the thing that was completely un-turn-on-able when I got it back from Midas.

To refresh: when Midas replaced my clutch, I had asked them to check out that trunk-mounted power outlet and see if they could determine why it wasn't working (it had never been plugged in by the factory, it turned out). Midas couldn't figure this out. But apparently, in the process of checking, and though I can't for the life of me figure out why they would do this, they jimmied my stereo system out of the dashboard, unplugged it from power, and then jammed it back in again.

But it doesn't end there. Oh no.

See, the reason why I didn't simply turn the car around and rub Midas' face in it the moment I noticed that the stereo wasn't turning on was that I thought it was simply the case that the stereo had gone into Theft Lockout mode, and I'd have to punch in some sequence of numbers to revive it, as directed by my owner's manual. (I'd had to do that a couple of times in the past, like when I installed the CD player�whenever the stereo is disconnected from power it has to be re-keyed to become usable again.) The clock had also been reset and the power windows were behaving oddly, both symptoms of the battery having been generally disconnected, so I assumed. So it wasn't until I got the car home and pored over the owner's manual that I realized that if the stereo were in lockout mode, it would be powering up, but it would say SAFE on the screen; since it wasn't powering up at all, this was a different problem.

And thus it wasn't until I got the car back, today, that I finally got to examine it and see just to what extent Midas had thrashed the hell out of my stereo.

I had a tape adapter in the tape deck when I gave it to Midas; it's what I use to connect my iPod to the stereo these days. When the stereo wasn't powering up, there was no way to try to eject the tape, so I didn't try. But now, on the way back to work after picking up the car, on a whim I hit the eject button. And the tape ground and writhed and tried to push its way out the door�but the door was flapped down in front of it, and the tape was trapped like a roach in a roach motel. TAPE ERROR, said the display.

Hmm.

After some tinkering and poking and veering and honking and parking and tinkering and poking, I finally got the tape out�by pressing down (accidentally) on the volume knob and discovering that the whole faceplate is completely loose, having pulled right off the body.

And this isn't the kind of stereo where the faceplate comes off.

Well. That would explain why the tape got stuck behind the door. Some guy at Midas apparently tried yanking the stereo out of its hole (probably because he didn't have those little ring-key things that you're supposed to insert into the slots at the right and left sides of the unit to extract it), and by tugging on the knob and other exposed grasping surfaces, snapped the faceplate off. (I found the snapped-off plastic tabs inside the stereo housing.) Then he pulled the whole thing out by the exposed metal, discovered that there wasn't anything related to general wiring or fuses in the back of the stereo cavity, and crammed the whole thing back into the hole after neatly forgetting to plug it back in. Then, he mashed the faceplate back on, in the process bending two of the pins on the connector, so that most of the stereo's buttons stopped working, and trapping the tape behind the door so that its little tab flapped down in front of the tape, preventing it from ever being ejected again.

That's some professional-grade work for ya, right there. The Midas Touch, one might say.

I'll take this to Midas tomorrow and show them�won't let them touch it, mind you, because I don't trust Midas not to break it just by breathing on it wrong. I'm quite sure I can shame them into giving me a nice check for a Benjamin or two that I can take somewhere else to get the stereo fixed and/or replaced. (What I won't tell them, of course, is that I can get a replacement for this stereo for $25 on Ebay, from any of the thousands of Jetta owners who have upgraded their factory stereos to new aftermarket ones.)

I don't know, incidentally, that it wasn't Bob Lewis that broke the faceplate off and Midas merely unplugged it at the back. But I know for sure that Midas unplugged it, and I think my theory�that Midas didn't possess the little metal keys that you use to pull the unit out, which Bob Lewis certainly would have had�is entirely consistent. Either way, I'm going to hang the whole thing on Midas, because I think I can make it stick; if I divided the blame between Midas and Bob Lewis, I don't think I'd get any satisfaction from either, as both would simply blame the other.

So I'll get a nice cheap replacement for the stereo, which I can replace on my own; and meanwhile this one works just fine, as long as I don't consciously pull the faceplate off: the tape works, the pins are bent back into place, and all is happy.

And the moral of the story is: Bob Lewis has essentially treated me right from beginning to end, though they have overcharged for some parts replacements; but whatever you do, don't go to the Midas on El Camino Real in Sunnyvale.

UPDATE: Oh yes. When I spoke to Matt, the service adviser, for the final debriefing, I told him of my tale of woe�the mysterious failures of part after part the moment I drive the car off each successive car service place's parking lot.

"Try looking at it from my perspective," he said. "Try having to be the guy to call up a dozen people a day and tell them about new parts you found that have to be replaced."

I gotta give that to him. Whether this is all an elaborate game of marvelous acting or not, he's certainly not doing this for the fun of it.

UPDATE: Oh geez. Guess what it's doing again?

That's right. Idling at 1000.

Pardon me while I go soak my head.