Is there anything worse than a car mechanic who tries to take advantage of you? It’s a rhetorical question. Of course there is. But a mechanic who tries to defraud you is a special kind of creep, is what I’m trying to say. Allow me to tell you a short story:

I drove Barb’s car, a red Subaru Forester, to the arboretum yesterday, and somewhere on the way back I ran over a sharp piece of something that punctured the right rear tire. Not a small puncture, either. Whatever it was, it left a hole in the tread big enough for me to see without having to look very hard for it. But the tire wasn’t going flub-flub-flub when I pulled into the driveway, so it must have gotten punctured on our street. I didn’t even know it was flat until My Darling B got into the car about a half-hour later and tried to drive away. That’s when it went flub-flub-flub.

I put the spare tire on it and we drove to a local garage to see if we could get it fixed. They couldn’t do it, and they were the only garage open on Sunday in our area, so we left it until today. B drove to a different local garage this morning, they plugged the hole, but then they told her one of the lug nuts was seized and they would have to force it off by beating on it with a hammer, possibly damaging the wheel bearing, bumping the cost of repair up over three hundred fifty dollars.

B was pretty sure they were trying to screw her over. They kept her waiting for more than an hour before they tried to stick her for the additional repairs. After they started messing with her, she texted me to see what I thought. My thought was that one of the mechanics backed off a lug nut, put it back on with the threads crossed, and then mashed it down tight with his impact driver, because all five of those nuts came off and went back on easily by hand when I changed the tire. I know what crossed threads feel like and they were all fine yesterday morning.

I drove down to the garage to find out what was going on with the car. I was not riding to B’s rescue, I was going because B asked me to. She noticed that the mechanics were talking down to the women customers and wanted to see how they talked to me. When I asked the mechanic to explain the situation, he very politely explained that one of the lug nuts was seized and they couldn’t get it off. “The spare is still on the car?” I asked. He said it was. “Then just put the other four back on,” I said, “we’ll take the car and pay for your labor.”

B drove to the dealership where we bought the car. (We usually take it there for regular maintenance. We didn’t take it there this morning because all we wanted was a patch for the tire. Should have been twenty minutes, in and out.) They backed out the lug nut and the stud, replace both, and charged B a grand total of ten dollars and ninety- three cents. Lesson learned.

I want to spread my business around to local places, but that’s one garage that’ll never get our money from now on.

Afterword: When I drove the Subaru to the arboretum Sunday morning, I parked it all by itself in a corner of the parking lot. When I got back a couple hours later, two other red Subaru Foresters were parked along either side of ours, almost like they recognized each other and gathered together in fellowship.