Revival, RPMs, and Respect

Time to bring back the blog.
Yeah, I know it's been a year or so. Whatever. We'll just start with today.

Today I took my car to the Subaru dealer for an oil change. I had a couple of questions for the service manager. For instance, why is there a pattern of recurring corrosion on my battery? And why, when last I was there, did they not properly clean that up, even though they charged me for cleaning it? I also wanted to ask about the possibility of uneven tread wear on my tires. My friend Sam had noticed it. I said to Tom, or Bob, or whatever his name was, that I had replaced two tires at different times. Before I could continue and explain that I was already fully aware of the ramifications of running a 4WD with a limited slip differential on tires with differing diameters, he interrupted loudly with "[ignorant girl!] On These Cars, when you replace One Tire, you replace All Four Tires..." So I interrupted him right back with "I Understand that Running my Car on Tires of Different Diameters...blah blah blah and I Also Understand that the Manufacturer States the Range within which the Diameters are Close Enough blah blah blah... and I Have Measured the Tread and Diameters of All of the Tires to Ensure that they are Acceptable blah blah blah." So then he shut up. I said, "so could you check out that wear pattern for me?" and he said "well uneven wear can only be an alignment problem and..." and I said "and how much would that cost me?" and he said "$99" and I said "Why?" And he said "Because tire alignment here costs 99.95" and I said "Yes, but why? I'm sure I can get it done for considerably less elsewhere, so that's what I'll do." For some reason, at that point he started being nice and acting like I was not an ignorant girl. He said they would really spend some time on that "battrie" as he called the battery, and make sure it was done right. When I came back to pick up the car, he had sure enough spent some time on the battrie, and had had the guys replace one of the bolts and check the levels, etc. And my car was cleaner than they'd ever made it before, and then even vacuumed inside, which they've never done before. So, the moral of the story is, show me some R-E-S-P-E-C-T!