On Tue, 7 May 1996, Denise Thorpe wrote:
> Having worked in the wrenching biz I can tell you that he may have been
> testing you for a sense of humor and/or gullibility. The classic test is
> telling the customer that their muffler bearings are bad. You should go
> back and tell him that he's completely full of sh*t and then he'll have
> infinite respect for you and maybe even buy you a beer. And then there's
Yeah, he (or she) will buy you a beer. Of course, there's the off chance
he or she will bean you with a hammer.
Denise's example does remind me of a friend who has many, many cars, one
of which is a VW bug. It began to run badly, and he took it to a local
service station that specializes in VW repair. There, he was told with a
very straight face that the mechanic could not be sure until he tore the
engine down, but he suspected someone had installed the camshaft backward.
My friend, who was himself a mechanic once, pointed out that the engine
had run beautifully for two years. The mechanic's response was, "Well,
you were lucky."
Ray Gibbons Dept. of Molecular Physiology & Biophysics
Univ. of Vermont College of Medicine, Burlington, VT
gibbons@northpole.med.uvm.edu (802) 656-8910
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