Once upon a time I had to get the front axel of my last car replaced. It was a $1200 repair. Now, this is is expensive, but it was a necessary repair. It was a $1200 problem, in that not fixing it might have resulted in my axel breaking while I was whizzing down the highway at 65 mph – potentially certain death.

In late April the engine light came on in my Mazda. Driving wasn’t affected, but I took it in to an AAMCO shop that was close to home. AAMCO has a good reputation; the shop was advertising free diagnostic tests until the end of April. I called on a Saturday morning and on the third ring noticed the online listing stated the shop was closed Saturdays, so I hung up. Seconds later the phone rang. It was the shop owner (who has caller ID) saying he was actually open. He said he never likes to miss a call. I was kind of impressed with his initiative. We chatted a moment about the problem and I made an appointment to take it in the next Monday.

That day he called with his diagnosis. He’d found two codes. One was that the gas cap was loose. Okay, I’ll turn it harder from now on. The other was that two oxygen sensors “blew.” They were the upstream and downstream sensors that indicate how rich or lean the engine is running. Why did they blow? His answer was that one of them konked out, which caused the gas to run too lean and blew the other sensor. He said they needed to be replaced. What do I know? Husband isn’t a car guy, so we both agreed to the repair (though he wasn’t entirely convinced by the mechanic’s explanation).

So, $795 later, I had two new sensors in my six-year-old car. The sensors were damn expensive – $250 each, I think.

Two weeks later, the light came on again. I took it in on a Saturday. He ran the tests, and one of the sensors had tripped. Why? Well, maybe it was a bad sensor. What’s the likelihood of that? But we’d paid already, and it was under warranty, and this was the problem according to the expert. He replaced it.

Two days later the light came on a third time. However, I fell ill for a week, so I couldn’t deal with it. Then the last weeks of May I needed my car and had a wonky schedule, so Husband and I couldn’t easily carpool. The car was performing okay. So I waited until my schedule opened up. I called him last week and made an appointment to bring it on Monday. For the third time. All of this is warrantied. Good thing.

Monday afternoon he called to tell me he hadn’t found the problem. He’d run a diagnostic so thorough that it was 14 pages long. He was having “his guy” test every possible thing. He’d let me know as soon as possible.

Tuesday afternoon he called saying he’d gone through nine pages of testing and still didn’t know the problem. It could be the fuel pump, yadayadayada. I could tell by his blustering explanation he was embarrassed. He’s been in business 30 years, never encountered something like this, etc. He made a lame joke about how it was a good thing we weren’t paying for a diagnosis because it would be about $1000 by now. Not funny.

Wednesday around noon he called. He finally found the problem. He asked if I’d ever had the spark plugs replaced. I said yes, probably when I had the car tuned up sometime (at Precision Auto, which I will never go to again because of the crappy job they did). “Well, they were gapped wrong! Whoever replaced them didn’t gap them correctly. Once I fixed that, the engine light went off!”

My God. How simple and obvious. Why had he not checked this at the beginning?

So I picked it up Thursday morning and so far, the light has remained off. What this means, however, is that we paid nearly $700 to replace what probably were two perfectly good sensors. Because really, if he had caught this at the beginning, the repair would have cost oh, about an hour’s worth of labor ($60). Ouch. I have no proof of that, of course. We’re just going to eat the cost, never be a repeat customer, and tell friends not to use his services.

He was a nice guy, the kind that likes to chitchat, but friendliness doesn’t fix a car.