Transmission Service (Post #99) 7/7/2008


I’m slowly catching up with the 60k service on my 81k Discovery. Friday I took off work early to get the transmission “serviced”. I called Cottman’s on Wednesday and setup an appointment. It’s kinda sad that you have to make appointments for these types of things. But I should know by now the world has changed from the days of yore. Gone are the days when you just pulled up to a specialty garage and asked for a service. I’ve known this for a while but I still miss them.
So back to the appointment. I left work and headed to the Cottman’s on South Western in OKC. The Norman Cottman’s has been closed for at least a year. I learned that the prior weekend while driving by their previous location off of Lindsey in Norman. No explanation given for their closing.
So I get to the Cottman’s on South Western in OKC, and he looks at his paper and sure enough there I am for 1:00pm. He then begins to tell me that one of his guys didn’t show up this morning and he couldn’t see me today.
He could “get me in” on Monday, but today was a no go, according to him, “you can see all my racks are full.” Yes I could see that. His district manager then piped up with, “you know what you should do in situations like this?”
He responded with, “call my appointments?”
Really? Yah think? I was his first after lunch, how many other people had their plans changed?
And the district manager said, “yeah, you could do that, but …” he then rambled on about something and finished with “these boys don’t understand they don’t get paid when they don’t show up.” District manager man then shared, “Midwest City and one of there other shops for sure couldn’t see me for sure.” He then instructed the shop manager to call Yukon to see if they could get me in. Yukon! That’s only 50 minutes drive from Norman. Not at all a convenient location for me to use. It didn’t matter anyway, they were booked or didn’t want any more business for the day.
I tell you, if I was running a shop in a market with unemployment at an all time low rate, Mr. No Show would be FIRED. And I wouldn’t tell him he was fired, until I made him apologize to all the other guys that worked that Friday. THEN I’d fire him.
Where is “customer service”? That manager, didn’t even try to make it right. He didn’t offer me a discount for his screw up. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t reassure me that I would be first on his list for Monday. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. No effort what-so ever to keep my business. It was evident that he had not run a shop for very long. Maybe Cottman’s doesn’t need new business.
So, shit outta luck, I headed for Norman.
Not only did I blow 3 hours of annual leave, I was wondering who will be working on my beloved Discovery. While I drove to pick up my son at the YMCA I contemplated doing the service myself. I really didn’t want to do that.
So after I picked up my son and told him about customer service and how he should always reward customer service with his wallet. You get bad service don’t give them your money.
I then went to the old Cottman’s location. I don’t have the name, but he was awesome. He told me they were shutting down for the day. And when asked where he would recommend, he told me the Goodyear on Lindsey. I thanked him and off we went.
The Goodyear got me in immediately and said the job would take about 2 hours. We got back in an hour and forty five minutes. The shop foreman Bob told us we’d be ready just a few minutes after 3:00. Well a few minutes went by and then some, and around 4:15pm we were done.
I’m not gonna repeat the things I heard the shop guys say about Land Rover Cruisers and how they make everything too complicated. I am going to say, my confidence in their work is not 100% at this point. 3 hours for an 2 hour job. It was pretty obvious they had never serviced a Discovery or they had not done one in a while.
I’m hoping there is nothing to be concerned about. But I can assure you that if I have trouble, I’ll be calling them back and I’ll tell the guy that referred them to me that they should refer Land Rovers to them. Hopefully it won’t be from the middle of the desert on the way to our vacation destination.

Have a good day and happy rovering.