Unexpected Kindness: Car Repairs

Last week, I experienced an unexpected kindness…

About a month and a half ago, I took my Subaru for an oil change. I scooted down to a Valvoline Instant Oil Change at the far end of South Willow, where, for a reasonable sum one can pull their car into one end of a garage, recline their driver seat and zone out to tunes while the mechanics do their thing and then drive out the other side in ten minutes. It’s a simple deal, and I’m all for that.

The gentlemen inside ran my car’s VIN number and came up with a list of overdue maintenance procedures. The transmission was over-full, serpentine belt nearly worn out, coolant as effective as tap water and a host of other issues all clamored for attention. Thank goodness for tax refunds, right? A few days later, I returned to have all of the most important issues taken care of, watching all my boyish, carefree dreams for a new laptop suffer utter termination with the swipe of the debit card. *click* Ugh.

The very next morning my car began protesting. I took a left turn into the parking lot where I work and my steering wheel began to shudder in my hands and a T-rex stomping vibration rippled through the car. How curious this odd malady should attack my vehicle just one day after so many good things had been done to it. A few days went by with the episode repeating at various degrees of intensity- many times not happening at all. There didn’t seem to be any type of consistency or special trigger that set the problem off, other than taking a right or left turn.

I went back to Valvoline and asked them to check their work and make sure something wasn’t wrong. Nothing turned up and I was left empty handed. A call to my grandfather suggested that the problem probably had to do with a worn CV joint which sometimes causes the wheels in all-wheel-drive vehicles to move out of sync with each other and can eventually make you lose power steering. If that was the problem, it should be an easy and relatively inexpensive fix compared to a more typical transmission overhaul in the range of $1,000+.

A couple of weeks passed without much of a chance to get the car checked and the off-and-on shaking had me convinced that it might just break down if I didn’t do something soon. I’d gotten my brakes looked over at an honest place a few months back, so I contacted them about getting my CV joint replaced. When I described the shaking steering wheel and the sounds, the guy on the other end told me that I most likely was not dealing with a CV joint, but rather a transmission problem. My heart shrank. He gave me the name of a guy- Wayne Russel who owns a place on South Willow, across from McDonalds. The garage is named Russell Auto and specializes in transmissions. The guy on the line assured me that Wayne Russel was a very honest guy and well worth seeing. I called up Wayne and my fears were confirmed. Yes, the shaking occurred during both left and right turns, yes I did have work done on my transmission just before the problem first occurred, yes, I could willingly trade my future first born child for transmission repairs. Wayne told me to bring in my car so that he could take it for a test drive to get a better idea of what the issue might be.

Gonna be honest- I put the thing off for a week and a half. There were a few times when I had a chance to go, but either the car was cruising along like a champ or I just really could not bring myself to face the possibility of having to hand over a thousand scraped together dollars.

This is where the kindness and unexpected part comes in.

I did go to Russell Auto and Wayne hopped in my car with me to take it around the block. I was simultaneously worried that the shaking wouldn’t occur so that I’d have wasted his time and I’d be stuck with a car on the edge, and also that I might be hardcore bankrupt a half-hour later. There appeared to be no light at the end of the tunnel. If there was one, it would be a giant electric mosquito zapper with 5′ 6″ gaps in its screen. Just my size.

Wayne is an older guy and he calmly listened to the car as we took turns, making sure to try both directions, backwards and forwards. We turned around in the Families In Transition parking lot on South Beech, which is almost directly behind his garage. He commented that he knew the place and that FIT were ‘good people.’ I replied that I thought so too. We drove around the corner and back into his parking lot. He then spent about 25 minutes explaining to me what I should know about transmissions and how to take care of them. He wasn’t talking just to hear the sound of his own voice- you can tell when a person is doing that; rather, he was simply sharing knowledge that very probably will serve me well and save me unnecessary grief some day. We looked in my manual and he explained how the system worked. I listened carefully, knowing I would probably forget most of the technical details within the hour, but knowing that Wayne was showing some kindness to me when he could have gruffly hopped in and out, told me it would be thirty bucks for the test drive and that he’d have to have his boys do a more intensive inspection later. Instead, he popped the hood and I followed him to the front of the car. When I pointed out the transmission dipstick like a dummy (as if he didn’t know where that was), he told me that he was looking for something else. Wayne pulled the cover off of the fuse box, quietly examined the map on its inside and popped a spare fuse into an empty slot. We climbed back in the car. “Good.” he said, “Your four-wheel-drive light came on. That means it worked.” Wayne explained that he’d simply turned the all-wheel-drive car into a front-wheel-drive car. The problem, he had correctly guessed, was that the oil Valvoline had put in my car when they replaced the fluid, was not slippery enough and drag was causing the four wheels to move out of tandem during some turns. Taking the rear two wheels out of the picture should greatly reduce if not eliminate the problem and increase gas mileage. I was overjoyed. Wayne informed me that there were some simple enough options if the shaking came back or if we had a snow storm next winter and I wanted to switch over to all-wheel drive again, but otherwise, I was good to go.

He refused payment for what many other mechanics probably would have considered 45 minutes of “critical diagnostics”, rounded up to the hour. Wayne shook my hand twice and told me Manchester was a good place. Then he went back inside to inspect someone else’s car when it was already quarter past closing time and his other employees were headed out the door.

Even afterward, I’m left with the feeling that I’ve had an encounter with the kind of person I aspire to one day be- and perhaps more surprisingly, in an industry that often generates so little trust. Wayne could have easily led me into the deconstruction of my transmission and charged me a grand. I was expecting as much and it’s pretty obvious when talking to me that I’m no car genius. Instead, he shared what knowledge he thought I could put to use and moved a fuse. His final statement, about Manchester being a ‘good place’ really struck me. To hear a person you have no prior relationship with say Manchester is a good place, calmly and with a tone that reveals both a knowledge and forgiveness of its shortcomings, is a thing I hope everyone here gets to hear from time to time.

Russell Auto is located at 247 South Willow Street, Manchester, NH 03101. Check them out at www.russellautoinc.com

If you know any other mechanics in the area that deserve recognition and which you would be happy to recommend, please leave their information in a comment to this post so that others can take advantage of honest services and their much deserved client base can grow!