{"id":4197,"date":"2011-05-24T08:00:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-24T16:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=4197"},"modified":"2011-05-24T08:00:33","modified_gmt":"2011-05-24T16:00:33","slug":"you-gotta-ask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2011\/05\/24\/you-gotta-ask\/","title":{"rendered":"You Gotta Ask"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>$5300.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s what Santa Monica Subaru wanted to fix my Saab.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, it&#8217;s a Saab, but it&#8217;s really a Subaru, and that&#8217;s important, as you&#8217;ll find out.<\/p>\n<p>You see I started the car in gear.\u00c2\u00a0 I had it on a hill.\u00c2\u00a0 In reverse.\u00c2\u00a0 And I forgot it was in gear, and after letting out the clutch, the car jumped.\u00c2\u00a0 Violently.<\/p>\n<p>How many times has this happened to me?\u00c2\u00a0 I&#8217;ve driven a stick and a stick only for over 35 years.\u00c2\u00a0 But this time&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>When I went forward, the gearbox was mush.<\/p>\n<p>But then it got better.<\/p>\n<p>But when I went in reverse&#8230;\u00c2\u00a0 I heard the kind of clanging that would not require a stethoscope to decode.\u00c2\u00a0 You know how you bring your car in for service and the problem doesn&#8217;t manifest itself?\u00c2\u00a0 That was not the case in this instance.<\/p>\n<p>A freak accident.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s ultimately what Daryl at Sherman Oaks Subaru said.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s an expert.\u00c2\u00a0 He said if I drove it over he could get behind the wheel and know what the problem was in minutes.\u00c2\u00a0 It didn&#8217;t take that long.\u00c2\u00a0 He knew I&#8217;d blown the reverse gear.\u00c2\u00a0 And if it&#8217;s that only, it&#8217;s gonna be fifteen hundred bucks.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Which is excessive, but not fifty three hundred bucks.\u00c2\u00a0 In Santa Monica they said it would cost more to fix than repair it, but they wouldn&#8217;t fix it, because it was a Saab and the part numbers would be different, and a replacement might not even fit, but Darryl said this was wrong, he services Saabarus all the time, after all, Saab is their sister dealership.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m pissed at Santa Monica Subaru.\u00c2\u00a0 And I&#8217;m wondering if I even needed that head gasket back in February.\u00c2\u00a0 And now they were going to charge me too?<\/p>\n<div style=\"margin-left: 40px;\">So I&#8217;m at the Wildwood restaurant, at the top of Vail.\u00c2\u00a0 With Jason Flom.\u00c2\u00a0 It&#8217;s blowin&#8217; and a snowin&#8217; and we&#8217;ve hit it hard and we&#8217;ve come in at two p.m. for a bit of refreshment at American&#8217;s highest BBQ joint.<\/p>\n<p>And we&#8217;re deciding what to get&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>And whatever Jason decides to order, it does not include onion rings.\u00c2\u00a0 But the rings look so GOOD!<\/p>\n<p>So what does Jason do?\u00c2\u00a0 HE ASKS!\u00c2\u00a0 &quot;Can you put a couple of those onion rings on top?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>And of course, the help does it.\u00c2\u00a0 Because of Jason&#8217;s delivery, because we were dropping almost forty bucks on lunch, because he&#8217;s a stoner ski bum?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure.<\/p>\n<p>But I give credit to Jason for asking.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s how you get ahead.\u00c2\u00a0 The rules are made to be broken.<\/div>\n<p>So I&#8217;m so pissed at Santa Monica Subaru that with a mild delivery, I say &quot;That&#8217;s gonna be free, right?\u00c2\u00a0 Since no work was done?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>And the service writer is caught off guard.\u00c2\u00a0 He protests that they put it up on the lift.\u00c2\u00a0 Then asks me, &quot;What if I take half off?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>SOLD!<\/p>\n<p>My father was so busy chatting up the help, trying to get a deal, that I&#8217;ve stopped, not wanting to be perceived as a schnorrer.<\/p>\n<p>But sometimes you&#8217;ve got to schnorr.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes you&#8217;ve got to evaluate what&#8217;s equitable.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes people know they&#8217;re ripping you off.<\/p>\n<p>And sometimes when you ask, you get.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>$5300.\u00c2\u00a0 That&#8217;s what Santa Monica Subaru wanted to fix my Saab. Yes, it&#8217;s a Saab, but it&#8217;s really a Subaru, and that&#8217;s important, as you&#8217;ll find out. You see I started the car in gear.\u00c2\u00a0 I had it on a hill.\u00c2\u00a0 In reverse.\u00c2\u00a0 And I forgot it was in gear, and after letting out the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-15H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4197"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4199,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4197\/revisions\/4199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}