Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Flunky
My stupid car flunked its emissions test. Because the on-board computer was "not ready" to report on its pollution whatsits, or whatever. Even though I haven't had any work done recently and have not recently disconnected the battery. Well happy birthday to me. I am so thrilled to have to take my car to the shop tomorrow to discuss resetting the computer, or whateverthehell.
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11 comments:
Happy Birthday Fermi.
Well, I guess 'just say no' isn't appropriate for cars then? Hmmmm.
Hippo Birdie to you!
Thanks y'all. The birthday is Saturday. I was trying to get the car stuff done ahead of the deadline, but that's not gonna happen now. I'm dropping the flunky car off tomorrow (took it there today, but they need to keep it a few hours).
Emission test? What the hell is that? :ewink:
Still within the warranty period?
LL - red tape from the land of smog.
Dave - of course not. Warranty ended last fall. My mechanic says some cars are really flaky with this problem, so what he'll try tomorrow only has an 80-90% chance of actually working. *sigh*
Happy Day Before Birthday!!
fermi - up in the big city they do emission testing, but here's how it works. A friend of mine was telling me the story...
His brother flunked the emission test, so he came to my friend (who works in an auto parts store) and they put a tester on the computer. It showed some oxygen sensor failure or some such, so they replaced the O2 sensor, cleared the computer and he went back and failed another emission test. So they hooked the tester back up and found another little problem, so they fixed it. Brother fails again, so he complained to the tester that he'd done everything he could to fix it, but didn't know what else to do. The tester said, "Really? Do you have the receipts?" So the brother produced the receipts showing that he's spent over $100 trying to fix the problem. "Ok, if you can show that you've spent over $100 trying to fix it, that's good enough for Idaho" and he gave him a pass. The moral? It's not about the emissions, it's about the revenue generated by the testing and fixing process...
Don't know if that's the case in the big ATL, but perhaps you could check.
Dianne - thanks.
LL - I don't think they grade for "effort" around here, unfortunately. But you have a good point about it generating dollars for certain industries. My local mechanic certainly benefitted by my car's unexpected failure (since the warranty ran out I don't use the dealer any more).
The local boys went above and beyond. After they fixed the problem, they drove down the street and got my car reinspected so I didn't have to do it. Nice.
Happy belated bday. I was over at Dave's and he said the party was awesome!
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