It never ceases to amaze me how often certain businesses who claim that they offer certain services do not have full competence in those services!!
Recently, my car started giving me problems. Basically, it wouldn’t start, however, there was clearly power, since my lights, radio and everything else electrical was working. After puzzling this over for a while, as a last stab before towing my car to a service station, I decided to try jump start it. It started. So I assumed that there was something wrong with my battery.
After driving to the place where Anita bought the battery from, and finding it not there anymore, I stopped at a Supa Quick, since they advertised that they ‘did’ batteries. I asked the manager there if they could test my battery, and he got someone to test it. The conclusion was that my battery was fine, and there must be some other electrical fault.
So (some weeks later, as I had to go to BMM) I ended up taking it to an auto electrician. They tested the battery, and concluded that the battery was at fault. They replaced it, and my car is happy.
Now, why didn’t Supa Quick pick it up? Okay, they must have used a different test. Speaking to the auto electrician, he said that the battery was fine when there was very little load on it. So it basically gave 12V, and all of my car’s internal (low load) electrics were fine. However, they must have not tested it under high load, which meant that they did not pick up that as soon as the load on the battery increases when starting the car, the battery’s output voltage went down to 3V.
Now, for a business (Supa Quick) that claims to specialise in 6 areas (Tyres, Batteries, Shocks, Exhausts, Wheels, Alignment), where one is Batteries (okay, in my books Tyres/Alignment/Shocks = Wheels, so 20% of their competence), you’d expect that they should be able to pick up something like this, as I would think is a common case for battery failure. Now, I’m not beating up on the poor guy who did the test, but perhaps they need to change their testing procedures and use equipment that will diagnose all the common cases for battery failure.
So, all in all, because of a misdiagnosis, Supa Quick lost business from me, which went to someone else.
Comments
8 responses to “Incompetence costs you money…”
Your rants need more emotive words – such as `moron’ or `idiot’ – and parodies of the brand, such as `Supa-Twit’ for maximum biting edge.
Lol… My choice would be ‘muppets’!!
I like muppets. Muppets is better. The Supa-Quick Muppets
Hey Sam
Long time no see, and just so this isn’t completely off topic, hope you went back to supaquick and dumped the faulty battery off.
Hey Gareth
Yup it’s been a long time. Welcome to my blog. Glad to see you’ve started one. It’s already on my daily surfin list 🙂
Just to remain on topic, naah… The people who know what they are doing took the battery.. I don’t think I’d trust the Supa-Quick Muppets with anything more than a limp vienna sausage.
Hi Sam,
You don’t know me, except perhaps by proxy via these other animals. Groovy blog though, most chucklesome 🙂 . Keep up the good work…
Quinn
PS – Re Supa-Quick, yes, they are truly useless specimens of humanity. They spent three hours attempting to fit 14″ tyres onto the 13″ rims on my car a few years back.
Hi Quinn
Thanks for the compliment, and welcome to my humble presence on the web. Yup, via proxy, I have heard of you.
I have one question tho, why ‘kittychunk’? Nice to have you on board 🙂
Ah. Oh dear 🙂 . The long story is a bit complicated, so we’ll forget about that, and go with the abbreviated version containing only the salient bits.
I enjoy LAN gaming. At one point, so did many of the people I work with, so we would stay late every now and then to abuse the work network for Quake 2 sessions. Picking nicks designed to antagonise or annoy people was a stupid and thankfully temporary fad in our little community – one of my co-workers was a cat nut, so GibbedCat -> KittenGibs -> KittenChunks -> KittyChunk was a natural evolution, a sort of progressive refinement of the art of taunting. I liked the unusual sound of the final version so I kept using it long after said co-worker stopped talking to me… it’s sort of stuck as my handle for anything online-related ever since.
-q-
PS – despite the grotesque implications of the name, I actually like cats. Please don’t sic the SPCA on me.