Recall? Recall?!
I’m sure you remember that scene from the 1979 coming-of-age classic Breaking Away, which was set in Bloomington, Indiana. In it, a graduating local high school student, who loves bicycle racing forms a local “Cutters” team to compete against the Indiana University frat boys. His father is a local used car dealer and ex-cutter himself, who sells junkers to the naive local student body. The scene that I always remember as so memorable is when the boy suggests giving a student who is unhappy with his car purchase a refund. The father pops a gasket and starts mumbling “Refund? Refund?!” as he gets sedated for the trauma of it all. It’s a great movie and a funny scene and I can’t hear the word refund without thinking about it.
Just the other night we went to go see the new movie You Hurt My Feelings starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobias Menzies. They are a married couple who are working through their own empty-nest mid-life crises. She is a writer of modest success and he is a therapist who is starting to lose touch with his profession and his patients. As a therapist, he seems to handle the realization of his mediocrity better than does Louis-Dreyfus, who is quite shaken to learn that her own husband has been lying to her about his feelings about her work. She unintentionally overhears him telling his brother-in-law that he really doesn’t like her latest book and that reality devastates her. Tobias, on the other hand, gets told specifically by a couple that cannot agree on anything who he has treated for two years that they have finally agreed on something, that he has not and is not helping them with their problems. The really funny bit takes place when the patient/husband tells Tobias that he has decided that since he hasn’t helped fix them over two years, he feels they deserve a refund for their sessions. He asks what he means, and is told by the patient that they want the $33,000 that they have paid him for their sessions back. This does not sit well with Tobias, but he is too genteel to tell the guy to go fuck off, and instead just goes about ignoring the request as patently absurd.
While such a move is certainly highly unusual, I imagine that most people who hear that find themselves laughing about how funny it is and then doubling back on themselves and wonder why exactly it seems so absurd. There are many professions where a failure to achieve the goals established would result in some sort of reasonable rebate or refund, but certainly not in something as vague as psychotherapy. In fact, when I think more and more about it, it seems to me that it is not as absurd as it initially sounds. Naturally, without some sort of prior arrangement, a therapist could easily say that he is giving his time and attention to the matters at hand and that since there was never any implied or explicit guarantee of an outcome, no such refund is warranted. Then again, most often, a therapist does start off telling his patients that they should be able to work through his or her issues and that over time things should improve. Isn’t that a sort of implied assurance or guarantee? It might be. So, Tobias never goes into a seizure mumbling “Refund? Refund?!” But his eyes clearly want to tell you that.
I have just spent a few hours at our local Mercedes dealership waiting for the return of our car, which I brought in to the service area to have a recall notice addressed. I don’t even know exactly what the issue was that prompted the recall other than to say it was something involving a seal on one of the rear windows. In other words, it wasn’t anything too dangerous or troubling, but I know how these things go, and if I hadn’t responded to the recall notice they would have had grounds to tell me that I had violated my lease terms. I’m sure it would have resulted in them telling me I broke it so I have to buy it or some such variation of a penalty for being a recall scofflaw. So instead I patiently sat in the Mercedes Benz customer waiting area and looked through emails and played on my iPad. They had initially told me it would take 90 minutes to do the job, but the service representative was in calling for me within about 30 minutes. He also mentioned that he was not able to give my car the complimentary wash that comes with all service visits for some vague reason of having had the water shut off for some unexplained reason. Since I have limitless car washes at my car wash, it was no issue to me except that it tends to reinforce my view that Mercedes is simply not as special on service as it used to be. At least he didn’t do what I half expected, which was to tell me three other things they found just by chance that I really should have fixed as soon as possible. Last time it was my need for new tires on my one-year-old car, which struck me as rather odd, but resulted in me going to Discount Tire and getting four new tires.
I currently have two cars and two motorcycles. My motorcycles seem to regularly get miscellaneous recall notices for this or that. I tend to pay pretty close attention to motorcycle recalls since you really don’t want things falling off while you ride. For some reason I take those far more seriously than a car recall since I think car recalls are usually just excuses to get you in the shop where they can have their way with you. For some reason, I have a more trusting relationship with my motorcycle manufacturer than that. As for my cars, let’s start with the Tesla. That car just rarely has anything wrong with it. I have usually not bought cars in my life, preferring to lease whenever possible. I have this thing about residual value loss that was borne of a Lincoln Navigator I owned once and couldn’t resell for love or money. But I bought the Tesla X outright in 2016 and over the seven years and 25,000 miles I have owned it, it has given me so little trouble that I might even welcome a recall just to give me an excuse to take it into a dealership. The one time I went into the dealership was when the big video screen stopped working. They showed me politely (but with a trace of condescension) that if I help both steering wheel thumb wheels down it would reset the system and the screen would come back on. Voila! There has been no need to take it in for service since then. I did have to have the 12V battery replaced, but they did that with a home visit for $249…not a bad deal altogether. I’ve also had the tires replaced, but I had that done at a tire shop. Tesla genuinely does not want to see me and that’s OK with me.
But Mercedes is another issue. Every Mercedes I have owned has had some glitchy thing or another go wrong with it. I’ve even had to threaten Lemon Lawing my last GLS 450 and got them to give me a lousy deal on a new model and take back the lemon over a 48V battery issue that had the car deciding it wouldn’t start at the most inconvenient times. I have had my current Mercedes for a bit over a year now and since the lease runs for another three years, I am wondering what will be next to go. Kim and I have tentatively decided to make our next car a Subaru and after years of having a Mercedes, I’m quite looking forward to the change. I’m helped in the switch by Subaru advertising that they donate to disabled animal causes and that’s all it takes to sell Kim. In the meantime, I will just keep wondering to myself, “Recall? Recall?!”