It was that not fun time again; time to take my car in for servicing. Since the vehicle was under warranty, I had to go to a dealership and that left me with a tough choice to make — do I go to  the far away dealer in the South Bay where I had bought the car? Or, ugh, to those assholes in Brisbane, a dealership a good 1 hour closer, but damn their customer service sucks.

You see, I already ‘knew’ those Brisbane guys sucked; when we were test driving cars, we went to their dealership first, but they treated us like total crap, ignored us, were rude, and so we left, drove an hour south and bought our car from the South Bay dealer. Still, an hour is an hour, and so I begrudgingly emailed Brisbane for a service appointment. Shocker —  no one got back to me. It took 3 more emails, and a world of frustration, just to finalize a service date.

My heart was aflame with rage when I started thinking, “I need to go write a yelp review of these guys so I can give them exactly what they deserve.” I opened up my yelp account, but just before that Demon Revenge took over my typing fingers, I started to think…”Either these folks are really terrible business people or my situation was an exception. If they are terrible business people, do I really need to write a review? Other customers are likely to have a similar experience, they will stop going and the business will suffer without any help from me. Or, there are folks like me, that chose to go there for something other than good customer service, i.e. convenience, proximity, cost…In these cases, no review I write about customer service will sway them from going to this dealership.

On the other hand, if I was a one off, some exception..what’s the point of writing a review? If normally they are great they will have plenty of customers who return independent of what I say. Plus, I make mistakes sometimes too..I wouldn’t want folks judging my work, my abilities,  based on one mistake I made..why should I do that to others.

At the end of the day, service at the dealership isn’t about me at all. Writing a review, taking my revenge, is, at best, some super small factor in the dealership’s success/ failure anyway. The guilty party here is me: I let some car dealership (later day note: really myself disguised as the idea of this particular car dealership) plant a poison seed — vengeance — in my heart. And when that seed grows, I alone get stuck with its bitter karmic fruits.