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Changing tires makes me hungry, not only because of the physical exertion, but because the tires look like donuts. They look like those big Hostess donuts that are covered in dark chocolate. My mouth watered as I swapped the big tire from my car with the small spare.
Yum. Yum. I thought. If only they actually made donuts that size... Between my hunger pangs and a lot of lifting and cranking, I managed to get the tire changed. Then I made my way to Walmart where I had bought it not too long before. "What was wrong with the tire?" I asked the mechanic when they were all done. He told me that the seal along the rim had broken. That meant nothing to me. He might as well have told me the tire was clinically depressed. "By the way," the mechanic added, "I wouldn't trust that spare very long. It has teeth marks on it!" "Oh, that's nothing to worry about," I said sheepishly, quickly exiting to the parking lot. When I got out to my car, I noticed that a hubcap was missing, so I walked back over to the shop and asked the mechanic about it. He told me the car only had three hubcaps on it when I brought it in. I had him double-check the shop to make sure. With no hubcaps to be found, I assumed I must have lost it on the freeway. A month later, I got another flat on the same tire and returned to WalMart. They told me to leave the car with them for an hour and to go into the store and spend as much money as I possibly could. This is the beauty of the WalMart tire warranty program. I filled up a shopping cart as they instructed and returned to the tire center an hour later to find that they hadn't done anything at all to my car. "We've been trying to contact you," the guy at the counter said. "You need a new tire, and we don't have that tire in stock." "How did you try and contact me?" I asked. I had been carrying my cell phone around with me, and that was the number I had given them. "Telegraph," the guy explained. "It's more reliable than cell phones." "I see. So what's the deal with the tire?" "We don't have it." This led to one of those awkward customer service moments where I stood there waiting for the guy to say something customer-service-like, such as "We're sorry we have been incompetent. Please wait while we call a nearby store and see if they have a tire in stock." Silence. There were three people in the tire center at the time because it was in the process of shutting down for the day, and that's apparently when all the employees show up. None of them seemed to understand why I was still standing there. Fortunately, the manager of the department arrived and offered four possible solutions: 1) Try calling other stores in the area and see if they have the tire in stock. 2) Order a tire. It would take a week until they got it in. 3) Come back tomorrow when the next shipment of tires was due to arrive and see if, by chance, the tire I needed was in the shipment. If I chose this option, the manager said, they would take my name and phone number and call me when the tires came in. 4) Buy a new car that matches the tires they have in stock. Option 1 didn't work. I passed on option 2. I seriously considered option 4 and then reverted back to option 3. Like the naive girl who just dated the class jock, I told them that I would be waiting for their call the next day, then I paid for my stuff and went back to my car. When I opened up the trunk, I saw that not only had they had given me my tire back, they had also given me the hubcap from someone else's car (true story). "I see how this works," I said. When Walmart didn't call the next day, I returned - out of sheer curiosity more than anything else - to see if they had gotten the tire in. They had not. A day later, I had my tire replaced at the family-owned brake shop down the street. Several days after that, there was a knock at my door. I opened it to be greeted by a man from Western Union. "Mr. Smith?" "Yes?" "Telegram for you." I signed for it and opened it up. It said, "MR. SMITH. STOP. WE DON'T HAVE TIRE. STOP. STOP SHOPPING. STOP. COME BACK TO SERVICE DESK. STOP." That was going to be the punchline to my story, and, of course, there was no guy from Western Union. But truth is stranger than fiction. A week after my adventures at Walmart, their service manager left a message on the answering machine telling me that my tire was in. I told my wife that the tire, which I never ordered, had arrived. "Wow," she said. "Now that's customer service!" |
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