My car dealership is improving over the years...

I've been driving for a long time, and that means visiting a lot of car servicing departments at dealerships over the years. For a lot of my driving career, I got the impression from most of those guys that they thought they were doing me a favor to service my car, once they'd pocketed the money it cost me buying it.

And in one memorable case, I got the well-known 'Parker 51 Servicing'. To catch you up on those old days, Parker 51 was a fancy pen, and the 'Servicing' was a well-filled Work Order listing all sorts of jobs that really hadn't been done at all, except on that paper form. I proved by leaving my car parked nose-first against a wall of their shop, with an empty cigarette pack tucked under the front tire, so that if they moved the car to take it into the shop, it would crush the package, and I'd know they actually did something. I returned three hours later to find the car where I'd left it, and the cigarette pack undamaged, but their Work Order listed a dozen items they said had been done.  This was a Ford dealership, and the year was 1957, and I haven't bought a Ford product since.

I like my Dodge Caliber, and it runs very nicely, and it does get its servicing as they say it does. I bought my first used Dodge in 1960 after I'd recovered from the disaster that was my first new car, that world-class lemon, the '57 Ford.
When a car starts falling apart on the road with only 308 miles on the odometer you just know this is not going to be a happy experience. It sure as hell wasn't.
When I get a screwing like that, I want a lot of kissing with it....