No matter how honest they seem, I always feel like I’m get ripped off when I take my car into a mechanic. Taking it to the dealership doesn’t make it any better. The mechanics at one of them give me the impression that they are crooks and the others seem like incompetent boobs. What should I do?

I bend over and take it in the ass, that’s what I do. I can’t lift up that car and look underneath and know whether what they tell me is true or not. All I can do is believe them, shell out the money, and hope they are being honest. It’s the cultural agreement. I won’t kill you if you don’t kill me.

I took Auto Owner’s Maintenance in high school so that I would be able to fix my own car when I grew up and got out into the world on my own. God bless that teacher, I could fix an original VW Beetle if I had to. I could change the spark plugs, the oil and do other more hairy procedures. That class taught me nothing about the New Beetle. They taught me nothing about those little computers in the car that tell you when there is a problem and what they need to do about it.

Frankly, I don’t believe those computers exist. I’ve seen them hook a machine up to my car and it prints out a bunch of stuff, but I don’t know if that is in my car or that cool machine. Sure, the guy at Checker Auto Parts was able to hook a little machine up to my car and he gave me a numeric code that I had to look up on the Internet. The code told me that the car was running lean. No shit?! I could tell that by the sound of it.

What I need is to have an “in.” I need to know someone personally who is in the business. Someone who I trust and who trusts me regarding other issues. I’ll take care of his computer if he takes care of my car. That’s my problem. I don’t know anyone that I trust in the industry. Instead of taking Auto Owner’s Maintenance in high school, I should have dated the guys who lived in the auto shop. I should have let one of them break my heart, dealt with it honorably and kept him as a “friend.” Then, when they said that I needed a huge repair, I could fork over the money in good faith. Why didn’t they tell me this in high school? Networking is king.