I wrote a thousand words yesterday about terrible things Walmart did to my car. I intend to follow that up with an even more harrowing tale of Walmart car-maintenance malevolence. They really do seem to be out to destroy my car. This attack was on an innocent little Ford Fiesta that I bought in 2011. Prepare for a journey into the bizarre and horrible world of Walmart oil changes and attempted autocide with malice of forethought.
Episode Two; Murder by Massive Car Farts
Now, I know that there is no posted policy anywhere in the Walmart automotive section where they do oil changes, tire mounting, and random acts of evil, but I really believe they all work under the same directive to stick it to Mickey anytime and every time they can.
I have been cheated by them before. One time I took the car in, waited for two hours, and even though I was watching through the window as they did the oil change, I had no visible evidence that they actually took any old oil out or put any new oil in. When I asked them for the empty oil bottles, they said they pump oil from an overhead reservoir (which I did not see anyone physically do). So, I paid them and went home. But before I made a trip to Iowa, I had the Ford dealer do a more expensive oil change. They said the oil looked okay but it really didn’t look like it was only a week old. So, I’m deducing Sherlockian-style that Walmart charged me twenty dollars just hold my car for two hours and look at the oil.
That brings me to last Wednesday. I knew better. I knew I should take the extra time and pay the extra money to take it to the Ford dealer, but Walmart is temptingly close and convenient. So, I took the thing in. The amount of oil in the engine was a little low, so they did the oil change (I actually saw oil go in this time) and made me sign a waiver that said that Walmart was not responsible for any damage that might’ve been caused by having too little oil in the engine. On Friday, while picking up kids from school, the engine overheated in traffic. While sitting at one foul-tempered stoplight with fifty or sixty… thousand other cars, and running the heater on a ninety degree day to keep my engine from flaming out, the check engine light came on. “Oh, no!” I thought. “Walmart was prescient about damage from too little oil.”
At home I checked the ridiculously hot engine and found the cap from the top of the engine (where a Walmart technician puts in new oil) was missing. So I take it back on Saturday afternoon to show them the problem. “Oh, yes, we’ll clean this mess up and put in new oil for free. Don’t you worry about this.” (He miraculously found the cap in the precise spot by the radiator where he had left it three days before.)
I waited it out, and, sure enough, the engine light was no longer warning of imminent car death. So I failed to notice that he had kept my receipt from the previous visit. We chugged happily out of the Walmart parking lot and down Marsh Lane to a spot where we were closer to home than to Walmart. The car started making choking sounds and blinking multiple warning lights at me. Number two son pointed to smoke coming up from the corners of the hood. And a massive blue-white cloud of car fart exploded out of the tail pipe, obscuring the traffic behind me for miles. My Sherlockian brain immediately deduced that something was wrong. An oil change is NOT supposed to have an effect like that on your car. So we limped the rest of the way home and called Triple A.
Fixing the problem was no bowl of Jello pudding. I called Triple A and they recommended a tow so that no further damage would be done to the engine. The tow truck came and I asked him to take it to 5-Star Ford whom I had previously called and explained my dilemma. This he did. And there are at least three 5-Star Fords in the North Dallas area. He took it to the wrong one. So, I arranged to have them keep my little Ford pony for the rest of the weekend and fix the potentially expensive problem on Monday. I was depressed all weekend. The evil Walmart goblin hordes had apparently destroyed my car. I ate a lot of ice cream… probably more than was good for an aging diabetic.
Finally, the day came when I could find out the bad news and possibly get my car back. I learned Monday that it was not a completely fatal blow. The technician at Walmart had put new oil in without draining out enough of what was in there. So there was far too much oil in the system when I tried to drive it home. Too much oil and too high an oil pressure apparently gives a car massive amounts of intestinal gas. That led to the nearly fatal car fart. I ended up paying six times as much for the corrected oil change as Walmart had initially cheated me out of. At least I didn’t have to sell one of my kids into slavery in order to get the money to fix it. And I learned a valuable lesson from this whole experience. Walmart hates me!
Catch a Falling Star 