More Likely To Talk about Bad Experiences
The age old adage is that you’re much more likely to tell someone about something bad than something good. For instance, if you go to a restaurant and the food stinks, you’re a lot more likely to tell people than if you went to a restaurant and the food is good. I tend to agree with this school of thinking.
When is in high school, I had some car problems and took it to an auto mechanic that I normally didn’t go to because I had won a $100 gift certificate for them. The instructions were simple: find what was wrong and call us with an estimate. A few hours after dropping off the car, they called with a laundry list of things they had tried (unsuccessfully) and gave us a few options of other ideas they had. At this point, they were a thousand dollars in parts and who knows how much into labor. My dad laced into them (verbally, since physical violence is rather hard to achieve over the phone), told them to remove everything they had done and put the car back how it was when we got there so we could take it to some place competent. So they undid their work and ended up charging us $18 after the $100 certificate. After which we took it to a reputable place and they figured out the problem right away and certainly charged less than what the villain in this tale would have charged.
The place I took it to initially was Anthony Automotive in Marquette, MI. I’ve told this story to dozens of people, often when in the area of Anthony’s, when someone is looking for auto work, or when I simply need an interesting story because my last two blog entries have largely bombed when it comes to public interest. I’ve told everyone to keep away from the place. I don’t know if ever helped, but I like to think that some day they will go out of business because of my spreading the word (or because of an unfortunate sinkhole that swallows the entire building). Sadly they probably won’t (nor will the sinkhole swallow them), because in the automotive world, a shady business can rip off lots of people and chances are many of them won’t even realize it. But heck, now that I’ve blogged it, maybe even more people will someday know and take their business elsewhere.
Now if I took my car to Anthony Automotive and they just fixed it, I wouldn’t be saying any of this because that story just isn’t interesting. I went to Florida three times, but when people ask about it, I’m most likely to tell them about the horrible ride there and back the one time. Ask about a birthday and I’ll tell you the time we hit a deer coming back from my relatives on my birthday. Ask if I ever went boating and I’ll tell you about when we hit the iceberg.
It’s just human nature. So next time something bad happens to you, look for the silver lining: at least you’ll have an interesting story to tell.
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