I’ve recently gotten two different car service people angry with me. There must be something wrong with the way I communicate, and I feel bad about it.
Incident 1
A few weeks ago, our 2012 VW Jetta died. We were coming home from a long road trip, passing through Oklahoma on the way to Albuquerque, when the engine suddenly stopped. A local mechanic found metal fragments in the fuel filter. Turns out, that’s a symptom of catastrophic failure. Fragments of the high-pressure pump get spread through the entire fuel system, completely ruining it. The only solution is to replace everything. $$$$!
A friend came and brought us home. The next day I called a local mom & pop shop that works on German imports. “Mom & pop” are actually a young couple with a small child. The father does most of the mechanical work, but the mother is pretty knowledgeable about cars as well.
I told her what happened.
She said, “Don’t let the internet scare you. It’s a sad waste that people junk their cars when they could be fixed.” She estimated about $2000 to replace the fuel pump, parts and labor.
I felt elated. Maybe our car could be saved after all. I asked her what it would cost if they had to replace the fuel injectors as well.
Now we’re at $4000. “But it might not cost that much. We’d only charge you for the parts that actually need to be replaced.”
“The dealer is asking about $5000 for the same job.”
“Our labor rates are lower.”
“Could you start by checking the fuel injectors? That way we will know if they can be saved.”
“Let me ask my husband.” Several minutes passed. “He says it’s the lifting pump, not the high-pressure pump. Lifting pump. It’s in the fuel tank. The lifting pump is your problem.”
“With all due respect, that’s different from what I’ve seen. Everything says that if you get metal fragments in the fuel filter, it’s from the high-pressure pump. Could you check the service bulletins on this?”
Her voice came back, clearly irritated, “With all due respect, this conversation is taking a lot of time. Meanwhile, I’ve got twenty other customers waiting. We may decide to refuse this job.”
“Please don’t do that. I’m just need to get some certainty before spending the money to ship the car back here.”
“My husband has twenty years of experience. He knows what he’s talking about.”
There was no way I could gamble $450 to ship the car, not even knowing if they would accept the job. Worse, I couldn’t trust their estimate, since they didn’t seem to understand the situation. I sold the car to a junkyard. We’ll never know if the injectors were actually ruined.
Incident 2
I went into Midas to get a 4-wheel alignment on our “new” 2015 Nissan Altima. There were two people at the counter, a middle-aged black man and a twenty-something white man. I checked in the car, cracked a few jokes with them, then settled in the waiting room with my laptop to work on a program.
About 30 minutes later the younger man came out, handed me a sheet of paper and said, “We need to reset the computer on your power steering. It will cost twenty-nine dollars.”
“Why does it cost thirty dollars to reset a computer?” I was thinking about the tire-monitoring system on our former VW. When we changed tires on it, we had to push a button inside the glove compartment. There were sensors on each wheel, and the computer would spend the next 20 miles learning statistics about the normal pattern. All this makes perfect sense to an AI researcher. I simply assumed that the electric power steering (EPS) computer would use a similar learning procedure.
“We have to hook up a special scanner to reset it.”
I said, “I’m a computer programmer. That’s what I’m doing right now.” I showed him my laptop with code sprawled across the screen. “I can reset a computer remotely by sending a simple command to it. Why does it cost thirty dollars to do that?”
He said, “If my computer had a virus, what would you charge to remove it?”
I thought for a moment. It kind of reminded me of ransomware attacks by Russian hackers. “That’s not a good analogy.”
The older man jumped in. “The machine cost ten thousand dollars. If you have one, go ahead.”
The young man started quoting off the paper, word-for-word. It was a generic notice about the existence of EPS and the need to reset the control computer, but not a description of what the reset actually does, even in layman’s terms.
I said, “I can read. Look, go ahead and reset the computer. I want a complete job.”
He called out to the shop for them to proceed.
I asked, “When you reset the computer, that means the numbers in it change, right? Where do those numbers come from?” I wanted to find out whether the reset started a machine-learning process.
They gave me an explanation about when you do an alignment, things change.
I had a vague flicker of insight. Perhaps these are calibration parameters that need to be stored permanently, and the only time they’re available is while the car is on the alignment rig. “The numbers in there now, are they from the last alignment?”
“From the last alignment, from the dealer, from wherever.” They shrugged.
“I had a VW before. Whenever we changed the–”
The older man cut in, “That’s different.”
“Wait. Let me finish my question before you answer.” I described how we had to push the button in the glove compartment to start a 20-mile learning process.
“Yeah, the tire-management system. When you move tires around it needs to know that the left-back is now on the left front–”
“It doesn’t matter where the tire came from. All it needs are the readings from the sensor on that wheel.”
“Well, I guess you know better than me.” The older man walked out to shop in a huff. I could hear him grousing with the mechanics. The young man followed him.
A few minutes later they came back to close the job.
I told the young man, “Sorry that my way of speaking annoyed you and your coworker here. I respect that you know more about cars, just like I know more about computers, particularly robotic systems.”
The young man smiled tightly and handed me the receipt.
Conclusions
Car-service people, like physicians, preachers and so on, probably feel pressure to present certainty, even authority, to their customers. I don’t believe either of the people above had an ego issue, but they did feel threatened in their role when I asked questions beyond their knowledge.
Despite his faults, my PhD adviser taught me some important lessons. One is to be confident of your abilities in the presence of other highly-accomplished people. The other is never to claim knowledge you don’t have. In academia that would be suicide. If you don’t know the answer, immediately state your limitations.
Maybe the problem is that when I hear an incomplete or contradictory answer, I keep probing. It’s the way of the scientist. Apparently, most people aren’t trained to say, “I don’t know.” The more I probe, the more insecure they feel, until they lash out to end the conversation.
Once I reviewed a novel for a fellow writer in which one of the characters was a psychologist with two (!) PhDs. The character was portrayed as arrogant and overly certain of her own knowledge. I felt like my category of people was being insulted by this depiction, just like a race or sexual orientation.
Most of the people I work with have PhDs, and to me they’re just people like everyone else. I pointed out to the fellow writer that someone who completes a PhD will usually be humble about their knowledge, because they have learned their limits. And nobody actually earns two PhDs. One is bad enough.
I suspect that my strident assertions about the good character of PhDs only served to reinforce his impression that we’re arrogant.