An hour down the highway our transmission began grinding badly. It sounded like low fluid. We limped back to town stuck in second gear, drove into Jiffy Lube and cornered the manager. “Let’s take a look,” he said, opening the hood. The next thing I knew, he checked the fluid level and–without a word–filled the transmission fluid reservoir. Then he asked me to direct my complaint to the owner when he returned to the shop in a couple of hours.

When I came back to speak with the owner, he checked the fluid level and said it was fine. “Of course there’s enough fluid,” I replied. “Your employee filled the reservoir as soon as I returned!”.

“Really?” said the owner. “Where is that employee who can back up your story?” You can guess the rest: the employee who topped off the fluid was nowhere to be seen, and the owner dismissed my complaint.

As it developed, my tranny was completely destroyed. I escalated the issue to Jiffy Lube corporate, who refused to be held responsible for their franchisee. So I went after the franchisee, who owned several Jiffy Lubes. His rep came by the transmission shop to examine “the transmission whose fluid we left low”, then he engaged me in what turned out to be weeks of haggling over the repairs, while I drove a costly rented car all the while.

At one point the rep offered me a junkyard transmission as a replacement. When I held out for a rebuild, he said “our conversation is over, and I never offered you a replacement transmission…you cannot prove I did”.

Clearly, this was well-practiced stonewalling. So I consulted an attorney, who suggested that Jiffy Lube probably ran a legal machine built around tying up and waiting out claims in the $4,000-$10,000 range, so my best bet would be to get what I could in small claims court even though the small claims limit would still leave me $2,000 in the hole.

So that’s what I did. Jiffy Lube didn’t even appear to contest the claim. The small claims judge expressed his weariness at yet another such case in his court, awarded me the maximum, then moved on to the next case on the docket…a nearly identical suit from someone made poorer by Grease Monkeys Inc!

“Never trust your car to these little lube shops,” said the transmission shop owner as I handed over a whopping check. “Their employees were probably flipping burgers a month before; they are not mechanics.”

Learn from my mistake. Don’t get jiffy screwed.