Vice
I like to think I don’t have many of them, but this is one of them; you just don’t get the same thing from those places where the biggest thing on the sign out front is a dollar sign. Oh, look — it’s the “The 1$ Car Wash”. Does $1 buy me more detergent or dirt from the car in front of me? Maybe it’s the perfectionist in me coming out, but if I’m going to take time out of my life to have paid professionals clean my car, I want it to come out…uh…clean. I mean honestly — one of the managers came out while the guy was scrubbing my mats and said there was a film on it, so he was going to run it through again. I think the exterior was probably cleaner the first time than it would have been if it spent the whole day in one of those places down the street.
Honestly, I like my car’s exterior clean as much as the next guy, but I go to Jax for the job they do on the part of the car I see the most of; the interior. The coupon I had described one part of the service as “extra vacuuming”; two guys crawl into the thing with vacuum hoses when you drop it at the start of the car wash proper. The extra part was blowing dust, crumbs, and whatever out of folds and crevices in the seats, floor, vents, etc. and then vacuuming the car a second time with a crevice tool. Then he went at my mats that he’d already pulled out. I’d just gotten the mat scrub add-on before, so I’d seen them with the air-powered brush and the spray bottle; what I hadn’t seen was the guy getting rid of the blower attachment he’d just used on my interior, grabbing the brush, and then putting it down again because it was the wrong carpet brush. The wrong one.
I drove away trying to remember the last time my car was that clean. The last time I spent an afternoon shampooing my interior (different car, admittedly), it wasn’t this clean when I finished. And I didn’t get the carpet shampooing, just the mat scrub that comes with the package named on my coupon (maybe if we’d had a rougher winter I’d have chosen differently). Even if I had, they’d have finished faster (this is no appointment needed detailing).
Sometimes, you just have to pay a professional to do something right. Damn.1
- By the way, the first item on the carpet shampoo checklist is “All Non-Permanent Stains Removed.” [↩]
April 8, 2006
at 5:48 pm