So highly strung / intense for a youngster.
Maybe I'm getting old now, but I was far more relaxed in my late teens.
Life was for enjoying and learning, not getting stressed, especially not about a car.
Save stress for when you have real life responsibilities.
An impressive trick if you can pull it off. There's no denying the absolute clarity and logic of that reasoning. Sadly though, the human mind rarely responds in kind, hence why some people become highly stressed and suffer severe, almost crippling anxiety for some unexpected and otherwise innocuous reasons, even when they are aware of logical reasons why their reaction makes no sense.
That said, in my late teens I was buying old cars for £20, smashing them through an MOT with nothing but hope and davids isopon P40 'hairy" filler (which
still has a picture of an Austin Meastro on it to this day) getting it a pass, and then driving them til I got bored / they broke/ I ran out of talent... Carefree days indeed. If only I'd kept those cars, some of them are now worth a ****** fortune.
Had I spent the thick end of five years wages - before tax (normalised for inflation) on a new car that then broke, I'd probably have been a bit highly strung too... I'm told that the youngsters leaving school now will be the first generation in a century who will be worse off than their parents, and yet this forum seems to be full of people barely old enough to shave who can afford S3's...
I'd be asking them to pay for a full detail for it. They've done what they should've done to begin with and give you a like for like courtesy car and now their goodwill gesture should be a full detail depending how long it sits.
Would you though?
Really?
Not withstanding the facts that
a) you can't dictate what a goodwill gesture might be, because it no longer a gesture, and there will certainly be a shortage of goodwill, and
b)I wouldn't trust a car dealer to wash my socks without leaving swirl marks in them, what are you really gaining?
This is what I was talking about above. The car broke, they will fix the car, free. They recovered the car to the workshop, free. They provided a car, free, they provided another car when the first car wasn't considered to be expensive enough, free. They will apologise, kiss ****, and genuinely be a bit embarrassed by the whole situation, so what good will come of demanding a posh car wash?
The sense of entitlement I was talking about before seems to go hand in hand with a belief that every customers money is equal. Not so. Suppliers, dealers and contractors of all types have 4 basic types of customer;
1/ is the customer they want to develop, they'll offer a good deal and excellent service now so that they are the first point of call when it comes to the big future sale(s). (Be nice to the young lad buying an A1, because he'll be back in a couple of years for an A3, then an S3, then a Q5, then an S6 etc...)
2/ is the customer they want to keep. A proven spender who is trouble free and worth keeping by way of additional discounts or incentives, because he's so easy to deal with.
3/ is the customer who's a pain, but he pays big so it's worth milking him for all you can get until he finally goes elsewhere. Laugh at his jokes, take his money, but if he leaves it's no skin off your nose.
4/ is the customer they wish they'd never met. They offer him zero discount, and even quote higher than normal because they know he always complains or demands extras that weren't part of the deal. He's a pain in the **** and the sooner he goes somewhere else the better.
You're better off being customer 1 or 2, than being customer 3 or 4.
