decidedlyodd

After putting it off for most of the summer, I broke down and took my car into get the brakes taken care of. It’s not like they’d gone out or anything, but my car has been breaking increasingly roughly for a while now. When I went up to the San Juans months ago, Rico (who works in the auto parts business) made some sort of exclamation about my rotors. Then Jay told some horror story about the tens (or maybe it was hundreds) of thousands of yen he had to pay for new rotors in Japan when he used to live there.

Now, the thing I hate most about getting my car fixed is finding a place to go. Experience has taught me to assume most mechanics are thieves who will screw you over at every chance. That leaves me with very few good options. I’d rather just pay more and not have to deal with as much bullshit. So I did what a lot of people do in that situation and just took the car to the Toyota dealer. On the plus side, the dealership downtown is a short walk (less than a mile I think) from my apartment and they’re supposed to know what they’re doing. The people there seemed to be fairly professional and they took care of everything in a timely and polite fashion. No games about when I’d get the car back or bald-faced attempts at selling me services and products I didn’t really need.

I had to get new pads on the front, have the front rotors machined, have the break fluid changed, new pads on the back and new rotors on the back (since they’re too worn to be machined). Plus, they noticed that my power steering fluid was in need of changing. I told them to just do it since if I didn’t I know it would continue to bother me. Unfortunately, getting everything done was really expensive. I obviously expected that, but the amount I paid was still more than I had expected.