Car Wash

Always the slacker, I once picked up a product that promised to “make washing my car as easy as spraying it a couple of times”. It was a plastic bottle of super concentrated sudsy stuff with an integral mixer/sprayer selector that you attach to your hose and use to wash your car. You set it to “wash”, point it at the car, and it mixes the soap with the water and sudsifies the vehicle, then you set it to “rinse” and it sprays plain water. Sort of like a power washer without the power. Simple, huh? Except the mixing was a little messed up, at first the mixture was heavy on the soap, and then when the soap reservoir was a little bit depleted, the soap concentration fell off big time. At any rate, once I got it connected to my hose and started trying to wash my car with it, there were more pressing issues than merely poor control of soap concentration. To be specific, the whole device kept falling off the hose! I mean the internal threads on the device were a little too large so when you screwed a hose into it tight enough to seal against water leakage, the slightest movement of the device (as in moving it to spray the vehicle) would cause the hose to pop out. Then you had to go chase down the hose and shut it off to re-thread it in there. It didn’t really matter at that time because by then the soap was all gone, the reservoir had leaked when the thing fell off the hose, and the selector switch was really difficult to operate under pressure so I couldn’t get the spray mode selected in order to rinse off the car. I gave up and washed the car by hand. When I got finished, I called the company to complain, and they were very nice about it. They apologized for my troubles, and they sent me a coupon for another one- free! Later I received a letter from the company asking me to give them a call and do a customer satisfaction survey. When I called again they asked me if I was satisfied with their resolution of my problem. I said “Well, I did get a coupon for a free replacement. Did your R&D department modify the thing so that it wouldn’t pop off the hose?”  They told me no.  Hmm. “Then how can you expect me to be satisfied with your resolution of my problem? If the car washer is just the same as it was before, What makes you think I won’t have the same trouble I had the first time?”  Well, they hemmed and hawed, but weren’t able to provide a reasonable explanation. “But we gave you a free one? Why aren’t you satisfied?”  Duh.

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