I have been taking my cars to Ralph’s Auto Service here in Asheville for going on 14 years. Ralph (not his real name) might be best described as Carolina cordial — I had to remind him again last week that he didn’t need to call me Mr. Collins — and he is definitely a man of few, carefully-chosen words. But Ralph is Mr. Reliability when it comes to delivering on what he promises, and that’s what matters here.
When I call Ralph for an appointment, he answers, “Ralph’s Auto,” in such a sober tone that it makes me want to take a box of donuts over to his shop to perk things up. (And yes, we have done so.) Given Ralph’s general demeanor, I had to smile when I looked over the service receipt* from my last oil change and how Ralph filled it out:
It struck me that the most interesting thing about this form is the fact that Ralph uses it. The only fields he fills out faithfully are the service date, customer name, make and model, odometer reading and amount due. Everything else on this exhaustively subdivided form gets entered in a style one could call mechanic minimalist — the lone organizing principle being “Parts on Left, Labor on Right.”
This begs the question: in what anal-retentive universe would any car mechanic come up with a form like this? Certainly not the one Ralph lives in. I’m thinking military.
Take the ESTIMATE section. Ralph’s form provides for an initial estimate, then a revised estimate (with time and date and initials!) and even a third revised estimate:
What the hell kind of repair involves three estimates from one shop? You can be sure that Ralph would show you the door before offering you even a second estimate, because you would already have proven yourself to be too much trouble.
Predictably, Ralph has never filled out the ESTIMATE section for anything his shop has done for me. All our agreements have been verbal handshakes. Someday, I should ask Ralph if he has filled in this part of the form for any repair, ever — or would doing so mean that the job is more trouble than it’s worth? I think I already know the answer.
In the upper right, we find more laughers like the Time Received and Promised boxes, complete with AM and PM symbols to save precious time and ink.
These are one-upped by the Phone When Ready Yes/No checkboxes. Way back when, I would ask Ralph to call me when my car was ready, and he would always say, will do, but he hardly ever did. He probably just forgot to check Yes .
I love the throwback Pack Front Wheel Bearings checklist item. Hey, couldn’t we all use a good front-wheel-bearing packing right about now?
The PART NO. OR DESCRIPTION area of the form has a dedicated column ★ to encode new/used/rebuilt, plus two extra columns with no headings, I guess so that ambitious service guys can invent their own codes.
Needless to say, Ralph doesn’t use codes and doesn’t “color inside the lines” — his words, figures and sums just go where they go.
Which brings us to that tortuously-titled REPAIR ORDER LABOR INSTRUCTION area, where labor gets its due. Ralph’s narrative looks a little lost floating inside this big box.
Finally the bottom line. Don’t get distracted by those INTERNAL SUMMARY columns to the left because, rest assured, Ralph isn’t. The only accounts that matter to Ralph are accounts receivable, as in Total Amount .
The shaded area neatly sums up how this form splits far too many hairs. There are no Special Repairs or Towing in Ralph’s world, just labor, parts and tax.
Ralph’s worldview is very anti-box and very American. He would hate filling out this form if he gave it much thought, so he doesn’t think about it much. My guess is, Ralph has got several boxes of these forms in the back to use up, so he will just ignore all the extraneous bullshit on them until they’re gone.
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