they're not fun to put a belt on. I've done a few of them when I did dealer work. Certainly not impossible, but I didn't like doing them.
Engineers don't care if people can fix them or not. Their job is to make it as inexpensive as possible, as durable as possible given the amount of money that they are going to sell them at, make them competitive, and still turn a profit on them. Nowhere in their description does it say "it needs to be easy to work on". Unfortunate and that's always a big argument between techs and engineers.
As far as "bad dealers", it happens in all brands of all equipment. I can speak for the dealer I was at, when I say that everyone has good days and bad days. The last couple years I was there were filled with more bad than good, and it was way too often that I found myself talking to customers in a manner which wasn't as professional as the conversation needed to be because of so many things, a boss who was overly controlling, customers who were mad already and passed on to us by salespeople because salespeople did their job (sales) and that's the end of it (as directed by the overly-controlling boss....) and by time they got to the store after trying to call the dealer 4 or 5 times (automated answering....) they're ticked, then sales ticks em off even more, by time they get to "me" the shop guy, they're about ready to ring someone's neck. That happens a few times and people start dreading going to work. For me it took about a year of that. The second year I was mostly a robot. Go to work, take whatever chewing that was coming my way (and it usually amounted to nothing), blow it off, finish my work and go home. Repeat 5x a week. The previous 26 years was better in that the boss was also a leader. If we had mad customers, he'd step in and diffuse the situation (most of the time). Sometimes he'd let me deal with them, as a way to teach us how. For that I'm grateful. VERY good boss, and I enjoyed working for him-and the work that I put out to help customers showed.
studies showed that 86% of customers said that the service experience was a determining factor in whether they chose to do business at the dealership. That's huge. So for 26 or so years I busted my tail end as a shop maggott to help people and meet/exceed their needs. When a dealer representative is proud to work for the company, it shows in how he or she treats the customers who choose to spend their hard-earned money. And on pay? Everyone thinks that the more you pay people the better the help is. Studies show that to be somewhat true, but I can also say that pay by itself does not necessarily do the work, it's often the difference in pay between employees at the same company and WHY those higher up get paid more. In the case of that dealer, the day the new company came in, they restructured the salary schedule such that shop guys didn't get a raise in the 2 years I was with em, but sales got a HUGE raise. I was making $48k through that 2 years. At beginning, the head sales guy was at $57k, when I left the head sales guy did over $240k, and had less responsibility, less work to do, and a nice cozy office to work in. Meanwhile the dealer was forced to start taking on construction & ag equipment so us techs were forced to train more, 3 to 4 times a year typically (no commission for training so that's a loss), Working in the cold, and worse yet the heat because there was no a/c. Working out in that stuff, under tractors that are filled with cow/horse/pig poo, RTV's that have needles laying everywhere (yes I've been stuck a couple times...through gloves once), construction equipment that will KILL you instantly (one of the dealers in that little chain had a skid steer bucket fall off mid air, fell and killed two techs), mowers covered in clippings that make you break out and/or get very sick at times (have had to spend a week in the hospital over a allergy that came from a mower, don't know what it was), for $48k salary. I proudly did my best and had a boss for the last 2 years that couldn't care less about how much effort the shop guys put in, but cared a lot about how much stuff the sales guys could sell. That's a toxic workplace and I got out when I had opportunity. And that's a major reason service guys don't get all that excited anymore. The pay generally sucks and the conditions are even worse. Sad part is, there aren't many people qualified to do it and when someone comes in who is, they want to pay 'em barely over minimum wage and treat them like dirt. All it takes is a heartfelt "thank you" once in a while.
in 2014 I think it was, the old (original) boss/owner handed out christmas bonuses. THey always come in a cheap little card but nobody ever opens the card, they get the money out and run to the beer store or whatever. I noticed mine had some writing in it and I read it. It was a heartfelt thank you, basically said "thanks for all you do for this business". The money was insignificant, it wasn't much, but what was written by the boss meant a whole lot more than $500. That's all it takes sometimes.
Customers never see that stuff, but they certainly see the effects of it. Kubota also shares some responsibility too and "our" (their) division service rep understood this but when a company gets "that" big (Kubota) the changes that need to be made take seemingly forever to accomplish-which is worse now than it was before I got out.
so yes, we are all different, and we don't always work for a great boss/company, and that ofen shows in how we deal with others. we ain't perfect. If we were, we'd probably choose a different way of life...
