NEVER bring a car to Jiffy Lube for oil changes.

Yeah, I've heard the horror stories. Everyone has issues once in a while, but I've had them lube my '65 Mercedes, a '66 Thunderbird, my later model Pickup and my wife's Mazda-- all many times, without problems. Just depends on the help that's working that day I suppose, like anywhere else. You need to know how many zirks you have under there, so you can compare notes with them. Stuff like that. I had a horror story myself, but it was with a sole proproetor shop-- they'd replaced the gear oil in my '66 Chrysler using the standard stuff, failing to notice it had a limited slip diff., which takes a special lube additive. Caused me a lot of trouble on a long trip with my wife one week.

That was NOT an oil change I could believe in.

Another small shop here in town; my brother drove his car in for a routine tune-up, and we had to tow it out. After that we nicknamed that place, "(So & So's) Drive-in, Tow-out Auto Service".

Oh, the stories I could tell would exceed the capacity of Joe's web server. But; one time after I had gotten some tires changed at another small shop, I was driving in traffic and had to hit the brakes-- Wooops! The steering wheel was nearly ripped out of my hands as the car lurched to the left, toward on-coming traffic (no collision, luckily). Turns out they had done a "free safety inspection" on the car without my knowing it. The old brake drums on that '63 Dodge had enough wear that there was a little lip on the edge, outside of the shoes. You had to loosten the brake adjusters considerably to get the drums off. Upon reinstalling the drums, they had only readjusted one side. That "safety inspection" almost caused a head-on. The poor old man who happened to be there when I returned no doubt remembered the little chat I had with him for the rest of his life.

I never trust auto machanics. They have too much to do in too little time, for too little money, to do a really top notch job at anything, until you get into the uber high-end, custom shops. Even then they are human. A good machanic often spends as much time observing as doing anything else.

I think that about all one can Hope for is chump Change.

While every town in my state is cutting spending -- along with modest cuts at the state level -- the federal government is constructing gigantic mall/offices and hiring new workers in numbers that would eclipse the total number of government employees in some states. Apparently the 2.4 million man workforce isn't enough to do the small amount of powers listed in the Constitution.