BRAKE SPECIALIST PLUS - SCAM ALERT

I took my vehicle to Brake Specialist Plus in Buda two months ago to have my brakes serviced as they were starting to make noises and not stopping in a safe distance. This is my handicapped wife's car and, as I am on the road a lot, I make sure to keep up on the maintenance as I do not need to worry about her having an issue when I'm not in town. When I brought it in the manager told me that I got it in in time and it was not going to need any major repairs. They cleaned and adjusted and treated the front brakes and told me that I was good to go.


Obviously this is not the first time that I have had brake work done on one of my cars so I understand that there may be a little noise at first. When I got home I noticed that it was making as much if not more noise than it was initially. I called back to the shop and was told that it would smooth out over the next couple of days. It never did.


I brought it back in a few weeks later and was told this time that they had to clean and adjust the rear brakes (somehow this was missed on the initial inspection I guess). After a couple of hours they had the rear brakes cleaned and adjusted and said that this would solve the problem. Apparently, no one drove the car after this adjustment because it did not make any difference at all. Again I called back and was told the same thing, it will smooth out over a few days.


Once again, it never did smooth out. I brought the car back this last week to have it fixed once and for all. I explained to the manager about the issues and he said that he would get it fixed. He came back and said that it was going to need a new rotor now because of uneven ware and that the rotor that was on there was too thin to machine down.. Obviously because the brakes weren't properly maintained this caused the ultimate decay of the rotor. If the rotor was in that bad of disrepair I would think that it would have been noted and addressed the first time that I went into have the brake system repaired.


I finally sent an email to the corporate offices of Brake Specialist and received an email back from Executive Vice President Jamey Whitlock. He assured me that he would have the issue addressed and that he would call me on Saturday. Well I did receive a phone call on Saturday but it was not Mr. Whitlock, it was the store manager from the Buda store. He told me to bring the car back in and they would get it fixed. I brought the car in to the shop at about 6:30 Monday morning and dropped the keys in the overnight drop. The store manager said that he would look at it as soon as he came in and would get the guys working on it.


I called to the store at about noon to find out how it was coming and what they found. They said that they needed to machine down both of the front rotors (the ones I was talking about earlier that they said were too thin to machine down) and that it would be good to go. First of all, 6 hours to machine down two rotors? Are you kidding me. I dropped my wife off to pick up the car as I had an appointment back in Austin in the early afternoon.


She called me a short time later telling me that the brakes were still not right and that the manager was rude to her when she picked up the car. He was telling her that he did this for her as a favor and that he did not have to do anything for us. How about the fact that I brought you a car with brake problems and told you to fix it. I was not asking for anything for free, just to have my vehicle fixed properly. I already learned years ago that this location was not capable of performing a simple oil change (but, then again, the name of the company is not Oil Check) when they screwed up an oil change on my sons car. I do expect you to have basic knowledge and customer service skills about the thing that you advertise that you are good at.


I have tried to contact Mr. Whitlock twice this morning to no avail. This has to be one of the most poorly run operations that I have ever done business with. Save your self a whole lot of time and aggravation and go somewhere else. The old manager of this location is now over at Christian Brothers Automotive in Buda as I learned this morning while looking for someone to fix the brakes on this car. He always provided outstanding customer service so maybe that is an option.

Straighttalk Wireless Bad Phones Horrible Customer Service

For months now I have been having issues with my Huawei M865C phone purchased for use on Straighttalks network. It started off slowly where I would get this green circle thing every once in a while and it would eventually go away. It got to the point that the only way to clear off this screen was to do a hard reset of the phone; essentially wiping away all of the data that was not stored on your memory card.

The customer service people at Straighttalk seem to think that this is normal, not just normal, acceptable. Over the course of the last month I have spent more than 20 hours on hold with their "customer service" team and have been given no solution to the issue. Even though one of their agents told me that this is a common problem with this phone, I have been assured that it is not. One of the agents at the executive resolutions department tried to resolve the issue by sending me a new phone with an airbill so that I could send back the defective one. Three days later, same problem. Now I am forced to, once again, do a hard reset of the phone losing more data.

Now that this is the third phone of this type with this issue I was told that they would send me a different phone with the airbill to send back the defective one, as they did with the other. I waited four days and called to find out where the new phone was. I was then informed that I would have to send back the broken phone before they would send me the replacement as per company policy. I have spent four hours on the phone today with customer service trying to get through to their executive resolutions department,since their is never a manager available, and have been told that their is no such department, they don't have the number, etc., etc.

I have had some bad experiences with customer service from other cellular providers but these guys take the cake. They may be a couple of dollars cheaper than their competitor but there is a good reason for that. While I was on the phone with their God forbid that any of you should ever find yourselves dealing with Straighttalk Wireless, but if you do, the number to their executive offices is (305)715-6500.