I felt the grille on my dash was hurting my Blower motor performance, so I removed it!
On a more serious note, I want to get some opinions on how I should handle this situation.
Here is what happened. I took my car to Ziebart for an interior detailing. My appointment was at 9am, and they said they needed 4 hours to complete the car. I didn't get a call until 4:30 when I called them and they said they were about to call me and say it was done. I got there, picked up the keys from the Manager, then proceeded to leave. Once I got in the car, I immediately noticed the grille from the windshield defroster was COMPLETELY detached and just laying on the duct below it. I am very aware that the grille on the dash gets VERY brittle over time and will break very easily. What really bothers me about this situation is that the owner did not call me, or even tell me about this issue before I got in my car to find that it had happened. I took the grille that was completely detached inside, showed it to the manager and said "this was attached when I brought the car here". He came out, took a look, and said that he'd see what he needed to do to make it right.
At this point I knew what he was going to say when he called me. His tech would tell him that the part was very brittle and broke just by being touched, blah blah. Sure enough that's what I got. He is offering to let me bring it back and have the tech try to reattach it, but I think we can all agree that it will either not work or look like shit.
Am I being irrational for being pissed about this? The way I see it, I brought the car to them in a certain condition, and I got it back with a part broken that wasn't broken when they received it. Replacing the part will cost me $205. I realize this is much more than the value of the service I paid for, but I've managed not to break that grille every time I've wiped my dash down.
On another note, the tech that wiped down my dash with one of the greasiest protectants ever also felt that the clear plastic on my cluster needed it as well. wiping it off proved ineffective, then using windex to get it off created that horrible white milky film over the plastic that I ended up taking the cluster out of the car to fix. (a little polishing compound did the trick). That's just a useless sidenote.
