I recently had a customer come to my shop with an Ecoboost powered Expedition. His complaint was a lack of horsepower and a rough idle, along with a check engine light and a wrench light being illuminated on the dashboard. It had a little over 90,000 miles on it.

I take it for a short test drive to verify his complaint. Hooked up the scanner and found a misfire code for cylinder 2 and a pair of throttle body codes. Experience has taught me that when I have two conflicting throttle body codes (throttle stuck open and throttle stuck closed) that the throttle body has failed. and that can cause a misfire. Based on it's mileage I recommend replacing the spark plugs and the ignition coil for the number 2 cylinder, then I head off to the parts department to get some part numbers so I can check extended warranty coverage.

Turns out the throttle body and ignition coil are covered, the spark plugs are not, neither are the other maintenance items I recommended. The customer doesn't want to spend any money so I'm told to just replace the throttle body and the 1 ignition coil. So I do. After every job we have to write a report in the tracking software that says what we did, and in the case of warranty work, why we did what we did. At the end of the report I noted that the customer declined recommended maintenance work and that the truck may still have drivability problems.

I clear the codes, park the truck and give the keys and paperwork to the service adviser. By this time my shift is over so I head home. When I get to work the next day, I get handed the repair order from the day before about the poorly running Expedition. He brought it back complaining that we didn't fix it right, and that everyone working there was incompetent, and how we inconvenienced him by making him bring his truck back and all sorts of other imagined slights that we committed against his person.

I do my due diligence and verify that nothing I touched was installed incorrectly or otherwise having an issue (new parts doesn't necessarily mean good parts), and finding nothing wrong with the work I did, I used a highlighter to highlight the note about remaining drivability problems on the receipt (the reports print out on the receipts), and on the back of the Post-It note that was attached to the work order I wrote "If you treat your AR-15 like a Mosin-Nagant you don't get to complain when the gun jams."

In the estimation software I once again recommended the deferred maintenance from the day before, and then re-parked the truck. The customer hasn't been back but I like to think that he accepted he can either live with the poor running, or pay me to fix it, or fix it himself.