The Cost of Truth $1500.00

Over the weekend, I finally got my van back. And thank goodness too! Thankfully I have wonderful people in my life who were very gracious in lending me their cars, which I appreciate greatly. :-) But my husband and I were also faced with a decision in regards to the vehicles, and it has cost us for telling the truth...

My van, though it broke down, wasn't what cost so much. That was my husband's car. Unfortunately, it came to just over $1500. So here's what happened...

After my van began acting up, my husband took his car in to have his brakes tightened. He had gotten new ones a few weeks earlier, and they were not working properly. But when he took the car in, he found out the problem was not the new brakes, but the fact that there was a contaminant in the brake fluid. They quoted us $3000 roughly to fix it. We, of course, were shocked. The last ones to touch the brakes were the guys who put the new brakes on, so we figured they were the culprits...

That night however, we found out that it wasn't the company at all, it was, in fact, our neighbor. Granted, he didn't know that would cause the problem, he said he had done it all the time in his old vehicle. But it did cause a problem, and we were stuck with what to do.

We knew our neighbor had done it without realizing that would happen, and also that he didn't have the money to fix it (though he did not offer to help financially in any way), but we also knew the mechanic didn't do it. They should have caught the problem, and warned us before releasing the car, but they had missed it too.

The problem was power steering fluid, which is petroleum based, had been put in the brake lines and damaged anything rubber. All of which needed to be replaced. So what should we have done?

One family member felt we should just blame the mechanic and demand they pay for it for not catching it, another felt that we should say the mechanic did it themselves, but here was the problem, we KNEW who had done it. Yes, maybe telling a fib would have saved us a lot of money, but it would have been a lie. So we chose to tell the truth.

Amazingly, the mechanic offered to cover half the labor and a third of the parts, while also salvaging some others. Which pretty much cut our cost in half. He said, "I should have caught this, and I'm sorry... But I did not put the wrong fluids in." We told him we knew, and to start the work. He honored his word, and only charged half, and we had our car back in a week.

Looking back, yes, that money had been meant for something else... I am upset at what happened, and that we had to spend so much to fix something that should not have happened in the first place. However, I do not regret telling the truth...

This lesson has been an expensive one, we will not allow any neighbors to work on vehicles for us anymore! LOL :-) But is has also been a good lesson. So often people want to save a buck by being deceitful, in the end though, honesty is so much more important. We may have paid out the money, and I know some of you who feel that was foolish, but I know many more people who feel we made the right choice. Because selling your integrity, at any price, is just not worth it. :-)

So, our cost for telling the truth... $1500.00  A price far worth knowing we did not lie.