Shaq Auto Body & Fender. Simply hearing the name of this "business" brings back an immense amount…read moreof horrible memories. My boyfriend brought his car into this shop in February of 2013 after he had been in a car accident that left the entire front passenger side of the car in a mess of a state. But what we were going to unfortunately find out some 6 months later, is that he was better off with a wrecked car, and with $1,800 in his pocket.
Let me just start off with this: Procrastination is an evil thing. If your mechanic/body guy displays ANY signs of it, please, do yourself a favor and walk away when you still can. Shaq is the epitome of procrastination. He is extremely laid back with his work, promising you the world, but having very little to offer. Basically, he's all talk. Projects that were to be done on this car would keep being delayed by him for absolutely no reason at all. At first we realized the reason as to why he wouldn't touch the car at all was because he wanted full payment before he started anything. Okay, that's completely understandable, and there was no communication from him regarding this, but regardless, it was something we let slide. Once the car was fully paid off, we figured it would only be a matter of time before the car would be back on the road and performing, if not the way it was before, at least close to what it used to be. Instead, we were met with 5 months of sheer excuses and a lemon.
Shaq would receive new cars into his shop on an almost daily basis. His lot was almost always full during this time with cars that needed their own servicing. This is normal in any shop, but the difference with Shaq's shop was that, instead of "first come first serve", it was more of a "first come first - oh wait, let me just do this - oops, got a new customer let me.. - oh my son's car is priority hold up - wait, gotta take this other car.. - oh will you look at that, time for my daily afternoon mini-bar.." And here he proceeds on plopping on a chair with a couple of his buddies, sipping on beers as if there were no worries in the world. So in one day, he had accomplished about 5% progress in each of his cars. And yet, the car that had been sitting, and sitting, and sitting, and racking up layers upon layers of paint from other cars and dust, already paid off, has seen nothing done to it. Ordering parts for the car was another story in itself. It's as if someone would threaten to kill Shaq and his whole family if he even attempted to order parts ahead of time to have them ready for whenever the hell he'd feel like working on the car. Everything was ordered at the very last minute (Mind you, it's not like these parts were shipped overnight. We're talking 2+ weeks of wait time.), every single time we were promised the car one week, we were met with "Oh, come back next week. I'll be done next week."
"Come back next week" had to have been his excuse at least 7 times. And even yet, the progress of the work being done on the car was a dreadful, hell-like wait. Everything was inching along so, so painfully slow. Shaq never dedicated a full day to just knocking out the stuff that needed to get done on this car like he should have. His attention was being split into a million pieces, guaranteeing that my boyfriend's car would receive very little attention. By the time we had to forcefully take the car back in August, with it not even being halfway completed, let me just say that the condition of the car's exterior and interior were cosmetically disgusting. When the car came into the shop in February, it had only one big blunder, and that was the site where the accident took its toll on the car. When we took the car back, yes, we did have the fender and hood replaced (unprofessionally as it came to be discovered by another mechanic later on that actually knows what he's doing), but the paint of the car was matted down with speckles of other car's paints, and months' worth of seriously caked on dirt that a car wash would most definitely not get rid of. But it did not stop there. The same way the exterior had been forgotten and left to withstand everything it did, the interior did as well. The seats and carpet, dashboard, steering wheel, EVERYTHING, was so incredibly dusty, it would give any abandoned building a run for its money. This car was inundated in dust. There were dirty paper plates and napkins on the ground of the car from the times Shaq or any of his buddies decided to have lunch either in or around the car and just leave their garbage inside. The plastic strip under the gear stick (it's an automatic) that moves with the stick as you switch gears was somehow torn apart and pulled upwards, exposing the internal of that part of the car. Shaq of course promised to have all of these issues fixed, but never even fathomed to fix any of it within the 5 months he had it.
This has been such a distasteful experience. This makeshift mechanic wasted so much of our time and money.