This is a term used by the author Gretchen Rubin in her book The Happiness Project. It’s a task you can’t seem to cross off your list of to-dos because it leads into other tasks in order to solve the overall task at hand. I’ve been dealing with one of those for almost a month now — routine car maintenance.
Roughly three weeks ago, I took my car to the dealership to have the 60,000 mile service done. While there, per the usual it seems, they informed me of an additional $600 worth of service items my car “needed”. Mind you, I’d already spent $600 on the routine maintenance. One of the additional items was to get my rear brakes done. I knew I was getting close to due for them to be replaced but opted to have them done another time.
Then two weeks later my brakes started to make some noise. I took the car to another repair shop to have the brakes done because it was cheaper. They informed me that the squeaking I was hearing was not from my rear brakes but from my front ones and that total (front and rear) it would cost about $1200. They said that whoever did the front brakes put the wrong type of pads on the car and most likely the pads and the rotors would need replacing. Ugh.
DH and I discussed it and he remembered where we had the front brakes done which was only in January of this year. He called the shop and found out the brake job was still under warranty. Therefore, I had the rear ones done (they were at 3/32 and still needed replacing) at the one shop and today, took the car back to the shop which did the front brakes originally.
It was a stressful day dealing with this last repair shop. Of course, they didn’t want to admit any wrongdoing and thus repair the car for free. After several calls back and forth between their mechanic, my husband and their manager, they finally agreed they would at the very least replace the pads to see if that fixed the noise. They said if it started squeaking again, they would then take care of the rotors.
So far the brakes are not making any noise. And I’m just hoping they stay that way for another 40,000 miles thus ending this boomerang task.
Gah! Sorry you had to deal with that boomerang task.
Don’t get me started on car service shops! I’m so mad about the last incident with mine, that I’ll now be going elsewhere! In fact, I’m making hubby deal with the car stuff from now on! I’ve got enough boomerang tasks to deal with.