I'm no longer a GM technician.

[TheRobSJ]

Well, that didn't last long. At 1pm today, my service manager was fired. An hour later and not 10 seconds after I shook his hand goodbye does the general manager round two other techs and myself in his office where we are uncerimoniously laid off.

Claims of slow business are a bit hard to swallow seeing as how the service lot is totally full of cars. They say the store is losing $100k a month. I can see that when the sales department hemorrages away selling only a handful of cars a month. But I don't see why my position had to go away. Even harder to swallow is getting laid off because the store is losing money by a man who makes at least $150k a year and is only there half the time and sees no problem slapping a dealer plate on a new $70k Escalade or $80k STS-V every few months depreciating them to death commuting back and forth to work(when he does show up) and to top it off expensing the gas to the company.

There have been some other GM dealers that just flat out closed here in the Bay Area in the past month. So there's going to be no shortage of more experienced GM techs to compete with for jobs now.

Fortunately I have a couple offers to either go back to Acura or go to an independant shop which could potentially pay very well. Either way, I don't think I'll be on the front lines for GM service anymore for awhile. And that is the part the really sucks. I was really looking foward to checking out the new CTS-V and ZR-1.

Well folks. There's still the fact that I am a master certified technician, and I love Corvettes. So I'm not going anywhere from this board.

Rob

[c4c5specialist]

You know it when I tell you.
Its their loss.
Fact is, quality technicians with a conscience are VERY VERY hard to come by.
The CSI will drop, and they will realize what they had.
But I personally will tell you, between us here, you always are welcome and will have any resource you need.
Keep the faith, c4c5

[TheRobSJ]

You're right. It's their loss. Now, in addition to the CSI, their training percentages will drop below 100% in several catagories which will make it hard to claim OLH on warranty tickets and have the regional manager breathing down their neck doing audits with a fine tooth comb now.

There were only a handful of techs there that actually cared about any of the training. The rest are either just kids who don't care and just do maintainence services or old guys who are close to retirement (just milking their union senority) and don't want to keep up with this fancy new stuff like MDIs, direct injection, and well...even the Tech2. In just 11 months I managed to get a lot of courses completed. I had finished everything and was waitlisted for assesments in 3 catagories as of my last day plus I had almost all the WBT classes done in the other catagories. I was thinking I would have made World Class in three years or less and I was certainly on track to do it. Oh well. At least I got quite a bit of training out of them that i'll have no problem using for my next employer. But why they spent all the money to send me to Los Angeles for the hybrid class only to lay me off a week later is just mind boggling.

[JBsZ06]

Just reading this thread and wondering how your doing in life? Where did you end up working?

which dealership did you go with?

[TheRobSJ]

I didn't. My old service manager tried to get to to got where he wound up, but the dealership is just too far of a commute for me. And for less money.

So I'm back working on any ol' make&model that comes in the door at an independant shop. The money is good (indie shop owners know they have to pony up the big bucks to get techs who have made it to dealership master tech level to turn mercenary and go work for them), but I do miss being on the forefront. I did all that GM hybrid training for nothing. I won't see technology like that in my shop till they are waaay out of their warranties.