Lest you all should panic

There are people I email everyday and there are people that check my blog everyday and apparently if I don't keep up my normal activities of emailing and blogging, people tend to panic and think I am in labor. I am not.

Here's my question for the day - how much do you think car repair shops attempt to rip off those of us who fall into the car-stupid category?

See, we have this 5 year old car. We take ridiculously good care of this vehicle. It is washed at least once a week. It is taken both on short and long trips - though it is mostly used in town. We drive carefully and are not "hard" on it. We keep up with regularly scheduled maintenance. It is on these regularly scheduled maintenance events that we have begun to doubt the entire car service industry.

I am not exaggerating when I say that everytime we bring our car in for an oil change, the car dude calls us and explains that our vehicle needs $500 (at least) worth of repairs. We have replaced fuel pumps, brakes, ball joints, fluids of all kinds. The list goes on and on. And it really truly makes us wonder if we are being taken for a ride...on a very expensive roller coaster.

So what do you think? Its hard not to go down the slippery slope of "everyone is out to get me" hill. If the car service industry does it, then so must the appliance repair industry. If the appliance repair industry, so must the computer repair industry. If the computer repair industry, so must the ... I'm too tired to go on.

How do you know when someone is pulling the proverbial wool over your eyes? How do you know when someone is taking your lack of knowledge and using it against you? I would never dream of doing this to someone so I am flabbergasted to think that it happens as often as it feels.