Air Care don't care

I had to take my car for emissions testing again. I visited Air Care Colorado Fort Collins this time. It was mildly better than the Greeley location.

Smog checks have made a difference in air pollution along the front range, there’s no doubt, but the general appearance of Air Care locations belies that. The Fort Collins location has more of a “bus station waiting room” ambiance than the homeless squat vibe of the Greeley location, but it was full of reminders that Air Care doesn’t care.

The entrance includes discolored and peeling signs, another trashbag-wrapped ticket machine, and an enormous weed.

The Fort Collins ticket machine has been wrapped in trash bags with more pride, using straps or tie-downs instead of tape.

The instructions on the Fort Collins gatekeeping machine are odd.

It looks like the original instructions read something like

PUSH BUTTON
TAKE TICKET

Apparently those instructions weren’t fit for purpose, because they got partially covered with new instructions. Notice the fuzzy arrows pointing to the slot that emits tickets. This means the physical layout of the front of the machine is misleading. The button is to the right and a little down from the ticket slot, I can see how someone could get confused by that. Almost everything goes left-to-right, or top-to-bottom. Push button or buttons on top, take ticket or receipt at the bottom. In addition to dents and rust, I believe there’s peeling paint from what looks like tape adhesive. Perhaps this is evidence that the Fort Collins location had a Greeley-style trashbag taped on it for a while.

The waiting area was somewhat cleaner in Fort Collins. Same industrial chairs as the Greeley location, but the brown pleather coverings were intact. The mysterious blue-gray cabinets with gauges and pipes sticking out were closed and locked. There was a big poster detailing exactly how checks should be made out, and another poster with a QR code to let you “share your thoughts”.

Sorry for the image proportions. I wanted to include the random pock marks and holes in the waiting room drywall.

The QR code and the printed URL lead your browser to a non-existent survey. Maybe a survey existed at some point in the past but Air Care decided they no longer needed more thoughts about bad experiences and unclean waiting rooms. Maybe they never had a survey in the first place. Either way, it’s more evidence They Just Don’t Care.

Overall grade: C-, slightly better than Air Care Greeley.