New Beginnings

[Michael Sackstein]

Good afternoon, I guess I’ll start off this topic by saying that I’m a very similar predicament as EricTheCarGuy himself was 14 years ago when he first started his YouTube channel and that began what has now become one of the most popular automotive YouTube channels today, at least as far as I’m concerned. The other day, on November 8th, 2023, I was fired from my job at the Toyota dealership after having worked there for a year and a half. Before I get into the actual motive for why I was fired let me first start off by saying that basically everything that Eric has said about car dealerships in his discussion videos on his etcg1 channel is absolutely true and I’m sure he knows as well as I do that there are a lot of politics involved in the business that may or may not be everybody’s cup of tea for lack of a better description. So a little bit about me, I went to college and grad school as well, got my masters, tried some stuff in the corporate world and that didn’t really work out for me which is ultimately how I wound up working at the car dealership in the first place. I started off as a porter at the service station. A couple months into the job unfortunately I got a dui and they did still keep me on the job because they really valued me at the time and I wound up doing all sorts of odd jobs around the service station. Mostly cleaning and upkeep of the property and whatnot. The next year I got promoted to a business developer associate in which I would answer the phones and book appointments for customers to get their cars serviced. That started back in January of this year, after having worked there for a year. Fast-forward to November and I admittedly was getting tired of working there. There was a lot of drama going on there that I didn’t care for and I had my eye set on going somewhere else whenever the right opportunity presented itself. So now we get to the nitty gritty of my post and why I was ultimately terminated. So when we book appointments for service we use some software which perhaps some of you are familiar with called CDK and Dealer-FX, which are both horrible to use I do not recommend them at all, and the internet in the service center is complete garbage to boot. That being said, I have always had good experience with Mozilla Firefox and working with that web browser, and so I downloaded that onto my desktop there and suggested that my coworkers do the same, and management didn’t take too kindly to that idea at all, even though it did work out for us. That morning I was actually getting ready to resign from my position after having been berated by my boss for a bunch of stupid reasons, unrelated to my downloading of Firefox, then he called me back and told me to come down to the office in which point he wanted to discuss my motive for it and so I told him the truth and at that point I was terminated. So I walked out of there, not even upset but actually relieved that I didn’t have to ever deal with anymore drama from that place ever again. After this experience and just having dealt with other car dealerships from a customer stand point, I’m not sure that I’m all that enticed to go back and work for another one again. I know Eric has his fair share of stories both good and bad from his experiences there, and I’m sure you all do as well. But I would like to know what suggestions you all might have for me going forward as I am currently trying to figure out my next career move? I look forward to hearing insight from all of you very soon!

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