The charmed life of Benna Kisin

Benna Kisin drove her new Lincoln Town Car off an Ann Arbor dealership lot two months ago, and she began to fall in love. The ride was smooth and solid. The instrument panel was impressive, right down to the indicator that tells how many miles are left on a tank of gas.

But trouble lurked. She was driving to Toronto a few days later and the seat began to feel hard. Her lower back started aching.

She pulled off the road to adjust the seat. That didn't help. She tried sitting differently. But it just got worse.

Had she made the wrong decision? With lease payments of more than $500 a month, this was an expensive car to have such an uncomfortable seat. And she had leased it for two years.

Three weekends ago, she met a man having his old station wagon washed at Foster's Hand Car Wash in northwest Detroit.

"How do you like your car?" he asked.

"I'm very happy with it," she said, "but the seat's kind of hard."

Well, if this wasn't a coincidence. The man explained that he worked for the Ford plant that makes Town Car seats. He asked for her phone number and gave her his name, Alvin Charles.

She'd forgotten all about it by this past Monday, when a colleague of Alvin's named Bob Morrison phoned from Ford's Chesterfield Trim Plant, on 23 Mile west of Gratiot. He asked her a slew of questions about her seat problem.

After she detailed it as best she could, he invited her to the plant for a cup of coffee and told her to bring the car; they'd have a look at it. When she picked her jaw up off the floor, she said OK.

Wednesday morning she found herself sitting on her extracted car seat on the plant floor, surrounded by Ford workers who listened to every little thing she said. She was thoroughly embarrassed.

But they were deadly earnest, and they replaced the pad in her Town Car seat as they gave her a tour of the plant. Afterward, when she sat on the seat and said, "This is absolutely perfect," everybody smiled real big.

They bid her good-bye, told her to let them know if there were any more problems, and the Southfield woman, 47, drove her perfect Lincoln Town Car back out into the real world.

Ford asks its customers not to try the factory-direct approach themselves. The company's toll-free assistance number is 1-800-392-FORD.

This story originally appeared in The Detroit Free Press and has been published here for portfolio purposes only. The photo is not the original photo.