I've been in sales and service management positions in the material handling and construction equipment business for more than 30 years with a dozen of those years as a field service manager. If you worked for me, I would have been very disappointed if you had not sourced help from others. Forums were designed for people to interact and seek opinions and help from others in an anonymous format.

If your management can't identify that, they need to take the "Using the internet 101" course all over again. And to sit there and believe that asking a technical question even remotely exposes incompetence - then they may want to retake "Business 101" as well.

A company is only as good as its employees and the key to "repeat" business is treating and charging your customer fairly. Customers hire a dealership service department because they're looking for an answer to their problem. If your dealership can't give them the answer they're looking for, they'll find another source faster than you can say "Cat-in-the-hat". Taking the initiative to find an answer to a problem to get your company's customer up and running again should have garnered an "Employee of the month" citation. I think that your judgment was prudent and probably contributed to making a happy customer.

It's no secret that good technicians that are knowledgeable, have a good work ethic and possess initiative are worth their weight in gold. If I were you, I would not let this incident erode my work ethic. If your dealership can't identify the value in your actions, others will. Good luck to you!