Oil grossly overfilled but was that the root cause of the destroyed engine???

 

Many moons ago, at the tail-end of the previous century, my father and I bought an Alfa 156 2.0 as a 'client visit' car. After one of the services at a local independent, my mother was told "keep an eye on the oil level as it was a bit low when it came in, so it will need a top-up during the year. If it looks a bit low, pop half a litre of oil in and it should be OK"

At the next service they drained over 9 litres of oil out!

What had happened was quite simple. My mother was not a car person so, every month she'd take the engine oil filler cap off, notice the engine wasn't full of oil, and would duly put in half a litre as instructed. This of course only came to light as a result of the next service and the somewhat confused dealer calling my father up at the office and asking if he knew why there was so much oil in there. It was a lesson for both my mother - in how to use the dipstick, rather than the oil filler hole - and for the dealer to never take customer's car knowledge for granted. I suspect that if he knew that my mother had taken 5 years to discover the headlight flasher on her Fiat 127 then they might have taken a bit more time to explain things. As much as I can laugh about it, my mother wasn't a 'car person', for her a car was a tool purely to get her around, though she always lusted after a "little shopping Mercedes" (an SLK, to you and me!) and she was always eager to tell my brother and myself about a lovely sports car she'd seen that day "It was blue, does that help you boys identify it?". Bless.

EDIT: For what it's worth, my mother was very well educated and a highly respected secondary-school maths teacher of 30 years, mostly specialising in 'mechanics maths' (she always joked that, as a maths teacher, she often struggle with basic addition, but could tell you the distance a bullet would travel). She wasn't stupid by any stretch of the imagination, but she had her field of knowledge and cars were very VERY far away from that field.

 

I hear you!
My mother was also a secondary school maths teacher, plus general science and biology, for some 35 years, very sharp, but she had absolutely no idea about cars.
One thing I still remember vividly was how she drove the family car, a 1970 HT Holden wagon 253 V8 with a "three on the tree" manual trans. She would take off from the traffic lights and by the time she got to the other side of the intersection she was already in third gear, the poor engine never got over about 1200 rpm. She thought that was a good thing despite my father attempting to explain in vain that it was not good for the engine.
That engine was completely stuffed at around two years old and had to be replaced at considerable expense.