2020-06-03 — Sideways of Sideways.

Hiya, folks. 😊

It’s 1:25 a.m., and it’s been a loooooong day. My goodness. I spent probably 5+ hours yesterday just getting prepared for today, not getting to bed until about 1:30, up early…, and it… well… today was a bit of a nightmare.

I feel a little ridiculous complaining about a day that, honestly, was a fabulous money day. It just… hammered me. I had so much on my plate, and there was so much potential that fell by the wayside because of a poor decision on my part that ended up sending things sideways of sideways.

I was thinking I was going to be good today. I knew it was going to be crazy busy. Both David and I were scheduled to the hilt, already totally full days before the day even started with no room for the bazillion calls that were likely going to come in. 🤪

Like yesterday, both David and I got going early, which added to my hopefulness of how it might turn out, but right off the bad, I made some poor choices. I had a returning customer run into issues with his radiator and wanted to get it replaced.

I already had a pretty full day lined up, but I had what could have been an opening for the morning if I wanted to push it, so I decided to. So I went out and got that job started, and it seemed like it was going to go fine, but it threw some pretty good wrenches and sent me sideways a bit. It took probably an hour or two longer than it should have.

After that, I was supposed to go to a customer who got bumped from yesterday to today, but I had the peeps at AutoZone have a lady call me who was broken down in their parking lot, and it seemed like a starter issue, but it turned out to be a 6-hour saga that in the end turned out to be a battery!

Ugh (insert embarrassed/dumbfounded face here).

I thought I could squeeze it in because it was basically on the way to the next job, and it didn’t seem like that big of a deal (Stranded lady needs a starter. Ok).

I got there and tested it. They (AutoZone) had tested the battery with their super-expensive battery tester, and the battery was testing good, but the starter was testing like it was either bad or didn’t have enough voltage. I checked the main hot wire, and it had voltage. I checked the pulleys to make sure nothing was frozen. I couldn’t test the ignition wire because it was tucked in there so far, I couldn’t reach it without taking the starter off, but by that point I was 95% sure it was the starter anyway, so I chose to just pull the starter

I was proud of myself because the service instructions tell you to remove the three-way exhaust manifold in order to get the starter out, and I found a way to do it without that. So I was feeling good about my decision to take the job at that moment.

But then the starter tested good off the car.☹️

It didn’t sound the greatest–both the commercial managers at AutoZone agreed it didn’t sound so great. I thought it was fine, but they deal with a lot more starters than I do, so I deferred to them.

I finally was able to check the voltage at the ignition wire, and it was super low. (9.95 volts) So I was left again thinking, probably not the starter, but the car does have 250k miles, and the other peeps did say it didn’t sound right. I cleaned off the battery cable a bit, thinking it might be a ground issue of some kind, and that raised the voltage from just under 10 volts at the ignition wire, to right about 11.5, which was big improvement and had me thinking ground issues.

I still wasn’t sure, though, so I left the choice up to the lady, telling her I wasn’t confident it was the starter, that it could be a ground, but it’s got 250k miles on it, and the commercial peeps say it doesn’t sound good.

Anyway, she chose to go ahead and replace it, and my heart sank when she went to crank it up, and it did nothing. I had deja vu of a cadillac with security issues that I never could get past.

Anyway, long story short. I was able to get it to crank a little bit with my jump box, and when I saw the battery voltage drop significantly after jumping the starter with the battery that was in the car, I decided to take the battery out and test it in the store instead of relying on the two testers we’d used so far that said the battery was good.

It tested bad.

Autuzone’s expensive portable tester and my less expensive portable tester both said it was a good battery, but when I took it out, I noticed it was swollen, and after charging, the main charger inside the store said it was bad. So we replaced the engine battery with a new one. We also replaced the battery in the fob with a new one, and guess what?

It started.

Wow. After 6 hours, all it was was a battery. I’ll have to have a redundant check of the battery so I don’t get torched by something like this again when the battery tester lies.

So in the end, she bought a starter she likely didn’t need but with 250k miles on it, it could have on its last legs anyway. Regardless. I didn’t bill her for replacing the starter, or any of the other 40 things i tried to do: I just billed her for parts and the normal one-hour service call for six hours of work.

Yikes.

After that, there was a quick battery job in Fayetteville, which netted me almost as much labor dollars in 15 minutes as the Cadillac did in 6 hours.

I lost a couple jobs, not getting to them in time (new customers from that day who figured things out before I could get to them).

Then it was down to one of the ones that got bumped from yesterday to today. I did a free diagnosis for him, since he’d been waiting for nearly two days. Nice guy.

After that, the last job postponed until tomorrow because I was so late, and… I went home.

When I got home, I had a good conversation with someone who was feeling pretty down about life and whatnot, and that was important. Now here I am. It’s 2:10 a.m. I’m super tired. It’s time for bed. Super long day tomorrow and starting early. 🤪

1. Grateful for the piece of broken plastic I got out of my eye 10 hours later. It was huge, and it’s amazing it didn’t really scary bother me.
2. I’m grateful that it was a really good money day despite all the sideways travel.
3. I’m grateful to have been able to have that talk with the person who wasn’t having such a great day.
4. I’m grateful for the progress that we (I and some of you readers) are making in goals an whatnot. Forward together. 😊
5. I’m grateful that I can now sleep. I’m sooooooo tired.😴

Good night, you wonderful people you.

Lift the World.

~ stephen