2021-02-06 — Another Week Gone

(sigh)

Was bound to have a rough one again. Was a double whammy today–work and personal life. The first car was (and still is) a disaster. It could have gone so quickly and so smoothly, but… I tried to avoid an issue I normally run into. Funny thing is the step I took is the normal way of doing it, a step I usually bypass. But today, I was like, no, I’m gonna do it that way. I don’t like to, but I’m going to.

So I went to remove the lower radiator hose to drain the coolant before pulling off the water pump (I usually just pull it off and let the coolant gush out there. But then I have to take the extra step of drying out the water pump bolt holes, which is annoying and time consuming, so I just was gonna drain the whole system first.)

The lower radiator hose in that GMC Acadia is in a really crappy place. I didn’t think I had my clamp pliers with me, so I was using regular pliers, and the cheap clamp actually broke.

😶

What made that such a nightmare is that it was a spring clamp. You can’t just pull it off. If it breaks, it breaks stuck on, and there’s nothing to grip, to squeeze the spring to get it off. You have to cut it off.

Yeah.

So… add to that headache the fact that the lower radiator hose on that car is buried in an awful place, which took 1 1/2 hours or so just to get to after taking off lots of things, including the air intake housing (nightmare on this car), main computer, etc. etc. and then another 1 1/2 hours to get a took in there and work back and forth to cut off the clamp. And then another 30 minutes or so because one side of the spring clamp was larger than the other where I cut it, so, it stayed on even after being cut, so I ended up damaging the lower radiator hose as ell, rendering it unsafe to use again.

So… 3 1/2 hours on something I didn’t need to do, was just trying to avoid coolant gushing into water pump bolt holes, but you know what happened anyway? After all that, three and a half hours or so of wasted time and wasted money, I pulled off the water pump, and coolant still gushed out, even after I’d drained the system.

Yeah.

So it was an absolute, utter, complete, waste of time and money, and I was tired, and it was super super super discouraging, and I melted down, and I was having a really challenging, painful conversation with a friend at the same time, and it was just… it kicked my trash up one side of the street and down the other.

Completely. I didn’t leave that car until after 4 p.m. (it was my first car), and I’m still not even halfway through with it.

Ugh.

After that car, I just sort of sat in a parking lot with the heat on, completely discouraged, worn out, and trying to find a way to cancel all the rest of my jobs without having angry customers.

I finally sucked it up, and got myself to go do two more jobs before calling it a night about 8:30 or so.

Tough day. Tough car day. The second car was a nightmare as well. The third… that one went smoothly, thankfully.

Tough personal day.

But I’m home. I’m gonna take a shower and go to bed. It’s 11 ish.

#1. I’m grateful I had the strength to suck it up when I was just… done. 5 ish hours of sleep. Long long days. I was just done, but I sucked it up and kept going when I just wanted to quit. That’s… something today.

#2. I’m grateful for opportunities to face hard things.

#3. I’m grateful that I know who I am.

#4. I’m grateful for a warm heater. It was cold and snowy during the last job, and my toes were super cold. Took a while, but the heater thawed them out, and I was grateful.

#5. I’m grateful for so many means of communication. No long-distance call costs anymore!!! So nice. 😊

Thought of the Day: “I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.” 
— Anne Frank

Lift the World.

~ stephen