2022-01-22 — A Vote for My Utopian Dreamworld

I guess it’s been good that I’ve been waking up before my alarm because today I realized, after waking up at 3:45 instead of at 3:30 with my alarm, that I’d only set the alarm for one day and not every day.

Oops. 🙃

…

Evening now. Long day. Half of it went sideways, and the other half went relatively well. The first job was supposed to be just a battery job. I couldn’t reproduce the problem, but they had me replace the battery anyway. Then after replacing the battery, it briefly wouldn’t start (the same problem she’d had before).

Lovely.

But then… it started, and I couldn’t reproduce the problem again after that. So I did a little searching on my Identifix account to see what other mechanics had to say, and they’d all mentioned bad ground cable connections, so I suggested that but let them know it was only a guess, that without being able to reproduce the problem, I couldn’t properly diagnose it. But they had me clean all the ground connections to the battery and tranny, and it didn’t have any starting issues after that, so… who knows. I probably won’t ever know, as they’re heading back to Texas today, probably just arriving back in Austin right about now.

Next job was one with a weird sound, and I went to it, and it was a repeat of a job I did for someone else a few months back. The bracket that the alternator, a couple of pulleys, a motor mount, and I think even the AC compressor all bolt to had busted completely off.

😶

Not sure how that happens. I’ve seen it happen just three times now. Two with the same kind of car and for no visible reason, and one on a car where the mechanic hadn’t properly bolted down the AC compressor, so it shook itself apart.

Anyway, I didn’t charger her for going out because… how do you charge when you figure it out in 30 seconds? So I told her what it would need, and I ordered the part, and I’ll go back and do the job later.

Fun fun fun.

Third job was… oh yeah, it was supposed to be a throttle body replacement, but when I got there, it was actually just the throttle position sensor that he wanted replaced. I’d told him that given the code it had, it was unlikely to be the part he bought that was at fault, but another shop had diagnosed it, and so he just wanted the part put in.

Well… I was right, and it wasn’t a pleasant trip arriving at that conclusion. I went to take out the little bolts for the TPS, and they were in there so tight that one bolt was ruined getting it out, and when I went to try to clean out the bolt holes to make it easier to tighten down, one of the bolts snapped off.

Lovely.

So now there was a broken bolt inside the throttle body, so the TPS was only going to be held on by 1 bolt, unless the customer wanted me to pull the whole throttle body off and drill out the broken bolt.

He didn’t.

Thankfully.

So I put on the new TPS, and what happened? The car wouldn’t even start after that. So I pulled the new one off, put the old one back on, and vroom vroom, started right up but still ran very poorly, but it least it was running.

So then I removed the breather hose that goes from the driver’s side valve cover to the intake hose (I’d pulled it off so I didn’t accidentally brake it when I pulled the intake hose off the throttle body). Well, I forgot to put the breather back on, and I had him drive around the block after putting the old sensor back in, and magically it was cured. But when I popped the hood, I saw the hose that I’d disconnected, so I plugged it in and had him drive around the block again. What happened? Ran like crap again.

🤔

So… I pulled the hose back off, and he drove it around, and it ran great.

😶

So I got some rubber stoppers, plugged up both openings, and had him drive around again. I was expecting there to be an issue, and then I was going to pull the rubber stoppers out one at a time to narrow down the problem further, but it ran great (comparatively).

I found out that the issue had started right after he got a new head and valve cover put on the car, and my best guess is that the new valve cover had a defective PCV valve in it.

I have no other explanation. Weird issue.

Fortunately, the TPS seemed to do fine with one bolt, and he didn’t want to drill out the broken one, so I put some zip ties around it to give it a little extra support. 2 hours at what I thought was going to be a 20-minute job. 5 cars left on the docket at that point, and it was 2 p.m., and it gets dark around 5, and I was all the way south, and all the next jobs were another 30 minutes plus north, with one more still in Fayetteville.

Fortunately, that fourth and last of the Fayetteville jobs was a relative breeze. The gentleman couldn’t get his hood open (the cable was busted), but it was hanging out right there, so I could pull on it and open it, so I rigged it up for him, adding a little rubber stopper to the end to keep it from scratching the paint, and he was off to the races. Today was a day of shade-tree fixes for people who I think were tight on money. One was a homeless man staying at the Salvation Army shelter, and the other a man who’d just had surgery to remove a toe for gangrene. 😶

I gave a discount to both of them, well, all four of my first customers, actually. The 5th job postponed. The sixth job that he thought was a bad starter turned out to just be a really bad battery cable connection. I had to invent a way to fix it in order to prevent it from being a larger, more annoying fix, but I figured out a way, and it should be just peachy, so he was happy on all accounts. I did slice myself open with a razor blade accidentally though. Not much blood, gratefully.

7th job canceled (my fault. I didn’t communicate well at all, and so she made other arrangements, not realizing that I was still planning on going, so I showed up, and she’d made other arrangements, and… whoops. Probably a good thing though, because it was already starting to get dark, and I still had one more job in Pea Ridge to go do–a car with an oil leak so bad that he last all his oil in just a 15-or-so-minute drive. 😬

I got there, and there was oil all over. He had an oil leak at his front valve cover, and oil leak at his front… sensor thingy weird thing. There was an oil leak at the rear valve cover. The power steering pump was leaking, but the really bad one was the oil filter adapter gasket. I must have been just completely blown because the oil leak coming from it was so bead it was a steady stream maybe an 8th of an inch wide.

Yikes.

I taught him how to fix it and suggested he find a YouTube video as well to help him through it. Not too hard of a job, and it was nice to be able to call it a night.

So… now I’m home. I see the world’s craziness continuing–me with my utopian dreams of a wonderful global future, but Russia and the Ukraine on the brink of war with the US getting involved. Covid. Internal strife up the yinyang. Good gravy.

I vote for my utopian dreamworld. Like Star Trek, where earth is a peaceful, happy society, and the problems aren’t with each other but with the aliens out in the universe. Can I vote for that?

(sigh)

Keep on truckin’

Love to all. Lift the World.

~ stephen