Today went so much more smoothly than yesterday. First car went a little sideways. The gentleman said he needed me to plug in my scanner to do a relearn on the crank sensor he’d just replaced, but the car wasn’t starting, and to do a relearn on that car, you have to run it at 5100+ RPMs. So… yeah, no relearn possible. I did some testing, and as best I could tell, it was the ignition coil that was bad, so I told him how to replace it, and headed out (turned out later he replaced it, and that didn’t solve the problem… so that wasn’t great, but oh well. I wonder if he messed up the crank sensor replacement, because the car was starting fine before he changed the crank sensor, and 95% of the issues with the symptoms he was having are either the ignition module or the crank sensor. I walked him through what to do next. It requires testing beyond what I have the tools for.
Second job was another wheel bearing… like the nightmare yesterday, except it went smoothly. 🥳 Wahoo! Third job was… oh, what was it… uh… Oh yeah! Overheating truck. I got there, and it was super low on coolant. He’d already put a gallon in, and I had to put in another gallon and a half or so. Couldn’t find any evidence of leak. Perhaps the service place he went to before left the radiator cap on.
Truck did great when I was there, so… I left it at that and told him to just keep an eye on it.
The most important part of that job was one of the coworkers that came out to eat lunch in her car next to the truck I was working on. She was really nice, and also attractive, which didn’t hurt, and I got up the courage to ask her to lunch/dinner, but she had a boyfriend.
Hey, I tried, right?
I was really nervous. I was good for so long, but then all of the sudden I was out of time, which made it awkward, but I didn’t want to lose the opportunity, so I went for it… albeit nervously.
Last job was a Ford Fusion hybrid that wouldn’t start. Turned out to just be a bad battery (regular battery, not hybrid battery).
By then, I was starting to feel migrainey, having not eaten breakfast. I wasn’t doing so well, so though I had more jobs to do, it was time to go home.
So the day went by pretty decently. The “ugh” part of the day was that I was slogging through the sales tax resubmissions, having done nearly 18 months worth of them, only to remember that I’d forgotten a significant part of the job, that I had a gazillion receipts to go back and look up because the blasted state requires me to know the county and city I bought the stuff in, so I can report the sales tax to the proper places. It’s… pretty discouraging, honestly. I busted my butt for hours, and now I realize I have hours and hours of receipt checking to figure out.
Ugh. I’m so discouraged. It feels like a neverending saga. I know it’s ending. i know I’m close. I just… I hate these stupid things. Things that waste hours and hours of my time to give the various local governments their handful of dollars.
Anyway, so the 18 that I just resubmitted now have to be researched, refigured, and re-resubmitted.
Ugh.
Double ugh.
I was already dragging badly, so tired of this stuff, and now the length of time that just this portion of the job will take has doubled or worse.
Right. So… I’ll dig in a bit tomorrow and a whole lot on Friday, since Friday will be nasty cold weather.
Well, folks. Love and hugs to all y’all.
Lift the World.
~ stephen
Lift the World 