Hi, peeps. 😊
Little boy me be tired. 😴
Seven cars today. Started early. First car was an easy one, a battery job. Second car was an easy one, a noise they were concerned about that couldn’t be reproduced. Third car was more of a challenge and… is still ongoing 😬.
Customer’s vehicle was overheating. They’d just had a water pump and thermostat replaced by another “mechanic.” That mechanic obviously didn’t know what he was doing, as he put a crap ton of gasket maker on the thermostat housing gasket that should never have had gasket maker on it. In addition to that, he filled the system with straight water.
We found that the new thermostat put in was bad out of the box. I’ve run into that before with my own 2007 Nissan Pathfinder. I bought an AutoZone thermostat for it, and it was bad out of the box. Don’t have that happen much, but I figured it was the same issue with this one, and I was right. Malaki replaced the thermostat, and I flushed the engine and heater core, and Malaki finished everything else up. The Pathfinder seemed to be doing just fine. Wasn’t overheating anymore. Running just fine. I even, as behind as I was, replaced a bad battery cable free of charge, both parts and labor.
But… about 15 minutes later, after I’d left Bentonville and was headed to Fayetteville, I got a call from that customer saying that the SUV had made some awful sound, the hood had suddenly popped up while driving down the road, a nasty sound was continuing, and it wouldn’t go faster than like 10 mph.
Lovely.
It sounds to me like the motor is blown, but the engine wasn’t overheating anymore. That much was totally fine, so we’d fixed the overheat problem. But now his engine sounds like it’s blown, and I think he’s blaming us.
How do you explain to a customer that changing out a thermostat and flushing the cooling system can’t blow up a motor? We got it with an overheating problem. He drove it with an overheating problem. We fixed the overheating problem, and it blew up on the way home.
I don’t know what the issue is. I was going to go over free of charge and look at it for him (really don’t want a bad review, so I’m just gonna eat the wasted time). He told me to come before 7, and I got to the address he gave me at about 6:10, but he wasn’t there. He’d left out of town.
Lovely again.
I’d driven all the way there to give him a free diagnostic on a truck that blew up that wasn’t our fault, but he’d just had shoddy work done by someone else, and now the truck blows up on the way home, and… yeah…
Ugh.
So… that one will get figured out on Monday, as I’ll again go to his place free of charge (why free, since it’s clearly not our fault? Well… all about the reviews. I’d rather eat time and even money than get a bad review. Reviews mean everything in this business. It was our fantastic reviews that attracted him to call us in the first place. I hope he takes that into account at some point. We have stellar reputation for a reason.
Anyway, crossing my fingers that it’s just something stupid, but it’s probably not. He was driving it while it was overheating. And when we drained the “coolant” (rusty water), there was a lot of block sealer in it, like someone had been trying to seal a blown head gasket or coolant leak, so… it wasn’t looking good already. But… from his perspective, he drove it there, and all it was doing was overheating, but it was driving fine. Then we touch it, and now it blows up.
Ugh.
That’s the crappy part about mechanics. Lots of dishonesty in the industry. Lots of crappy mechanics. But the good ones get lumped in with the bad ones. I had a customer the other day rip me apart for bad customer service, and it’s like… wow. That’s what so many people love about me, excellent customer service.
Anyway, I’m just crossing my fingers that Monday will bring a small miracle, and maybe his car will be okay, that maybe it’s something simple. Realistically, though, it’s not. Realistically, it’s going to be something major, and I’m going to have to teach him how cars work in order to help him understand that what we did couldn’t have blown up his car.
(sigh).
Anyway, I did another diagnosis is Springdale (2009 GMC Acadia with 12 check-engine codes and one transmission code). He’s basically either got really dirty oil (for his sake, I hope that’s the only issue, as it was dirty oil), or he’s got timing chain issues, and his bill is likely going to be in the multiple thousands and a job that’s bigger than what we do.
After that, I did a pre-purchase inspection on a vehicle. That’s another area where my customers I think have a huge eye opener and are super grateful. My pre-purchase inspections are crazy thorough. I don’t just do a 15-minute lookover, checking fluids and doing a quick pass by. I dig in, dig deep, and look a gazillion things. I spend a full hour combing through the car looking for everything I can see that might be an issue now or in the future.
The customers today were super grateful and impressed, I think, at how detailed my inspection was. 🥳
After that, I went back to a Honda Odyssey I’d diagnosed earlier in the day. Malaki had been replacing the alternator that I diagnosed as being bad, but he ran into an issue. He couldn’t get the belt back on. He said there was something wrong, but given that he didn’t have much experience with hydraulic tensioners, I was convinced it was user error. If you’re not familiar with those tensioners, they can be a pain to compress far enough to get the belt on.
So… I drove all the way up to “rescue” him from his lack of experience, only to find out that he’d assessed the situation properly, and the tensioner really was damaged beyond what we could do to fix it (someone had rounded off the adjustment bung, so we couldn’t compress the tensioner to put the belt back on).
So, kudos to Malaki for getting that job right! 🥳 It’s actually nice to be wrong. It’s helping me gain more and more trust in Malaki that he’s learning enough to be more and more on his own.
Another good thing that Malaki did today was that with the last job we did (lower ball joint on a 2000 Grand Marquis), I asked him if he wanted to try to do that job on his own to make more money or to have me with him, and in a heartbeat, he said he wanted to have me with him for that one.
So… cool stuff. He’s more realistic now with his skills and abilities. It’s giving me confidence that he knows when to ask for help, etc. It’s good. The biggest thing holding him back right now is his lack of good tools, and he needs a better work vehicle that he can safely keep all his stuff in and not have more stuff stolen. It’ll be probably another week before he has pretty much everything he needs, tool wise.
What else… uh…
So it was a good day work wise, though it was really stressful with the Pathfinder issue that remains open and the Odyssey tensioner issue. We’ll go back to both on Monday.
After work, I headed up to my hill sister Liz’s place, chatting with one of my nieces, helping out a bit with small to-do things, but mostly just sitting down and talking to Liz for a good little while.
Good stuff. Life is changing a lot for a lot of us right now.
- I’m grateful that though things went quite sideways at times today (the Pathfinder debacle. The Odyssey debacle. Being stood up twice), I actually did much better today than I have recently. So that was good (speaking specifically about being better at reigning in my sailor speak and being better at breathing and letting the stress roll off). There was definite improvement today.
- I’m grateful that I had a few easy jobs to mix in with the two sideways ones.
- I’m grateful that I was able to spend some time with my hill family today. I’ve spent so much time in my own little world for the last two or three years with all my own debilitating struggles that I haven’t really been around the rest of my hill family much. So it was good to be there and to try to be there for family during hard times.
- I’m grateful that Malaki is learning quickly and that it appears that there’s a good chance he’ll be okay to be on his own by November when I leave. That would be super good, unless of course I get him to the point where he decides he’d rather compete than buy my business or stay with me. 🙃
- I’m grateful that though I have more nieces and nephews getting married and finding their special someones, it hasn’t sent me into a sad place today. Sure I’m lonely and longing, but I’m okay right now.
Love and hugs.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 