Today was… A very less effective day work-wise. One person I know might call it paying the stupid tax. Or you could just consider it tuition of life.
We’ve had a job on the schedule for a couple weeks that’s been postponed multiple times due to schedule conflicts. It was a job I scheduled for Malaki. A big one. One that would basically be his only job for the day because it was 5+ billable hours all by itself. He told me at least a day before maybe you a couple days before whatever it was that he was having trouble finding the service information to properly do the job.
So naturally, I waited until the morning of to look stuff up, and I couldn’t find information that I was totally satisfied with either. I spent probably almost 3 hours trying to find the right information, and finally gave up because I was paying Malachi to sit for 2 hours but we tried to find the right information. In the end, I gave up and had him leave the job. The crazy thing is that 10 minutes after I had him drive away from the job and after my customer had arranged with the shop i recommended, I had a friend of mine find the information and send it to me.
So I paid Malaki basically to sit around for 2 hours. I wasted 3 hours of my own time. And so… Instead of making 5 hours worth of money, I paid out 2.2 hours of shop time to Malaki.
He’s a good kid, and money isn’t important, so I don’t mind it so much, but i would certainly rather make a dime or two for all that stress and effort. 🙃
Malaki’s fiancé today. Took them out to lunch, and that was good. What Malachi wants to do in the future and how much it does or does not relate to being with my business in one form or another. No decisions were made, so I guess we’ll see how things go. I’ve had some weird feelings about it all but I certainly don’t understand but wish I did.
While the whole debacle was going on with the one job that Malaki was waiting on me for, I was working on an Infiniti QX56. Those are made by nissan, remember? Yeah, and what does that mean? You guessed it! Stuff built so that you have to take off too many things just to get to what you need to take off. Gratefully, in this particular case, I was able to avoid it. He very possibly is having a starter going out, which on this QX56 is underneath the intake manifold, so you got to pull the intake manifold off just to get to the starter. Fortunately, after cleaning off all of the battery cables that were really corroded and had bad connections, I was able to get it to start. I don’t know if anything I did actually was the cause of it starting, because he had been having the issue for a long time and could always get it to start again, but it started up for me. And it started up every single time I tried after that, so we just decided to leave it as it is and see what happens. I was glad, because I really was not feeling in the mood to pull an intake manifold off to get to a little starter. 🙃
Anyway, so I had lunch with Malaki and Amy, and then I was going to send Malaki on another job, but that job suddenly ghosted me, so I ended up just sending Malaki home because he wanted to get to a car dealership by like 5:00 or something.
So I headed to another job myself, falling up on one that I’d worked on a couple days ago. An old 2001 Ford f150 with the V6 that she had me put a starter in because she had somebody else try and fix the car and ruin the starter in the process. So I put the new starter in, and it still wasn’t working, so I came back to diagnose it further. Turned out that even though the starter had its own solenoid, that particular model of F-150 had an extra starter solenoid mounted on the firewall.
😶
So I’ll swing back again tomorrow to put a battery and a starter solenoid in it. Lots of other cars to do tomorrow as well.
I’ve been dictating this entry as I drive home from Greenland, Arkansas. Who was driving from somewhere way down south all the way to Kansas City tonight call me begging for help stranded in the gas station with oil all over his engine. So I decided to help him out and drove down the Greenland getting there a little bit before 9:00 p.m.
Turns out that the oil leak, is best we could tell, was not something that had just spontaneously happen and sprayed oil everywhere. It looks like maybe it’s been going on for quite a while and building up everywhere. Unfortunately, it looks like it’s coming from the rear main seal, so definitely not a cheap fix. But neither does it look like it’s going to be something that’s going to keep him from finishing his trip, so he just needs to watch his oil pressure and does oil level.
Anyway, I’m going to call it a day. It’s after 11:00 now, and I’m just about ready to pull in to our driveway.
I haven’t been doing well at all lately, and some things happen today that we’re really discouraging that I don’t really want to talk about right now publicly. I might write a private journal entry today. I did one the other day, as some of you probably noticed, as it was password protected. I may write another one today or tomorrow.
Hope y’all are well.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 