Hiya, folks!
Brain is dead. Eyes are closing, but here’s a little bit about today. 😊
Spent a good chunk of the morning working on a tool that might significantly improve the speed at which I’m able to gather my customer’s information into the scheduling/data sheet I use on a daily basis to keep track of everything. One of my brother’s pointed it out to me as he was helping me with Google Sheet formulas and whatnot. It could be a game changer, streamlining things that, historically, have been long and tedious. There’s a lot do to, and the tool seems to have broken just in the last hour or so… but I’ll get it working and figured out!
I’m super tired. 🙃
I’ve had some massively delayed onset of poison ivy outbreak. My feet got even worse today.
Ugh.
Not fun, but I’m busy enough mentally that I forget about the itch and discomfort most of the time, so that’s nice, at least.
Falling asleep while writing. 🙃
- Tranny finished going out in my work van, so… that’s toast. I limped it home, and I’ll get the transmission replaced in the coming weeks. In the meantime… I’ll look for another van tomorrow to get me by in the meantime.
- I ordered more stuff for the Tree Service business that Stevie will be running. Less than a month and a half now before my big trip. Lots to do in the meantime!
So much going on. So much to do.
As far as cars lately, had a crazy one from Thursday. Had a young guy stuck way out in the middle of nowhere at a huge music festival call me saying he had a cracked radiator. He begged and begged, and finally I relented. It was almost 2 hours from where I live, so I told him he’d be billed for my travel time and that it would be better to have it towed, but… there weren’t any shops even remotely nearby, so… I finally relented and headed out there.
Winding road. medium-sized hills (they call them mountains out here 🙃), no cell reception for much of the trip, and then boom, found him. But…
What he failed to tell me was that he’d gotten in an accident, and the front end of his car was smashed. 😶. Can’t fix that one. The front was hit just hard enough to push the bumper reinforcement bar into the ac condenser which mashed the radiator.
Amazingly, despite being mashed inward significantly, neither the ac condenser nor the radiator sprung leaks–which is amazing. That said, it did break his radiator fan, which caused it to overheat just as he was pulling into the festival in the stop-and-go traffic.
I disassembled the front-end of his car, cutting off the front bumper with my grinder to access the bent bolts holding it on. I finally got enough off to remove the busted fan. In the end, with the fan removed, I instructed him to (if he wasn’t going to take it to a shop) drive at highway speeds with the heater on full blast, regardless of the temperature outside. He’s trying to get back to Michigan. I guess we’ll see how it goes. I’ll touch base with him this week to see how it went.
What else… I had a customer ask me to put a fuel pump in his truck (after I diagnosed it a few days before). Unfortunately, the apartment complex managers apparently are super sticklers, as they evicted him for having me work on his car in the parking lot. 😶
Wow.
He probably had a bit to do with that, as when they told him he couldn’t have me fixing his car out there, he was… not very nice to them.
Pays to be nice to people.
Lots of little stories with customers, but I’m dead tired, and it’s now almost 1:30.
Happy October. 😊
Love and hugs.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 