It’s a little weird…
20 years ago today I got home from my mission.
20 years. Y. E. A. R. S. Years.
😶😶😶
It’s just nutty how time flies. And it’s nutty how life takes turns that I never expect. Not in a million years would I have guessed that my life would have taken the course that it’s taken. I mean…
- I’m single
- I have no children
- Heck, I’m a 41-year-old virgin (just call me sequel 😆)
- I live in freaking Arkansas
- In the same house as my mother. (Love my mom, btw, just kind of a funny situation given the cultural stigma)
- I fix cars for a living–cars.
- My body hates me.
- I’m not an active member of the church that I grew up believing.
Crazy crazy life.
I could probably go on for a good little while if I actually stopped to think about it instead of just rattling off a bunch of things off the top of my head.
Speaking of that last one… I miss God. 😕
I miss the relationship I used to have. The closeness. The understanding. The light. The peace. The perspective. The feeling of a near open channel to the divine. The communication. The infusion of knowledge far beyond my own capacity.
I think that’s part of what has made what happened years ago so painful. That’s part of why there’s been so much anger. That’s part of why I lost all trust in the divine.
But still… I miss God.
And apparently, somewhere inside I must still love God because lately, I can’t seem to stay mad at him as much as sometimes I might want to.
A few weeks ago, maybe a month or so ago, while I was dragging piles of brush to be burned, I had one of those experiences with the divine that I hadn’t had in a while. A long while. I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t asking for it. But it came.
I told myself that I should probably write down the experience to remember. But I’m out of practice with that, and honestly, I think I was angry and wasn’t willing to to some degree.
I’ve been very angry with God for a long time. I felt the ultimate sense of betrayal. I lost all faith both in the religion that I grew up in and in the existence of a supreme being at all.
I could never deny that there might be one, as I don’t think that’s something that’s actually possible to do honestly, to have so much knowledge that one can know that there is no god. One would have to be God to know that it would seem. And the last time I checked, I wasn’t God.
🙃
But my heart seems to have softened quite a bit. I don’t have that reaction of anger anymore when I think about things related to God: I feel more of a melting heart and a longing for the friend I used to have who I felt betrayed me with the things that I held most dear.
But I just can’t stay mad at him. I want my friend back. I want that closeness. That communication. That light. That peace. That open channel to the divine that taught me more about myself, about life, about love, and eternity than any person or organization has ever been able to teach me.
At the same time, there’s still a pretty hefty piece of me that recoils at the thought of trusting in that old friend of mine.
I don’t want a repeat of all the pain I’ve gone through over the last decade and a half.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t like that I’m softening. Because I want to change the world how I want to change the world, not how I’m asked to.
I wish I could remember the experience that I had out in the field burning those branches. I wish I had written it down. I knew I should have written it down at the time. I just… yeah.
The only thing I think I remember is that it was some sort of communication that I recognized as being from God. It caught me pretty off guard.
I think my softening has happened mostly since then.
Anyway…
That’s all I’m going to say about that for now.
…
I met up with the new applicant today. My first impressions were positive. Friendly, potentially lots of great experience. I could easily see him as someone interfacing with customers and giving off good vibes and a good impression.
We met for the day in Springdale, and then we drove directly to our first job in Fayetteville, which was putting sway bar links on a 2012 Hyundai accent.
I had diagnosed it before as having a seized sway bar link on one side., But after taking the sway bar links off, they were certainly uneven, but the one I thought was seized was actually able to move with significant force. It was interesting that the one and moved with significant force, but the other end was floppy. Not sure quite why that would be the case. Made me wonder if I got the diagnosis wrong?
My applicant also accidentally broke one of the new sway bar links, which ended up taking a good bit of time to resolve because I had to go buy another sway bar link, and we had to cut off the one that was on there because he tightened it so tightly that it stripped out the threads.
That certainly wasn’t the best start to an application to work for me. 🙃 But I wasn’t ready to judge him as a no just yet.
The second car was a Dodge ram that was having supposed electrical issues. In reality, it turned out that he had bought two brake and turn signal lights that somehow were just bad out of the box. Super goofy. I’ve never seen that before. I had a spare bulb of the correct size on me, and we plugged it in, and it worked just fine. So that was good news and bad news for him. Good news that it turned out to be a lot easier than an electrical issue. Bad news because he had spent well over $1,000 trying to figure out the issue when all it was was just bad bulbs. 😬
That’s something that with a $5 multimeter or $5 test light he could have figured out in just a handful of minutes. But I guess that’s why they pay mechanics what they do. We have the knowledge that seems so simple and is so simple but just isn’t where everyone’s expertise lies.
Third car was a 2004 Mazda Miata. The guy had bought spark plugs and coils and asked us to put them in. Usually, even though it makes more work for me that I don’t get paid for because I don’t charge for it, I asked the customer why they want to do plugs and wires or coils or whatever they want to do. This time, we just did what he asked, and when we were done, the car still had the same problem, apparently, that he had prior. So we made an appointment to come back another day to diagnose the issue that he had. We didn’t have time to do it right then, as we had a super busy day.
The fourth car was Alexis that the customer thought needed a starter, and this time, the customer was actually correct! Unfortunately, in the process of replacing the starter, my new applicant broke the nipple off the air box. I had mentioned prior to be careful because those nipples break off easily, but it’s still broke off. It broke off while he was trying to go the extra mile for the customer, which always seems to be the case when things go wrong. We try and do something a little extra to help, and we run into issues. Unfortunately on these motors, the plastic gets old and degrades and that little nipple can break off with barely any pressure against it.
Normally, he has the tools to fix that kind of stuff. He owns a plastic lover and whatnot, but he’s still waiting for all his stuff to come on the moving truck, so he wasn’t prepared to fix it like you normally would have been. We ended up epoxying the little nipple back on the box and letting the customer know that if he had any issues, we were good for it.
He was super grateful and extremely complimentary of how we treated him and kept him informed and everything. That’s always nice. 🙂
The next job was going back to that 2011 Ford F-150 that the dealer told him he needed a water pump. We put on the two hoses, blood the system and got him going. My applicant didn’t notice that the clamp on the radiator hose was not on in the proper place on the new hose, so I had to point that out to him.
Another little bit of a red flag. I’m so hyper aware of everything all the time, well at least generally, that I notice all those little things. Mechanics have to be aware of those kinds of things, even the stuff that’s not their fault. For example, the clamp was in the wrong place from the factory not because he put it in the wrong place originally. But you still have to check all of those things even if one might think you ought not to have to do that.
The last car was a 2012 Honda Civic. It was a no start, end of course that pretty much means battery or starter, and most of the time it’s a starter, and this time was no different. We put in the starter, but when putting it back together, we accidentally twisted the wire 180°. Instead of pulling the starter back out and putting it in correctly, he “made it work.”
I didn’t really realize that until after we were completely done and gone a city away. Realistically, what he did will probably never be a problem at all to the customer, but I really don’t like the idea of stuff not being exactly the way we found it when we get there. I may yet still go back to that civic and pull the starter back out to untwist the wire. We’ll see. Maybe it’s overkill, but it’s important to me that everything be exactly right. I certainly don’t think very highly of mechanics who leave stuff improperly put together even if it does work.
So, lots of positives with this applicant, and some red flags as well. Overall, I think it’s more positive than negative, and I believe the seeds are there to keep it positive and overcome the negatives.
That’s a plus. 🙂
Home. Dinner. Scheduling. Bed! Well… recliner. 🙃
G’night all!
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 