Hello, my lovelies! 😊
Happy Saturday! (it’s early morning as I’m here writing about yesterday. It feels like it should be Sunday and that I should be “resting.”)
Right. 🙃
It was an interesting day yesterday. I woke up exhausted, as usual, with quite a bit more than a full plate, also as usual. 😅
Like the day before yesterday, the first job was supposedly a super quickie but would literally take me like 4 minutes, but when I got there, I realized the issue he said was the issue was not the issue–something else was going on.
So I started trying to figure it out.
The car had been just dying randomly while driving and not restarting. But it didn’t have a single check engine code, and there was nothing wrong with the fuel pump, and the issue that he’d been told was the issue was not the issue.
Anyway, so I worked on his car for a while, and he and I talked to bit while I worked on it. He’s from Brazil on a student/work visa. We had some pretty good conversations, talking about life, and future, and hopes and whatnot. I asked him what he wanted most in his life, not what he wanted now. And then I explained to everything that I’ve learned about how to figure out what you want most.
I think I even told him that I haven’t been any good at actually going out and getting what I want most. 😅
Anyway, as I was getting ready to bill him for the job after figuring out what was wrong and fixing it (possibly temporarily, possibly permanently), and teaching him what to do if it ever happened again, I had this feeling like I shouldn’t bill him at all. 2 hours of labor…
So, I didn’t bill him. 🙃
He was super surprised, and I think touched, and wanted to give me money, but I just told him to pay it forward which he didn’t understand, so I explained. He was super grateful, and even after I was about to drive away he came back to the van to thank me again.
Super Nice guy. Seems like one of those people who could be a good friend.
Anyway, so I didn’t make any money in the morning at all, which was fine, and was actually a help for me because I had woken up this morning, and I guess I forgot to mention it, feeling close to the edge of having a nervous breakdown again. I could feel the desperation welling up in me, just wanting to get away from what my life is right now.
But after helping the gentleman from Brazil, I felt a lot better. It was nice to do what my heart wants to do all the time anyway.
Wish this world didn’t run on money.
Anyway, after that I went and helped a lady that I did work for a few weeks ago or so. Her car wouldn’t start, but all she needed was a battery. She gave me her garage code, which I’m not usually comfortable with, but she didn’t even ask, she just texted me her garage code, so what else am I going to do?
So I went over and got her car taken care of. It took a little longer than I would have liked with it just being a battery job, but whatever. I’m trying to stress less when I have a billion things on my plate and things are taking a lot longer than I would like them to.
I don’t really ever have specific appointment times, so it’s not like I’m actually late late, but still, when you have a gazillion cars on the schedule, and you’ve only finished two of them by two or three in the afternoon, that doesn’t make for a realistic outlook that the rest of The work of the day can be completed early enough for me to get home at a decent hour.
Fortunately, today at least, it kind of worked out. 🙃
Car number three for the day was that Toyota sienna that had a busted heater hose connector, so I went back to that, tested the engine to see if there were combustion gases coming into the cooling system, found that there didn’t seem to be, so I went ahead and filled the system and finished everything up. Looks like it’s going to be completely okay.
🥳🥳🥳
Toyota resilience.
Car number four was supposed to be a big long long long job that I wasn’t looking forward to at all. But when I got there, the job that the other shop had said needed to be done didn’t look to me at all like it needed to be done. It’s possible that it could need to be done, but I couldn’t find anything wrong to prove anything that was bad. The shop said that he needed both lower control arms, and if he didn’t get them, his tires were going to wear out super quickly and super badly.
Well, I looked and couldn’t see anything that I was concerned about, so I just looked at the rest of his car and couldn’t find much to worry about, so I talked to him about little stuff and suggested that he take his car to a different place to check the alignment and go from there, and if somehow I was wrong, that I would refund him my service call for the day.
I guess we will see what happens.
The shop that told him that he needed to do the work quoted him $1,700 to do the job, and my quote was somewhere around $900 to do the same job.
Unfortunately, unless the issue is super super bad, so bad you can actually visually see the tilt in the tire, it’s going to be just about impossible for me to tell without an alignment machine.
So instead of being a multi-hour job that probably to what have taken me… four hours? I think I was there for less than an hour, which meant I could go home early!
Except…
As I was on my way to that last job, I got a call from Allison, the manager at the AutoZone in Bentonville because a car that had come in that they were told needed a battery, so they replaced the battery, wouldn’t start after replacing the battery. Allison had to leave and get her own kids, but there she was with this lady who was stranded and crying and frustrated and whatever else because she came in with a car that was running and now didn’t have a car that was running.
Over time, however, the lady’s story changed, and apparently she’d had this issue before. Of course, I think that was after Allison offered the refund for the battery that they installed for her.
Anyway, it was clear that she needed a mechanic, that the issue was going to be more than what people at AutoZone should be doing even if they were capable of doing it, and Allison needed to leave to get her own kids.
At first, I tried to walk Allison through a bunch of tests she could do to try and help, and we were able to determine from that that it wasn’t anything that Allison did nor any of her employees, and that’s when, I think, the lady started to change her story.
I was way down near Elkins on my way to that last control arm job and so I wasn’t available, so I gave Allison the number of another mobile mechanic nearby who might be able to get to the lady to help her.
Anyway, just as I got done with the last job, that lady called me begging for help because she didn’t know anybody and didn’t have any money at all and was living in a motel, etc.
So I called Allison to try and figure out what was going on, and I guess it appeared to be one of those situations where you have someone who’s perpetually getting help from other people, a perpetual victim. Allison said she could smell the pot smoke in the car, and said the lady was visibly high as a kite, there with her two kids…
So… the dilemma…
Do you help someone in that situation who appears to be a serial victim? Always getting free help from everyone… Quite likely not really going to actually even be grateful for the help because she always gets help from everyone because she’s always “desperate” (but not as desperate as she says she is, because when the answer is no, she always finds options that she says she didn’t have).
I honestly don’t know what is true, other than that if I go to help, I’m likely not going to make any money, And it could be a black hole job because somebody had been messing with the wiring and had an inline fuse that they had Jimmy rigged into this system, And it might well be for a lady who’s pretending to need help when she’s not as desperate as she says she is…
(sigh)
What to do…
It’s easy to be judgmental. It’s easy to say someone got themselves in the situation, were keeps themselves in that situation because of their choices, etc
And yes, there times when helping isn’t the best thing to do, but… yeah…
As a Mormon leader once said, when reflecting on what he had learned in his life, “I have found, too, that it is better to trust and sometimes be disappointed than to be forever mistrusting and be right occasionally.” ~ Neal A. Maxwell
So you probably already guessed. Yes, I drove over to the AutoZone and started to take a look at the car. I gave myself 30 minutes because I had to drive all the way from Elkins to get all the way back up to Bentonville, And it was I think 7:00 or 7:30 before I even got there.
So I said about trying to figure out what was wrong, my fairly quickly realized that somebody had relocated a fuel pump fuse and fuel pump relay to the main wiring harness instead of being in the fuse box. That meant that the fuse box was likely bad, but they hadn’t wanted to spend the money to replace the fuse box, so they rewired everything. Gosh, probably would have been easier to replace the fuse box, and you could get one online or from the junkyard pretty quickly and not go to all the work of tearing into the main wiring harness, but whatever.
One of the big challenges was that they permanently attached the wiring harness to the fuel pump relay, which made it ridiculously challenging to do any testing.
I have been able to get the car started by powering up the fuse with my power probe, but I couldn’t figure out why the fuse wasn’t getting power, and I couldn’t easily test the relay cuz the darn thing was permanently attached to the wiring harness. I tried to scrape away enough metal to do some testing, but I couldn’t get reliable connections that I trusted, and I tried again and again and again, and those 30 minutes turned into 2 hours, and frustration, and whatever, and in the end, I just wired in a workaround so that she could at least drive her car and not have to be stuck without a car with two kids and daycare and work and all that stuff.
So I wired a work around. It’s not very convenient, but at least it’ll work, and she can drive the car until she can get money saved up to have the issue actually explored to the point that it’s figured out completely.
I gave her a call and told her that instead of charging my normal fee which would have been $255, that I was only going to charge her $60. I’m expecting that I probably won’t get paid at all, but then again, she might pay me. It’s sort of a nominal thing at this point. I’m not really worried about it.
I finally got home about 10:00, or so, I think instead of 7:00 like I had initially thought I could, which would have been nice, but… Whatever.
I suppose one of the good things from the day was that my near breakdown status in the morning changed after helping the gentleman from Brazil, so I was in a fairly decent space the rest of the day. That was nice.
It was a good reminder again, not that I don’t give discounts and do stuff to help my customers and random people all the time , but it was still a good reminder of how much I want to be in the business of just serving people and not asking for money for it.
Aaaaaaaaand… Believe it or not, I might actually make some progress on my non-profit stuff this weekend.
It’s so stupid that my biggest hang up for getting started has been the name of the organization, but it’s not stupid at the same time. But on Sunday, my friend Cory and I are going to start working through everything, trying to power through and finally find a name for the organization.
And then it will begin. 😊
Cross your fingers, folks.
Thanks, Cory!!! 🥳
I miss my Utah people.
Hasta luego, mis bonitas!
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 