Gosh, Friday…
I had hoped for a super duper busy work day, but it didn’t turn out that way. That whole thing about people canceling when they schedule too far out in the future. Unless they’re same day or next day or possibly the day after the next day, I’m going to lose a lot of people, I think. That’s how it’s been, anyway, over the years.
So instead of having a jam-packed day, I ended up only doing three cars and only getting 5.7 billable hours.
😬
Hurts to have a day like that when you’re only working two days a week. 😅
The first car was a 2008 Hyundai Santa Fe. The gentleman had asked me to replace the plugs and coils in it, and it’s one of those engines where you need to remove the intake manifold to get to everything. There was a bit of a wrench thrown in the job because the customer didn’t order the correct parts.
He had wanted to replace all six coils, but since he had the wrong coils, and since no single store had more than two coils, we ended up just replacing the back three with new ones. He drove to the Bentonville AutoZone to pick one of them up, and I ordered the other two from the Pea Ridge AutoZone and had them delivered.
Gratefully, other than that, the job went relatively straightforwardly. It wasn’t too challenging, and everything went back together smoothly.
🥳
From there, I realized that I was only two streets away from Miguel’s house, so I stopped on over because he had set aside a winch for me that he had that was extra. So I hopped on over there, picked up the winch, and started driving back. As I was driving back past the house where I did the job with the Santa Fe, I noticed that he still had the hood open. I stopped back over, and he said it was still misfiring. Since I didn’t do the diagnostic, and only did what he asked me to do, it was time for me to do a diagnostic, which I did free of charge. I threw my scan tool on his car, and found it cylinder 4 was misfiring. That was the original cylinder he said was misfiring, but he thought that cylinder 4 was in the back of the engine, when it was actually in the front.
After all was said and done, he probably could have gotten away with just replacing a coil pack and having it cost him next to nothing. As it was, he had me replaced all the spark plugs and the three coils in the back, which was totally unnecessary.
Oh well. He lives, he learns. And in the end, he got a free diagnostic anyway.
After that, I stopped off in East Springdale at the house of the lady who still owed me $300 from the job a week or two ago. She didn’t have all $300, but you did give me $100, so at least that was something. And I did her a favor of getting rid of the wasp nests that were on her front porch. People spend a lot of money on wasp killer, but brake cleaner kills them just about instantly. It’s amazing. Spray it on him, and if you get a good direct hit on any given wasp, it’ll just drop to the ground and be dead within seconds. Not sure how it works to kill them so quickly, but it does.
After that, I went to car number two which was a 2016 Dodge ram ProMaster. By that point in the day, was probably 98 or 99°. The van needed a battery, but one of the battery cables was broken and stuck on the post, which necessitated a bit of creativity in order to remove it. I ended up disconnecting the entire negative battery cable from the frame.
In those cars, the batteries are under the floorboard in front of the driver’s front seat. What that meant was that not only was it 99 or whatever degrees outside, but I was also baking inside the vehicle.
Drip, drip, drip. 🥵
Eventually, I got that stupid battery out of it s slot, and of course it’s one of the huge h8 batteries the ways 80 million pounds. I grabbed a new connector, and connected it to the negative battery cable, through in the new battery, and put it all back together.
The owner of the van had tried taking the battery out in the south, and there’s a bracket on top that I couldn’t figure out how I went back together because I didn’t take it apart. It took me probably 5 or 10 minutes just to figure out how the stupid thing went together, and it only had one bolt. 😅
That card is way down in Johnson after the first car in Bella Vista. Then I was all the way back to Pea Ridge for my third and final service call of the day. Not the best route, but people canceled, people delayed, so on that day I was the beggar who couldn’t be the chooser. 🙃
The last car was a 2013 Dodge avenger that she said was making some awful noises. So I went there and found that the alternator with making a hideous sound, and it sounded like her tensioner and maybe idler pulley might have been going out as well.
The part she wanted was the new one and not the remanufactured one, which meant that I needed to order it in from another state, which meant that I would be doing the job on Monday. So I arranged to do it for her early Monday morning before she had to be at work.
Multiple cancellations and postponements, I only ended up doing three jobs for the day and getting home relatively early.
I ate some food, vegged out for a little bit, and I think I spent some time cleaning my room. And that was my frenetic Friday that… wasn’t so frenetic.
Since it was slow with people canceling and postponing, there was no adrenaline pumping me from one job to the next in a scramble to get everything done during the day. That meant there was no adrenaline to stay off the exhaustion, and no adrenaline to stave off the additional energy toll that the super hot weather took on me.
So I was totally exhausted and went to bed pretty early, comparatively. I was hopeful to get a decent night sleep before our morning exercise.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 