Ah… Frenetic Friday. What might be a stories of the day?
Turned out to be only a five-car day, and the first time I haven’t reached my billable hours goal in a good while.
I mean, I did work 10 plus billable hours, but one of the jobs didn’t get finished, so I won’t actually bill for it until it’s done. So my total actual paid billable hours for the day were 9.25. So it was still a solid day, even though I didn’t reach the target goal.
Also, I’ve said a new target goal of 11.5 billable hours. That will hopefully mean that I bill at least 100 hours a month. Fewer than that is fine, but it would be really nice to build a nice round number like that. 🙃
The first car was a 2009 BMW 328i that wouldn’t start. Turned out to be a bad starter, and though it took me longer than I hoped to get it done, it did go relatively decently, and that knocked out 3.5 bill of hours of my 11.5 hour goal with one job. The next one was a 1999 Ford F-150 that needed an alternator, that was a good quickie.
I was grateful that the first two vehicles were in the shade. It was brutally hot. At the hottest part of the day, it was 97 or 98°, but with a heat index of 119°. It was absolutely brutal.
The BMW, gratefully, was under a carport; and the F-150 that needed the alternator was in a tree-filled backyard, so I was completely in the shade.
I paid for the shade with mosquito bites, but I preferred the mosquito bites to the searing sun. 🥵😅
Card number 3 was a 2012 Hyundai accent that they said was making loud noise. I went over, and as I always do, I check the oil before starting it.
Metal.
Not going to be recovering from that one.
Still, as I always like to do my due diligence, I fired up the engine anyway, and it rattled and knocked like a son of a gun.
Even with the metal on the dipstick and the awful sound when running, I still drained a tad bit of oil out of the engine just to cover all of the diagnostic bases.
Unsurprisingly, the oil was silvery, with so much metal in it that it changed the color and supplied a mountain of little metal sparkles to pull out of the oil with my magnet.
The owners were out of town, but they had left the key for me, so I let them know, took payment over the phone, and headed to car number four.
Car number for was a 2004 Ford expedition that had two different issues. It had a really bad clunk in the front end that was a bad upper control arm, and it was running lean for some reason. I did a bunch of diagnostics on the fuel system, finding that the fuel pressure was lower than it should have been, especially on prime. That’s likely the cause of the issue, but I’m always a little hesitant when the proposed cause of the issue is a very rare condition, and even more so when the repair is several-hundred-dollar repair.
😅
But the fuel pressure readings did seem to be lower than they were supposed to be, and fuel pressure that’s too low can definitely cause the issues that he’s experiencing. It’s just a little nerve-racking.
That’s actually the job that I didn’t bill. I was going to come back later and replace the upper control arm and bill for everything, but it didn’t end up working out that way. I had to head south to get the part because it wasn’t a common part, and I had two jobs down south, so I figured there was no sense driving down south to pick up the part, driving north to fix the car, only to turn right around and drive back down south to try and finish the last two jobs. So I went to the next job, planning to return later that evening to finish up the work on the Ford expedition.
Car number five was a 2008 Saturn Outlook. That car was way down in Fayetteville after the last one being in southwest Bentonville. The Saturn Outlook supposedly needed an alternator, and when I got there, I found that the alternator wasn’t charging, so I went ahead and put an alternator in. It wasn’t an awful job, but it certainly wasn’t a quick one. It was a 2.1 billable hour job, and I think I got it done a little quicker than that, but probably right about that. After putting it in, it seemed like the alternator took a little while to properly kick in. That might be partly because the battery was low, and a low battery can cause an alternator to wig out. By the time I left, the alternator seemed to have evened out and seems to be charging well.
The Saturn Outlook is basically the same as the GMC Terrain and the Chevrolet equinox and all those mid-sized SUVs that general motors builds. That means that the battery is in the floorboard on the passenger side between the front seat and the middle seat. Anyway, I got the alternator installed, got her battery cable connections cleaned up and reconnected, and finished up.
Still, I was a little nervous about the outlook because the voltages were weird with the new alternator, but it’s under warranty for her, and it was doing its job when I left, so I’m not going to stress about it.
The last car of the day was going back to the 2003 Suzuki Grand Vitara that I worked on last week or two weeks ago or whatever it was. All I needed to do was install a little teeny tiny light bulb in the shift assembly, so that the PRNDL gauge that shows you what gear you’re in would light up at night. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to get back together, but Suzuki decided to put two of the clips right between the seats, so either you fight for a good long time trying to get the clips in the teeny tiny little space between the seat and the center console, or you remove the seats.
I didn’t want to remove the seats, so I fought with it and fought with it and fought with it until I figured out a creative way of getting the clips in.
I don’t remember how I did it, at this point, so hopefully I never have to do that job again, as I might not remember how to save myself the headache I had this time around. 😅
Well, there you go. By the time I finished up the Suzuki, it was too late for the other gentleman for me to go back and finish the upper control arm, so I called it a day and headed home, having no other vehicles to work on to get my last 0.75 billable hours to reach my work-day goal.
One little fun bright spot in my days has been that I’ve been rewatching the old show Psych, and sort of doing it along with One of my sisters. It’s one of those shows That’s relatively harmless, and a little kooky, but fun and makes you laugh, so it’s nice these days.
And that was my Frenetic Friday.
The severe tennis elbow in my right arm has grown more severe. I’ve been trying to not use the muscles and tendons that are causing the pain, but no matter what I do, they get a workout at times, and they’re just two screwed up for that right now.
Additionally, my left thumb, which I keep thinking I’m doing well taking it easy with, has also gotten worse. I’m worried that I’ll do irreversible damage, if I haven’t already, so I’m planning on taking a month off to try and give my body a chance to heal.
Taking that time off might also give me a chance to make a different plan for my future, as though my new work schedule of working 2 days a week is working out fabulously in some respects, in others, it’s just… Nothing of what I want for my life other than it providing a decent income.
So I’m going to spend a good chunk of my month or so off weighing options and making plans for how to transition, how to move on, and have to do so intelligently without losing everything that I’ve worked so hard to save up.
Cross your fingers.
So there’s a good chance that either the 28th or the 1st will be my last day of work for about a month… perhaps longer.
You know, one of the positives about working 2 days a week is that even though the days that I’m working are absolutely jam-packed, there’s less stress overall because even though I really really really really don’t want a job to bleed into the next day, if it does, it’s not that huge of a deal. It’s not like it’s going to make the next day impossible. It’s going to suck that I have to go out and finish a job on my day off, but it’s not going to make the following day that much more challenging because I’m squeezing a job in that I don’t have time for.
So that’s been a nice bonus. Yes, the days that I work are absolutely jam-packed, and I’m running from place to place, but I’m also running from place to place with less stress in the process than I was before.
I know it’s not gross. It’s just a change of circumstance, but it is providing some relief, to some degree, and given where I’ve been at emotionally and physically for so long, some relief is nice.
Speaking of relief, I’ve continued to feel better with that new prescription medication. I still have some omeprazole left, so I decided to take one of those instead of the pantoprazole, and I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not, but I started having issues again. So I’m thinking that there’s something about that pantoprazole that just works for me where medications don’t? I’ll probably try the experiment a couple more times to increase the significance of the correlation, should similar results occur, but for now I’m hopeful. And heck, maybe someday My body will remember how it’s supposed to work, and then I won’t need any medication at all. And then maybe, just maybe I’ll be able to sleep in a bed again.
🤞🤞🤞
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 