Saturday… Wasn’t the day off I wanted. 😅
Since one of my customers on Friday said it was too late for me to come back to finish the job that night, I ended up pushing it back to Saturday. I could have pushed it back to Monday, but he said he much preferred Friday, and since I sort of left him hanging because of the parts and coordination challenges I ran into, I didn’t feel good about pushing it until Monday.
Anyway, so I took a leisurely morning, and then I headed into Pea Ridge to the AutoZone there to return a bunch of cores I didn’t want to get billed for, and to return a bunch of new parts that I wanted refunds for.
I stayed to chat a little bit with the workers there, one of them having come back from what was supposed to be retirement, but I guess wanting to have more money than he was getting in retirement, so he’s back and being trained to run a store.
After that, I headed to the Bentonville AutoZone store to get some paperwork for some refunds that I had done over there from the last time AutoZone gave me refunds but didn’t actually process them. Fortunately, those got taken care of, but honestly, I was pretty frustrated because it felt like I was being treated like it was my fault because I guess part of the reason is that their system breaks sometimes When I return parts that I bought at one store to a different store.
It doesn’t happen all the time, but it certainly does sometimes. There’s no explanation for it other than that I’m returning the parts to a different store than the one I bought them from. That’s supposed to be no problem whatsoever. It’s a chain with thousands of stores that you’re supposed to be able to buy from any store and return to any store. But apparently, it screws up sometimes. I don’t know if it ever screws up for DIY customers, but it’s sure screwed up to the tune of I think maybe thousands of dollars, or close to it for me over the last year and a half.
Anyway, I get frustrated because it’s hard to try and remember which parts I bought from which stores, and on top of dealing with that headache, I get to deal with commercial managers who whine and moan because they don’t like taking returns back anyway, but they hated even more if I take them back to the wrong store. Why? Because they get their bonuses based off of how much they sell. So they are annoyed when I return parts, and their triply annoyed when I return parts that didn’t come from their store originally, because not only is it not just wiping out a sale that they made, it’s cutting into their sales even deeper. The store I bought the parts from gets to keep the sale even though the part gets returned, and the store that I return it to has to refund apart that they didn’t even get credit for the sale on.
And of course, again, the bonuses are all determined by your total sales, so it sucks for them.
It also creates a hostile working relationship between customer and vendor. Though it’s AutoZone’s policy to allow you to return parts at whatever store you want to, in practice, you end up getting an earful, and when life is already stressful enough, looking forward to getting an earful every time you go to return parts is not… Fun.
Of course, I could just ignore it, but I’m not very good at that. And certainly, it would be helpful if I worked to be better at handling other people’s snappiness and grumbling and whining, but it’s just a drain in the meantime.
Anyway, so after that I headed to the leftover job from Friday. I knew it could be a challenge, but it did turn out to be a good bit more of a headache than I expected. To be transparent, It’s not so much the job was a challenge itself, it’s that it was one of those jobs where it’s frustrating because of the way the engineers designed it. Instead of just being able to take bolts out and pull apart off, you have to remove another part altogether just to be able to remove the bolts because there isn’t clearance to get the bolts out without removing that part.
And of course, being me, I’m always looking for a quicker way of doing things, so I was hoping that I could find a faster way of doing it without having to remove that part as well, but no, that was definitely not in the cards as a possibility.
So I thought with it and fought with it and fought with it, and I finally got The old part removed and the new one installed, but when I was about 10 or 15 minutes or so away from being completely done, the new part I installed broke.
😶
That was… a pretty big blow. I had spent hours over there, on two completely different days, and now it was going to take a third day because the part I needed wasn’t even available in the state.
Not one of the best “non-work”days. It had been basically a full day of work for zero money.
Ugh.
Gratefully, the customer didn’t complain at me for the issue, and gratefully his vehicle was still drivable because the broken new part was still in better shape than the broken old part. So I’ll try and focus on that positive instead of massive negative that the whole experience was for me that day. 😆
I’m definitely grateful that the vehicle is still at least drivable. If it had not been, I would have had to come back out the next day or leave him stranded without a vehicle entire weekend.
So I rescheduled with him to come back… yet again, this time on Monday.
(sigh)
After that, I just came home and I think I vegged for the rest of the day.
As far as Sunday is concerned, I think I just vegged pretty much the whole day. I’m sure I was productive doing something somewhere, but I don’t remember. So I will just leave it at that. 🙃
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 