So… I didn’t pay very close attention when I kept telling everyone that called that My next available appointments were on Monday.
It’ll be Monday! Yep, I’ve got an open slept on Monday.
Apparently, I said that over and over and over, because when I looked at my schedule, I had 12 cars on it.
😶
(gulp)
Oh, and if that weren’t enough, the winter storm that blew in Sunday night and was supposed to be done on Sunday, kept snowing. It was snowing when I woke up, and it ended up snowing all the way until about 1:00.
12 cars… Snow.
😅
But I didn’t want to leave anyone hanging, and I hadn’t expected this storm to stay so long, so I didn’t give my customers the caveat of ” weather permitting.”
😅
It was quite the day.
Gratefully, I had one postpone early on in the day, saying that they hadn’t expected me to come out in the snow, so they had gone ahead and left.
🥳
Gratefully part 2, another customer had simply just stopped replying to me, so I talked them up to standing me up without me having gone there yet, which turned out to be accurate, as they didn’t reply again all day.
The first car of the day was a 2005 Nissan frontier that was a crank no start. 😶
A crank, no start as the first job of the day. Good gravy. 😅
But what was there to do but bite the bullet and dig in? So I began testing, and after fighting with it for a little while, I finally came up with the tentative diagnosis of a bad fuel pump. I couldn’t get the pump to work any way that I tried, and finally, I Back probed the connector and gave power directly to the pump, and still nothing.
One down.
Car number two was a 2014 Nissan Altima. I went out there because her neighbor had called on her behalf. She’s an old lady who apparently doesn’t have a very good memory. So I went out there, diagnosed the bad battery, and replaced the battery.
And then she told me she wasn’t going to pay me all of the bill. Apparently, she thought it was okay to withhold part of the payment for a while just to make sure that the car was okay.
Um… no. That’s not how this works.
Fortunately, after explaining to her that I do offer a warranty, she relented and went ahead and paid me the full price.
Phew!
The third car of the day was a 2009 Honda CRV that was broken down at Crystal Bridges museum. It was owned by one of the workers there, and gratefully, it turned out to simply be a drained battery. 🥳
It was nice to have two easy ones in a row after the challenging first job that had me a bit behind already.
The other nice thing was that the first two cars of the day were inside garages, so I didn’t have to be out in the cold and snow.
🥳
And with the third car being just a battery issue, and with the snow having basically stopped, that was no issue either.
🥳
Car number four was a bit of a different story, however. It was a 2012 Ford Transit connect that was needing a lower radiator hose replacement.
I went to get started on the job, and realized that it was going to be a pretty huge pain. That was a good bit of a surprise because… It’s a radiator hose. I mean… How hard can it be?
😅 right.
I looked up the job, and it was listed as a 1.6 hour job, so I started digging in. I tried and tried and tried to find a way of removing and installing the hose without having to take off the power steering pump, which would mean dealing with the belt, then removing the pump, losing fluid, having to top fluid off, etc etc.
I thought and fought with it, and finally gave up and resigned myself to having to remove the power steering pump in order to access the clamp and hose tucked underneath it.
For kicks and giggles, I decided to look up the labor hours for replacing the power steering pump, as according to the factory service instructions for the radiator hose removal, you need to remove the power steering pump.
What was my surprise when the book time for replacing the power steering pump was something like 2.2 or 2.4 hours.
Um… If the power steering pump job is 2.4 hours, and it’s required to remove the power steering pump in order to replace the lower radiator hose, then how on earth is the lower radiator hose job listed as 1.6 hours?
Yeah, somebody goofed. 🙃
Unfortunately, I had already given the customer a quote, and I didn’t want to back out of it because my system had screwed up.
So I ate like $80 or more or something like that.
In all, the job ended up taking me like 3 hours to do, so not only did I eat some money on that one, it took up a massive chunk of an extremely busy day.
But, it was done. So, at least there’s that. 🙃
Car number 5 was a 2018 Chrysler Pacifica that he said he could hear the windshield washer fluid motor buzzing, but nothing was coming out the spray nozzles onto either the front or rear windshields.
So I went out there, removed the washer bottle through the wheel well on the passenger side, disconnecting the electrical connectors and removing the pump from the washer bottle. What I found was that the washer bottle was full of this slimy algae stuff, and the filter for the washer fluid pump was nearly completely slimed over.
So I cleaned the ball of slime off the pump filter, but there was also a bunch of algae goo stuck to the sides of the washer fluid bottle.
I didn’t have any rock chips to fill the bottle with to do a rock chip clean, so I grabbed a bunch of bolts and nuts from my bolt and not been, dumped them inside the washer fluid bottle, filled it up with water, and just kept shaking and dumping and shaking and dumping until I felt like I had gotten out a reasonable amount of the algae goo.
Gratefully, after reinstalling everything, it only took a handful of squirts of the wiper motor to Get the fluid spraying through the front windshield nozzles. Unfortunately there still was nothing coming out of the rear nozzles.
So I started taking things back apart when it suddenly started working properly out the rear as well.
I’m so grateful I didn’t have to figure out how to flush those lines! 😅
🥳
Car number six was a 2013 Dodge charger. Repeat customer who this time had a coolant leak. When I got there, I found that one of the heater hoses that had a plastic t connector built into it had broken in half at the plastic connector.
The part wasn’t something that I could get easily or locally to be able to fix the car right then, so I did the hard work of removing the bad hose and then taught the customer how to replace it, letting her take a video of me doing the job.
She seemed a bit nervous about it, but I kept encouraging her over and over again that she really could do it. I also sent her step-by-step instructions for how to bleed the cooling system when she was done to make sure everything was done properly.
I had another job postponed, so that left me with nine on the schedule for the day, as I certainly hadn’t taken on any new jobs.
Car number 7 was going back to that 1998 Ford expedition that I had helped out the other day when it was crazy low on oil. He had a dead misfire on cylinder 7, probably the most challenging of all the cylinders to get the spark plug and coil out of.
It was a nightmare. 😅
Gratefully, after finally getting it out and finally getting a new spark plug and coil pack in, the misfire was no longer.
🥳
That one absolutely kicked my butt.
It was probably good that the customer sat there and watched me pretty much the entire time, even though it took a really long time because that kept my language relatively in check. 😅
Car number 8 was a 2000 Jeep Wrangler that had coolant and oil leaks. gratefully, I was able to quickly figure out that the coolant leak was from the water pump. It was so quick, in fact, that I felt bad charging him a full diagnostic because I had arrived so late at night that I couldn’t do the repair for him because they’re just wasn’t time, so I only charged him I think half or less less than half my normal service call.
The next car on my list, the one that would have been number nine, decided to postpone until Wednesday, which I wasn’t sad about because I wasn’t even going to get to it until probably 9:30 at night
Instead, I got home around 9:45, I think, which was fabulous.
Crazy insane work day in the books. I think I finished with 11 billable hours.
🥳
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 