I’m in a really bad way. I’m just… crumbled down to my last.
It’s that ever continuing up and down the downward trend of my mental health that I’ve mentioned so many times. Sure there are times that are higher than others, but the trend is always down.
I’m just spent. Spent.
😞
So tired.
Life tired.
In other news, it was a work day today–typical for a Friday.
Five cars. Four of them were paying gigs. First car was sort of an emergency call from a long time customer who had bought a van for his daughter, and she was about to drive back to Wisconsin, but the radiator was leaking. So I put him first on the schedule and swapped out the radiator.
The job itself went a lot better than expected, but the car had the wrong kind of coolant inside. I spent a while trying to flush out the coolant, and it just turned into a big nightmare.
Why do I try to do favors for people? That old adage of no good deed goes unpunished. I swear it’s like a freaking given. If I go above and beyond, half the time it’s going to turn sideways.
Such was the case today.
Ugh.
All I was trying to do was get the rest of the wrong coolant out, and I wasn’t going to charge him for it, but it just turned into a nightmare because I couldn’t get all the coolant out and thought I had. So when I put new coolant in, I ended up having the wrong proportions.
It turned out to be a major ordeal just to get the proportions into an acceptable range.
So frustrating.
Why do I keep trying to go above and beyond When it just bites me in the butt so many times.
Because that went sideways, ended up being late for my next customer, but gratefully, she was still available. I was supposed to have gotten there in the morning, and I don’t think I got there until like 1:00.
That job turned out to be a bad battery, except that I had just replaced the battery for her in December, so… It was super weird. When I would test the battery with my battery tester, it would come out testing good, but it wouldn’t let me charge it past 11.7 volts. It would start the car with 11.7 volts, but it wouldn’t charge past that, which was super weird. AutoZone went ahead and swapped the battery out for me for free anyway, but what it meant was that I ended up spending two and a half or three hours or whatever driving all the way down to Fayetteville and back and then from her place to the parts store and back just to figure out what the heck was going on, and in the end, I don’t really get to charge anything because the battery was under warranty, but AutoZone was doing me a favor because it was still testing like it was a good battery.
So I don’t feel right about submitting a labor claim to be compensated for my labor for the bad battery.
Anyway, so lots of times spent without getting paid for it, but at least the customer is happy with me, so that’s nice. Nice lady from the Basque region of Spain. I mentioned to her last time I was out there that I had traveled through San Sebastian, which isn’t too far away from where she grew up.
Cool stuff.
Car number three was a 2017 Hyundai sonata that needed to belt replaced. Gratefully, that went mostly quite quickly. It was another one of those belts that was In an engine compartment that was so tight that I had to use a box and wrench in sort of precarious way to release the tension on the tensioner because there wasn’t room for even my special tools, but it was a lot easier than the one I had to fight with in that Walmart parking lot a week or two ago or whenever it was.
That job was in South Rogers. The next job was up in Bentonville in a park. For that one, the belt had actually come off, shredded off. But I didn’t see anything wrong with the system, lucky for him, so It might well have just been a super crazy old belt. So I replaced the belt and sent him off to work, as he was a tad bit late to work because of the ordeal.
I’m grateful to have had two relatively easy belt jobs. That was nice after how the day had been to that point. 🎉
The last job of the day was driving up to Bella Vista to put brake pads on a 2018 Toyota RAV4. Gratefully, it went fairly well, and I called it a day from there, a bit more upbeat than I was in the morning, but I’m just… struggling.
Something’s gotta give.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 