Tough Day At The Office

There are many things that I enjoy about my work. I enjoy when a vehicle comes into our shop, I fix it and it drives away. I’ve been a licensed technician for over 5 years now and I’m quite comfortable doing what I do. There are days however where the general ugly realities of life come to bear. You know. If anything can go wrong, it will. If something is going to go wrong, it will likely happen when the vehicle is under your care. Today was one of those days.

At 4:00pm, I had a car which was scheduled for emissions repair. In other words, it had previously failed an emissions test and I was responsible for finding the problem and repairing it. At the moment, I happen to be the only one qualified to do these at our shop. We had another guy up until a couple of months ago, but he has since moved on to bigger and better things.

One of the difficulties of emissions repairs is that, it’s nearly impossible to be prepared for every pitfall. Just because you find something that is broken, there is no guarantee that there aren’t other problems with the vehicle. Just because you find 10 things that are broken, doesn’t mean that there isn’t an 11th item just waiting to bite you on your backside. You’d pretty well have to be God himself in order to see every possible problem.

We close at 6:00pm and this young lady wanted her car both diagnosed and repaired, which leaves me just 1 and a half hours to diagnose and repair the thing if there is to be time to retest it. Just so you know, there is no way under heaven that I can be humanly expected to do such a thing, but having a personal super hero complex, I set out to do exactly that.

So I look at the gas readings and notice an obvious misfire. I remove the distributor cap and notice that the center terminal has completely disintegrated. That would do it. The center terminal is the very thing that sends spark to each plug wire. Time is still ticking. I now have about 45 minutes to either continue searching, or I can fix the obviously defective item.

So I fix the part that is obviously and blatantly defective, in the hopes that I can get this young lady back on the road for the evening and have her car so that she can go to work the next day. I replace the cap and start the vehicle. Immediately, it runs much smoother than it was before. “Victory!” I exclaim. I warm the car up, do a couple more test to verify my repair and I turn the car off, with enough time left to retest the car. I put on my cape, walk to the front and proudly declare that this young lady will be able to drive home tonight and renew her license plate tomorrow.

As our emissions inspector gets into the car, a funny thing happens. It won’t start. Strange. Cap was busted. Kevin fix cap. Car run now! Kevin smash car no run!!!

So I stay 2 hours past closing time and as Murphy would have it, it now needs an ignition coil. How on earth could I have known that the coil would fail 10 minutes after my repair?

What galls me, is that

Even though I only replaced parts which were completely and obviously worn out

Even though I did everything in my power to try and have her car repaired before close

Even though it isn’t humanly possible for me to have predicted that in the time allotted for the repair

Even though I stayed late for two hours to diagnose the no start

Even though I’ll probably sell her the coil at our cost

…..she’ll probably walk away thinking that I have wrecked her car and done her a grave disservice.

And to the lady – if you are reading this, I am very sorry for you. You seem like a very intelligent woman, so I hope you really do understand. I’ve went to school myself and I know how inconvenient this is. I’ll likely share these words with you tomorrow, but I really have done everything in my power to make this as bearable as I can for you, whether you believe me or not.