solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
7d ago
Yeah, if there's a next time (Uh, I don't know how many more "next times" can be done before the oil in there turns into 100% sludge.) they're getting invoiced for it. As it happened, I just didn't want to go on a 10 hour round trip drive mostly through the middle of nowhere knowing full and well that the engine was 1.5 quarts low, and I had a jug sitting at the house.
Want to know the punchline? That 10 hour round-trip was for nothing because the parts they sent me with didn't fit.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
8d ago
FWIW, as a Trump voter in a state where it didn't matter, my vibes were somewhere between skeptical/cautiously optimistic, but mostly skeptical because I fully expected the GOP House and Senate to be useless.
Since then, it's mostly bad. DOGE has been a bigger clownshow than anticipated. Deficit hawks have nothing to be happy about given that the Johnson House is just continuing previous bad budgets. The trade war has been far bigger and dumber than anticipated. Biden's signature win might well have been running up the national debt to the point that any attempt at reform gets the Liz Truss treatment. Senate Democrats want to increase old people UBI spending, so maybe they'll manage to deplete the Social Security trust fund in ~2030 when AOC is President. LOL at spending more time and effort deporting anti-Israel academics than the mass of illegal immigrants. My expectations were low, but this is a fucking joke.
Fuck me, I wanted DeSantis.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
8d ago
Despair, but hope!
I’ll start with despair. My work situation has been bad. We’ve been dead and so I’ve been dead. I took the service tech position expecting 45hrs a week and daring for 50, and have wound up struggling to hit 35 while riding the clock like a rented mule. The driving remains insane; I’m on pace for 60K miles this year, and oh yeah we’re into week six of a fleetwide maintenance freeze so I haven’t changed the oil (but have added oil out of my personal stash) in 15K miles in my company truck. Our phones were shut off for 8 days, allegedly a coordination issue with the new people who’ve bought us out. I hope (and, cynical as I am, expect) that they’ll make payroll on Friday. I’m bleeding working this job, and hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from my supervisor almost feels like gaslighting. If I’m one of the top techs in the company while barely doing anything and usually failing to hit 40hrs a week, what are the rest doing? I literally cannot afford to continue working this job. Upon telling my (divorced) parents about the job situation, both have offered a rent free place to stay and get back on my feet. I’m glad to have that option, but oof that hurts and I’d have to get rid of my cats (I…uhh…kind of like the little fuckers, and I don’t want to move if I don’t have to.). I’m on the verge of applying to a local box factory. It’ll suck, but if it’s as advertised there’s lots of overtime available.
Let’s move on and give a cheers to hope! I had a round one interview with a trucking company today for a position as a dispatcher and it went well. This lead has been months in the making, but I think we might finally be getting somewhere. The local guy (who I’ve known for years from my time as a bartender and would be my direct supervisor) clearly wants to hire me. He played it cool, sat on my application, and allegedly of the ~80 applications received mine was one of two his boss forwarded his way (better to let it be his boss’ idea to hire me). The way he tells it, I’ve got it in the bag, but of course I’m going to do my best in terms of interview prep and so on. I’m actually interested in the job (Trucking dispatch seems like a logical path forward from all but running a third party food delivery company.), and while I anticipate a learning curve I am confident that I can learn the job and do well. The local guy tells me that he’s dead convinced that I’m the guy for this job and spent more time trying to sell me on the job than interrogating me on my past experience. We’re more than in the right place in terms of compensation. I’m not going to count chickens until I make it and sign an offer letter, but holy shit I’m excited and this might really be my path into something better and a company that I can grow into.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
13d ago
Seniors comfort themselves that they’re only getting what the6 put in, but really if you live 20 years post retirement and get colas on top of your earned benefits, then you’re taking more than you ever put in.
Another way to put this (and more important, given that Medicare is a bigger problem than Social Security.) is that retiring people today mostly paid for 1970s-2000s healthcare and expect 2020s healthcare in return.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
18d ago
In the sense that everyone in politics is dumb? Yes. Do I think that their voter base being less college educated means a whole lot? No. The Republicans were just as dumb back when they were barely winning the college educated vote and running Romney. I mean, nominating a painfully patrician rich vulture capitalist for President one election cycle after the great recession who was also weak on the GOP's signature issue (It's hard to argue against Obamacare when there's a state level equivalent with your name on it.) is self-evidently dumb, one would think.
The actual politicians, staffers, and even primary voters are more educated than the average American. Even the Republican primary electorate is (or at least was circa 2018, and I doubt that the primary coalitions have changed that much since then) majority college educated with a relatively small four point gap between the two parties (This is dwarfed by the education gap between primary voters and the electorate as a whole.).
The current Trump administration coming up with these policies are all college educated, usually hold graduate degrees, and disproportionately hold them from the Ivy League. Unless level of education and the prestige of the degree-conferring institution are inversely correlated with intelligence, these people probably aren't dumb. Catch is, you don't have to be dumb to be wrong, and that's what makes Hanania's whole "elite human capital" argument so grating.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
20d ago
Is it the ill-informed masses being driven insane by social media or the educated elites themselves?
I'd argue that media gatekeeping affected the informed policymaking class a lot more than the masses who never read, say, National Review. Speaking of gatekeeping, how many prominent political media figures aren't posting heavily on Twitter or some equivalent? Same goes for policy wonks.
This is an important distinction because it isn't mostly high-school educated voters who make policy, but the college educated, and most of those have graduate degrees. If the highly educated are just as prone to making bad decisions due to confirmation bias and/or falling victim to social-media driven stupidity, or are flat out uninformed, that's it's own problem, but these people aren't exactly "low information".
If you want some comedy (I like to laugh at my problems and I'm less in a mode of "active despair" and more "This place is a fucking joke, so I might as well laugh at it.), here are some highlights from my last month of the beer service technician life:
We're in week four of a fleetwide maintenance freeze. I'm driving 5K miles a month. It's been about 12K (pretty much all highway) miles since I last got an oil change, not like the engine is going to seize tomorrow but really not how one should treat a $30K truck. I did inspire a companywide "Hey, check your oil" message after a week of complaining that my truck was over a quart low on oil, asking for permission to top it off. I don't know if they forgot to pay the fleet maintenance bill or if the company is too broke to pay it, but it's not reassuring, and if this goes on long enough it's a race between one of my tires showing cords and the timing chain starting to get noisy. I'm going to laugh if the solution to the tire problem (right front tire is wearing very unevenly and the inner part is pretty much bald) is just to swap it with the spare (It is a full-size spare, so this would work.).
On a related note, apparently my district has the highest rate of unpaid invoices in the company, so we're going to have our line cleaners start badgering locations about unpaid invoices (Isn't this what our accounting department gets paid to do?). I got sent on a call to a place (to work on a 23 year old glycol chiller that's begging for death and gather details for a quote on a new chiller that will almost certainly be turned down) that just got current on an invoice from two years ago. Shockingly, they didn't have checks on site after being told they'd have to pay by check, so it looks like I'll be driving by tomorrow to collect (and probably hear about how said chiller isn't cooling sufficiently after having told the customer that calling an HVAC is most likely throwing good money after bad on it; playing bill collector at an ethnic restaurant with ESL staff is super fun).
We're really pushing it on some of these calls. We're charging full-price for preventative maintenances on keg boxes (These don't really have anything to "maintain" aside from cleaning the condenser coils and this practice was described as "ripping people off" by our CFO. Did I mention that I'm out of coil cleaner? I might get some more next week and was told to make due without it in the meantime instead of stopping at a store and buying some.). I drove 2.5 hours and charged a bar $180 ($65 for the part) to replace a shank on a keg box, really to replace the spacer (that we don't have in stock) that had cracked. I understand needing to charge a markup and labor, but this part can be ordered online for $20 and replaced in 15 slow-moving minutes. Needless to say, the customer was not amused (I was apparently the third person sent to fix this.) and paid up but asked that I express her displeasure to my boss.
I drove 10 hours round trip to install two shanks only to find that the parts I was sent with didn't fit. Why we ordered shanks 10.5 inches long (and waited months for said parts to be custom made) to replace parts ~2 inches long, I don't know. I drove six hours round trip to install a nitro infusion box because our install technician did a sufficiently shit job with a surly attitude on a previous install that the customer asked the we send anyone else. I drove eight hours round trip (complete with the CEO himself badgering my superiors asking for my ETA; would've been nice to have known the urgency of the situation or even what exactly I was supposed to be working on without having to call my supervisor and ask, and thank God it was a reset button because I didn't have the condenser fan I was sent to check on hand and/or would've felt like a total jackass telling the customer "I don't know why your compressor isn't turning on; call an HVAC tech.") to press a reset button (high pressure tripped out on the compressor of a glycol chiller). I all but wasted four days doing almost nothing (not that we had many calls to run anyway, and my boss didn't have access to our list of outstanding PMs until halfway through the month) waiting on a chiller to show up because we screwed up getting it shipped. These screwups, low call volume, and our huge service area make for a lot of one-call days and mostly two call days (or three easy, low-value calls), which makes it impossible for me to actually hit 40 hours a week, let alone the overtime I was promised. For example, today I was supposed to drive 2.5 hours to my first call, .5 hours from that location to the second call (actually reasonable!), 2 hours to the third call, and then 2 hours home (The third call canceled, so I was spared that in favor of a PM nearby. Too bad it was going to be the money-making call of the three.). This is not great when all three calls wind up being one hour, low-profit jobs.
On the bright side, I actually managed to catch my boss off the record at the bar and we had a relatively honest conversation (We both have about the same tenure in our current positions.) about things. She expressed mounting frustration with me repeatedly getting sent to undo install's fuckups (I don't care, but it's got to be screwing with her numbers, as is having to scrounge for blatant make-work for lack of calls or access to the PM list.), inventory (or lack thereof; we had to punt a job for another week because we don't have the materials needed to do it, and had to split a job a job with another company because we didn't have a secondary gas regulator in stock) issues, and constant issues with line cleaners' personal vehicle reimbursement (chronically being paid out late and/or less than promised) causing endless drama. She fessed up that she and her immediate superior really were told when I was recruited to the company that said reimbursement was going to be a lot better than it wound up being, that multiple friends of hers that she'd referred to the company had been "screwed" by this, and that she and her boss had been made to look dishonest. Apparently whoever was in charge of rolling out the vehicle reimbursement had the ratio of company owned vehicles to employee owned vehicles backwards (70/30 in favor of company vehicles when the actual ratio was 30/70) such that the company was blindsided by the expense of reimbursing line cleaners for using their vehicles (Before covid every employee got a company car, but they had to sell off most of them to survive the shutdown.).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
In my opinion as an alcoholic barfly who actually worked for the bar for a few years: maybe (in the right bar in the right location, but sure as shit not the bar I worked at), but no. For context, the bar I worked at catered (or at least aspired to cater) to grad students and professors in a college town, wound up being a hangout for retired/nearly retired professionals during happy hour and townie millennials during night shift (This demographic is rapidly aging out of the bar scene to an extent that the bar faces an existential crisis because Gen Z doesn't really drink that much.)
The odds are long, and worsened by the fact that bars are A. sausagefests and B. often skew old in their clientele. The drinks are cheaper at the place I worked at, $10-$12 cocktails, yes, but we also sell $2 PBR pints as long as the distributor doesn't screw up and run out of them, $4 domestics (including Miller Lite and Yuengling pint cans, Budweiser stuff comes in 12oz bottles), and $8 shifties (any domestic plus any well shot; my usual is a Budweiser with a shot of Jameson). You justify the cost because you like drinking and talking, and while getting laid probably isn't in the cards a good conversation probably is. As the millennials age out even the "interesting conversation" part is starting to become questionable.
In my experience young (and especially young and attractive) women rarely come to the bar alone, usually with a friend/spouse or in a group of friends who are having their own conversation and don't want an outsider butting in. There aren't dramatic rejections; you just pick up on the fact that you're not part of the group and that their conversation, game, or whatever was for them, not for you. The rare young woman who does show up alone (usually in-between relationships) will be subject to insane amounts of competition for attention from every single guy aged 21-80. The older guys have the money to buy her drinks and are sexually non-threatening, and thus will win most of her attention.
Very early millennial to Gen X and older women (and men) tend to be way less introverted and more willing to talk. It's hard to pry younger people away from their phones.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
DOGE is a suicide mission (unless a meaningless blue ribbon commission, which is what I expected) and it's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously. The executive has relatively limited means to actually do anything about the budget. That has to come from Congress, and the GOP has been anywhere from useless (W. Bush administration oversaw the biggest increase in healthcare spending since LBJ; Obamacare just locked it in and socialized some of it) to merely OK (second-term Obama GOP House did see some deficit reduction) on the budget since Gingrich, who was frankly playing on easy mode (post cold war peace dividend plus the peak earning years of the Boomers coinciding with a small generation retiring and good economic growth) compared to what any House is dealing with now.
Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I was one of those who made it. My snappy way of putting it is that I don't have to thank a teacher for being able to read but I do have to thank a Head Start speech therapist for being able to talk.
I wound up back in special ed as a Kindergartener for bad behavior/ADHD. There were IEPs, some of them were farcical. At some point they had me IQ tested and decided that I was "talented and gifted" (I have a severe loathing for that term, because my sister wasn't, and our mother wrecked her for failing to match that.). Supportive home environment? Not really, though my grandparents were great. It was a lot like Hillbilly Elegy with the characters and dysfunctions shuffled, maybe a bit worse. I did have the intellectual reserve to get away with being a terribly lazy/inefficient student. Even in the worst of times, there was this weird dichotomy where I was this awful pain in the ass kid, but also the kid who could and was glad to fix their computers (mostly dumb issues like "this isn't plugged in", but I wound up working as an assistant for the computer lab in place of study hall and was pretty good at basic PC troubleshooting and repair). I'm not proud of this in retrospect, but the elementary teachers got variable results out of me. The ones who were able to elicit my affection/desire to please instead of resentment through failed attempts to intimidate generally got along fine with me. Odd as it may seem given how much I hated school, I remember all of them fondly.
If I have to credit anyone for my successful reform, it was my middle school and in particular grades 6-8 teachers. They were a bunch of veterans who more or less ran their own show independent of the office, and were thus able/willing to strike their own bargain without involving the office or my mother. They were tough and strict, but fair, and never took anything personally. The bargain was simple: "We catch you breaking the rules, you suffer the punishment.". I liked leaning back in my chair (against the rules), so I incurred a bunch of glossary pages (to the point that I still remember the page number, 746) and paddlings, but it wasn't personal. I was released from special ed by 7th grade and upon graduating 8th grade the vice principal, my old nemesis, called me his "greatest success story". I was privileged as a high school student (in a "math and science" boarding school) to have the opportunity to go back and help the elementary literacy teacher set up her computers before each school year. I was a pain in the ass student; it was the least I could've done.
Am I a success? Eh...I'm not dead or in jail as I was expected to be. Did I live up to my college education? Also no. I rode an easy gravy train (locally owned food delivery company) after being a crippled alcoholic in my early 20s. The gravy train ended and I'm trying to figure out what's next. I'm not optimistic, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
As for ADHD, I mostly don't notice it as an adult unless I'm badly emotionally regulated (lol where does PTSD end and ADHD begin?) or in an unfamiliar situation where I haven't been able to set up a construct to work around it. At my best (owner's crony/best producer at a food delivery company) I am actually very structured and relentlessly organized/detail oriented.
In my current gig (draft beer repair/service technician) I am lauded for my excellent communication skills because I take the time to document/explain what I'm doing to on-site managers. I don't feel like I'm doing anything special, just explaining to the customer what I'm doing/need to do, and why that is, essentially telling them what they're paying for and why they need this or that thing done.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I just finished Metro 2033. I'd liked the game some time ago, was bereft of things to do (not terribly sick, but just enough to deter me from my usual weekend plan of socializing at the bar) and figured I'd brush back up on it before deciding whether or not to go for purchasing Metro: Exodus because I wasn't really feeling another replay of Far Cry 4, 5, or New Dawn (FC6 was just too bad to play through IMO).
It was a slog for most of it, the (translated into English) prose not entertaining enough in its own right to carry the slow pace before the plot got into gear. The last third of it was good enough to make me consider Metro 2034 and Metro 2035. If nothing else, reading Metro 2034 will be a shorter time investment than replaying the first two games.
For more fun junk food, I recently polished off the latest of Blaine Pardoe's Blue Dawn series. Basically, imagine a Tom Clancy novel set in a contemporary American civil war-like scenario and see also: Kurt Schlicter's People's Republic* series. Both are fun if cheesy, the perfect sort of book to kill a long day of flying with, but IMO Blue Dawn was just a bit better/more compelling even if the editing could've used some work.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Not OP, but no.
If anything, I'd argue that black Americans having the highest in-group bias disguises the fact that Americans as a whole, black Americans included, really aren't that racist.
Supermajority black places in America tend to suck either because they're super rural literal plantation country equivalents to the crappy left-behind parts of Appalachia (The black belt in Alabama is like this.), or because they had/have sufficiently severe crime problems that all middle class people including the black middle class fled the place.
If anything, judging by hiring patterns alleged and observed I'd be fascinated to see where various immigrant groups rank in terms of in-group bias. Alas, the famous graph had small sample sizes for even black and Hispanic Americans and the Asian-American sample was so small as to be useless.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I don't think it's so much that (The Fed did keep rates low in Trump's first term, after all.) as a bias toward "low rates good", belief that inflation was "transitory" and would correct itself more quickly than it did (Strictly speaking, it was, in the sense that inflation in the late 40s was also transitory.), and fear that raising rates would slow down the economy more than it did (Volker's rate hikes made for a nasty recession in the early 80s.). There's also the inconvenient problem that high rates are bad for the government's balance sheet.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
It is sickening, but that's the world. Absent foreign intervention (and Ukraine has been lavishly supplied by foreign benefactors relative to the Confederacy) Ukraine finds itself in roughly the same situation as the Southern Confederacy did during the American Civil War (and the combat looks a lot like the eastern theater of that war, aka. a static attritional grind with both sides unable to adapt to the fact that technological advances have invalidated their tactics,), outnumbered by the foreign enemy and stuck with frontier territories of dubious loyalty (There are probably more Ukrainians fighting in the Russian army than all foreign volunteers fighting for Ukraine combined. General Sherman's personal escort during the March to the Sea was a cavalry regiment from north Alabama.).
As a Southerner, at what point did/does the dying cease to be worth it? In retrospect I find myself angry with the likes of Jefferson Davis, brave with the lives of people like me and for what? Being perpetually poorer than the north? The "slaveocracy" whose idea of white supremacy was to import, support, and nourish ever more non-whites? The CSA richly deserved to die, and the only tragedy is that Southerners were shockingly able and brave enough to keep the war going and incur genocide-tier casualties in doing so. Ukraine pre-2014 had transformed itself from one of the better off Soviet republics to one of the poorest countries in Europe, literally worse off than Belarus.
I don't proclaim myself able to speak for Russians or Ukrainians, but from my perspective as an American this war isn't our war. I don't like the eastern-European emigres who have far too much influence in our government. There isn't going to be justice in that region. Justice probably entails digging up the graves of those responsible for failing to manage the fragmentation of the USSR into at least a customs union.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I don’t actually believe Russia has an overly functional nuclear arsenal
Why do so many people say this about Russia, but not China, India, or Pakistan? Say what you want about Russian military performance in Ukraine, their equipment does conspicuously seem to work. The armored vehicles run, drive, and shoot things (Even the Ukrainian T-64s, which had a reputation for being garage queens during the Cold War, don't seem to elicit complaints about being unreliable.). Their planes fly and drop bombs. Even their navy, ridiculously expensive method of storing and launching cruise missiles that it's been in this war, has to be blown up by Ukrainians to sink, and the missiles do launch and hit things if not shot down first. My Twitter feed is bereft of Russian missiles blowing up during launch N-1 style.
Their rockets were recently considered good enough to send American astronauts on. Ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads aren't exactly new technology. "Lol their nukes don't work." strikes me as the same caliber of cope as 2022 predictions that Russian military logistics would collapse for lack of tires.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
For me, the frustrating part is that I could be a lot better at this, but the training was just so limited that there's far too much that I don't know or don't know enough about to speak with confidence on. Post training, the problem has been similar to the problem I had during training: most of our calls are fairly unsophisticated stuff and our call volume has been low, so it's hard to learn and retain knowledge. TBH, while my supervisor is prone to excessively exuberant positivity, it appears that our standards are just low (in keeping with the pay).
During a call earlier this week I noticed a massive nitrogen leak on something someone else had done (I suspected us due to the fact that the gas lines were the same brand we use.), due to the fact that every crimp connection on a splitter was loose (fitting was too small for the size of gas line used, clamps can only do so much). I mentioned it to my supervisor and she laughed; apparently we installed that setup last year. I don't know if it was our install team (wouldn't be the first time) or the previous service tech (also wouldn't be the first time) that did it, nor am I immune to making mistakes, but come on, at least make sure your crimp connections are tight. Oh, and to add insult to injury the same supervisor forgot to add a gas regulator to the quote on the job I did. I should've caught that (and called my boss and was like "I feel like I'm missing something here."), but for some dumb reason I assumed that the pressure straight out of the non-adjustable blend box would be okay to run cold brew coffee since it isn't carbonated. Our parts inventory is a total shitshow so our other guy who could've done it today didn't have a regulator, nor did we have one in our storage unit, but I have two in my truck (but was on a call 200 miles away from where he was), so I get to drive 5 hours round trip to deliver him a regulator tomorrow and run one call, with another call possible/probable depending on customer approval.
The drive time can wear on you (I was a delivery driver for 14 years and loved it, but driving on the interstate is mind-numbingly boring.). If I'm lucky my calls are an hour away. My shortest drive this week has been two hours to the first call, 90 minutes home from the second call. Three days with 5 hour round-trip drives. I drove six hours round trip today to sell a restaurant manager a $30 coupler and tell her that her line was foaming because that product was either improperly handled, defective from the brewery, or had a bad keg seal (My guess is one of the first two because the seal looked fine, but I'm certain it was a bad keg. If you swap products to different tap lines and the problem follows the keg, it's the keg.). We charged her nearly $500 in labor for drive time (not so much because of pure distance, but because it was to a part of the state that we don't normally do much business in). I get that we quoted her that much in hopes that she'd call someone else, and it's not my fault that the restaurant manager didn't think to swap the kegs before assuming that her system was broken, but man it's hard not to feel like a bit of an asshole when presenting that invoice for 30 minutes of work.
Apparently I have a call lined up next week that's a 9-10 hour round trip drive for a 1-2 hour job.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
This job fuckin’ sucks, man!
I’ve been meaning to write this update for 4-6 weeks, but here we are. The last week of training wasn’t any more illuminative than the three before it (for the same reason; low call volume; my trainer apologized to me several times for the “bullshit training” that I was receiving), and apparently the folks up north had intended to keep me for more time to make up for the slow pace, but due to communications SNAFUs they called it at that and sent me on my own.
The first week on my own nearly broke me. Lots of calls, almost all far away, and I barely/didn’t know what I was doing. Too slow/disorganized and not good at diagnosing, and there was one particular call where I had what I thought was the gas leak isolated to a bank of four lines and just couldn’t find it. I found and fixed a leak, but it wasn’t the leak. Not being able to fix a problem bothers me in a way that I can best describe as ego-killing, and adding salt to the wound my supervisor got bitched at for me getting too many hours when four out of five days involved 5-hour round trips between the calls and home (Uh, I was under the impression that overtime was expected with this position. I drive more than any service tech in the company due to the low-density market I work in.), which in turn meant that I got bitched at/nagged to take lunch breaks. Apparently the company is in the middle of an overtime crackdown. I asked to be demoted to line cleaning and was denied.
Since then, things have been weird and, well, slow. I have good calls and bad calls, and have gotten better at not letting the bad calls make me want to end it all (I’m not being serious, wasn’t in any danger then and am far from it now, but good God those first few weeks were rough.) while allowing myself to feel good about the good calls. We’ve been so dead in service that I’ve been repeatedly sent to cover line cleaning routes for lack of service calls.
The problem is twofold: The first one is the most clinical. I don’t make enough money at this job to afford doing it long term. Adjusted for inflation, I make about what I did delivering pizza for Papa John’s 10 years ago and could probably match or beat it if I went back to the Papa. I could almost certainly make more money delivering pizza for Domino’s. Overtime hasn’t happened, so I’m stuck in the worst-case situation where I drive 10 hours a week for free (first and last hours of one’s daily driving are unpaid) and simultaneously struggle to get close to 40 hours a week. It’s a nonexistent to negligible gross raise and a significant hourly pay cut.
The second problem is that I mostly hate this job. I’m better at not taking it personally, but I’m not good at correcting foaming beer problems. I’ve gotten better at finding gas leaks but am far from a maestro. I’m not as fast as I would like to be but I’m getting better at putting kegboxes together (I didn’t know how much that aspect of the job would resemble working in construction.) I can change parts and within the parameters I’m trained on (aka. Not involving the HVAC side of things) I like working on glycol chillers, if only because the problem is usually obvious (My most common calls there are either a broken/ pump/motor, failed temperature controller, or total loss of coolant due to a coolant leak.).
My supervisor is blowing nothing but sunshine up my ass about how great of a job I’m doing and judging by the shoddy previous work we’ve done I’ve had to correct on some calls I’m at least partially inclined to believe her, even adjusting for the fact that we’re longtime friends, but I don’t feel like I do a good job. I’ve done some good jobs and gotten lucky draws here and there, but that doesn’t mean that I’m good at my job. Good would mean fixing the hard calls. As of last Friday I was allegedly the top-grossing service tech in the company for the month of February (This probably means that I was the only one to install a glycol chiller, our biggest ticket item.), something that “never happens” coming from my market. If true (and I don’t think she’s lying), my response is less self-congratulation and more “Holy fuck, I guess everyone else is as dead as I am or worse, because I’m not doing shit and my sales are well below the old goal to make commission.”.
The good news is that I should be able to pass a drug test (My new year’s resolution was slow to get off the ground, but I’m pushing six weeks without fake weed, and I don’t really miss it.) as of next week and start shotgunning applications. I don’t know what or where to do next, but this ain’t it. If I fail such that I’m still working here mid-April, I’ll make my one year anniversary and get a week of paid vacation.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Depends on the job, I guess, and I haven't taken the test in awhile. I usually get ISTP, but if I'm emotionally dysregulated (therapy-speak for "excessively stuck in my feelings, usually with a connotation of despair and self-pity but on rare occasions excitement?!) I'll score ISFP, and while I haven't taken those tests in 5-10 years I would consider myself a lot more extroverted than I did then (but probably not enough to earn an E over I).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
I'm kind of there right now. I had a successful gig in food delivery (owner's crony/right hand man at a small company) for a long time before the market got oversaturated/our customers got broken by post-covid inflation and the company I worked for had the bottom fall out and blundered into the draft beer industry, which is also facing rough times (or, at least, my company is; I'm apparently the top grossing service technician in the company for this month right now and that's insane because I'm A. straight out of half-assed training and barely/not competent at my job and B. have been so slow that I haven't hit 40 hours in three consecutive weeks).
I loathe my job and can't afford to live on what I'm making, but I have enjoyed working on glycol refrigeration units (They're the closest thing to working on cars in this job, and that's the vocational area I have past experience/strength in.) so I'm thinking that I should look into working on refrigerators.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
In my experience, the Trump voters believed that we were already in a recession or heading there. One happening now will just cement their belief that we were already there.
I will admit to being surprised that DOGE wasn't just shunted off to a room to spout hot air and do nothing. Government budgeting is messy and the real problems are extremely difficult to solve (bad demographics and a basically unreformable healthcare sector; we can't grow our way out of the debt when our post '08 growth has been pitiful compared to Reagan, Clinton, or even Dubya). Are social conservatives brave enough to suggest that MAID is the morally correct conclusion to Boomers and older Xers' fondness for aborting future taxpayers? I doubt it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
A similar thing happened with Millennials and the skilled trades/manufacturing. The '08 recession wrecked those sectors and in the absence of opportunity people went elsewhere, i.e. to college. As a then-student in the early 2010s who was handy with cars I worked with a guy (mechanical engineering major who was a significantly better mechanic than I) who'd quit his entry-level automotive job because slinging pizzas for Papa John's paid quite a bit better than being an apprentice mechanic, in addition to being a much easier job.
One of my uncles is a tradesman (a painter) and spent the early 2010s so broke that his wife and children occasionally lacked electricity. It was such that I emptied my wallet (We're talking like 50 bucks here.), and left it in the bed they'd let me sleep in during a visit (He'd have never taken a dime if I offered it to them, not even as a Christmas gift.). My uncle called me a few days later mentioning the money and I told him "Merry Christmas". It was the least I could do, and I wish I'd been in a position to do more.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Plus, in an accelerationist sense, social security saps popular impetus for a UBI in the same way that medicare/medicaid sap the will for universal healthcare.
The only way that America will get either of those things will be in the name of of bailing out the Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
Anti-old paramilitaries? Welfare for the old has been a core Democratic policy for nearly 100 years at this point, and old women are arguably their most loyal demographic. Add in the medical practitioners and their auxiliaries whose jobs are to care for the old in some variety and you have a massive chunk of the Democratic coalition.
Democrats at best are every bit as much a party of Gerontocracy as the Republicans are, if not moreso.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2mo ago
As an American it remains an insane oddity to me that Pakistan wasn't given the Gulf War treatment in 1998 after its nuclear tests. We didn't even totally suspend aid!
Correct on all counts. The company (at least from where I'm looking) is clearly struggling for cashflow, and thus we get issues like personal vehicle reimbursements being paid chronically late (not an issue for me, but a chronic source of drama with the line cleaners), fleet maintenance freeze, overtime crackdowns, issues ordering inventory, layoffs, and so on. The job would be tolerable on paper if I were actually paid for all my drive time, but as it is I'm expected to drive 10 hours a week (barring the rare exception in which I get a call in the town I live in) for free.
With that, things were slow in Q1 (averaging two calls a day with occasional line cleaning days) but have gone from slow to apocalyptically dead in Q2 (Rarely more than one call a day. I had a whole week where I ran one billable call.). We lost a major line cleaning contract to a competitor and instantly laid off a quarter of our market's line cleaners (One was a new hire in the middle of training!), so I've been spending most of my time covering (now quite barren) line cleaning routes for the guys we laid off. My supervisor has all but given up (Today was one of her Thursday sickouts after having been seen at the bar the night before lol.) and just tells me to do whatever and find some lines to clean or go to the storage unit and rearrange my truck when I don't have calls, whereas before I would get a list of spots to hit in order of priority.
I doesn't take a degree in economics to see where things are going. Relative to most markets for service techs (who have apparently been quitting en masse in other markets) the service area in mine is gigantic. It can be made to work given sufficient call volume that I drive to the city 2.5 hours away (or better yet the city an hour away, but that's where we just lost that line cleaning contract) and have three calls scheduled or the 1-2 calls are sufficiently lucrative. When the call volume drops, we lose economy of scale and wind up doing money-losing things like sending me to the same city a 5 hour round-trip drive away on two different days in the same week to run two different one-hour calls. Adding insult to injury, the "run one call and then clean lines" routine isn't even productive for line cleaning because the cleaning routes are heavily morning-weighted to hit places before they open and are serving product. Tomorrow I'm going to drive that 2.5 hours for a 10AM call (Can't do it any earlier than when they show up.), and then am assigned to "clean whatever you can" in a city an hours' drive away, so I'll be showing up in the middle of places' lunch rush trying to clean beer lines on a route I've never run before. Such productivity!
In all seriousness, I hope my supervisor is keeping it professional, putting on a brave face, and looking for jobs herself instead of drinking the kool-aid because this situation isn't looking very tenable. I would be far from surprised if the new investors take one look at the books from market to market, start shutting down marginal/money losing markets, and pulled out of our market entirely.
On the bright side I submitted the necessary information for my background check at the trucking company gig, and hopefully we'll get to the interview next week.
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