TRick Dipstick – Manager, Mangler or Larry Burns Clone?
Well, they have managed to piss me off…
Again.
Those damned under achievers they call “managers” are just about ready to make me really angry… Or to quote my oldest daughter: (when, after being fed copious quantities of Mexican Fud, she found that no one had reloaded the TP dispenser) – “ASSHOLES!!!!!”
The life of a Toyota Tech at the current time is a rather not too enviable place right at the moment. It seems that everyone and their brother has a Raging Hard On to destroy Toyota’s supposedly Evil Empire. So besides having to deal with idiots and morons, on the way to work, coming home from work and listening to The Princess’ rants and ravings about Her own ride to and fro, I have to deal with THE MEDIA making Toyota out to be the modern equivalent to Charles “Chucko” Manson, Josef Stalin, Genghis Kahn and Martha Stewart. (I would have added Hitler, but he had too many redeeming qualities: Autobahn, forced evolution in rocketry, Volkswagen and making the world finally realize that Genocide is just wrong!! He should wiped out the all the politicians and lawyers instead and he would still be in power today…)
So as the Media frenzy refuses to look at the facts surrounding
1. Honda Air Bags that go off so hard they break your neck, rupture the air bag itself and/or spit shrapnel ‘ala Claymore mines in 2001 and 2002 models. (Unknown # of confirmed deaths and injuries due to the fact that they were in an accident when the airbag deployed. But sooner or later the lawyers will find out the exact #)
2. Chevy Cobalt power steering decides to lock up on the freeway with NO warning. ( 2005-09 model years. No info on injuries or deaths because they do not account for “driver lost control and hit a buss full of nuns killing everyone in a 400 square mile area”)
3. Ford Crown Vics still burst into flames ‘ala Pintos (at least 14 dead cops and countless injuries)
4. Ford recalls 6 million vehicles for the “flaming switch of death”… A $20 part they used from 1994 to 2002 and did nothing about until 2005 even though they knew it was burning cars down to the ground – some while they were parked in a garage, thus taking the house with it…
5. And lastly, my personal fav is the 1999 to 2002 GM Chevrolet trucks or SUVs that had a “SECRET” warranty program to fix brakes that DID NOT WORK!!! GM was only going to do a recall in 14 states (WTF ???) and then generously added 6 more states and the District of Columbia. So if you die from faulty brakes in one of the other 30 states, you’re just SOL…
Anyway…
The powers that be in My dealership (and, hell, for that matter, The Princess’ dealership – ARE YOU LISTENING, SHERIFF LARRY??!! ) can not get it through their collective noggins that when dealing with me they should bow down and grovel at the feet of and heap praise upon their One True Alignment God.
Uh, that, of course, would be me.
Being as good as I am requires: a highly refined AIQ ( Alignment Intelligence Quotient ), patience (“well at low speeds it pulls to the right until it hits 32.3 mph then it shakes until approx 41.9 then it wants to turn left until 54.6 then it…) , a sense of humor (you want THAT thing aligned?? …. yuk yuk yuk …. Get the fuck OUT!!!), good language skills (“Because you hit a fucking curb at 100 klicks, that would be approximately 63 miles an hour, SIR!!! That’s why you get to pay again, asshole!!”), the ability to cover the ass of any body shop’s shoddy and unbelievably poor workmanship (Well, guys, I am the best, but honestly, this damn car really should be welded back together, with metal this time not with 1/4 inch plywood and super glue…) massive amounts of physical strength, super human agility and the capacity to consume approximately 10.3 metric tons of junk food daily so that I can fart with the force of 26 Hiroshima-type bombs…
Of course there is more but you get the idea…
Anyway.
Sorry for the “background” info but you need to acclimate yourself to my world.
And now the REST of the story…
Seems that The New Guy who took my Dream Job ( that I was so very terribly over-qualified for ) is trying to woo a particular body shop into doing biz with us. So the aforementioned body shop sent us a blue car. One of the other techs did various “things” to this blue car and sent it to me for the alignment. I did said alignment. I did not fix what other “people” did to the blue car, I just aligned it.
See, all I got paid to do was align the car, so that’s all I did. I hooked up the High Holy Alignment Ark of the Covenant, set all the alignment angles to the factory preferred settings and then did a “normal” sub-sonic test drive. I did exactly what I had been paid to do. Unfortunately, some one else did NOT do what they were paid to do. In fact, A lot of someones did not do what they were paid to do… See, someone did not explain the original symptoms to me. Then another someone got over paid to do other things to the little blue car. The other things did not work and in one instance was done, uh, WRONG. I was informed by the infamous TRick Dipstick that he did not care who got paid to fix the blue car, it was now my job to do the clean up. This offended me. I then spent the next 2 hours growling, yelling, screaming and bleeding all over as I UN-fucked a previously fucked up repair.
Gee, the Blue car still had, uh, “issues”.
Off it went to the previous someone for more work.
Back it came to me for “more aligning”.
It was at this point, angered beyond all redemption, that I asked “You want I should just fix the damned thing or what?”
No answer was forth coming.
And so it came to pass that TRick Dipstick in his finite wisdom decided I was not to be trusted with diagnosing and/or fixing the little blue car. He set about proving I was not doing what needed doing and, by Gawd, he would take matters into his own small, diminutive, feminine little hands. He then invaded the Holy Of Holies: The Alignment Ark of The Covenant Machine. Since he also felt that I have obviously not had the Ark set up correctly for the last 4.5275 years he was going to “fix” the Alignment Ark. My poor baby was subjected to heresies and atrocities not seen since the last time Sheriff Larry tried to “fix” a vehicle some time during the time of the 2nd Crusades. The difference there though was that Pope Spark Plug Wire XII gave Sheriff Larry a free pass. I believe his words were “Go forth and Tinker with cars no more. Amen.”
The following is photographic evidence of the extreme carnage perpetrated upon the Sacred Coveted Alignment Machine Arc.
As we can clearly see above, the Alignment “Head” is designed to be installed with ALL FOUR POINTS attached to the wheel, uh, not three.
And as we can see above the “pins” that are “supposed” to installed on the wheel are actually installed on the “outside” of the “Target Assembly” when they should actually be installed on the “inside” of the “Target Assembly”… And, yes, all those quotes are only there to piss you morons off!!!
Screw that unintended acceleration horseshit, they need to do a recall on Managers and retrofit some Gawd damned common sense into the bastards!!!!
So after the obligatory “Say, uh, Boss Hog, you want I should actually fix that blue car or are we just going to keep throwing parts and labor at it until we wear out all the nuts and bolts holding it together?”
I then was forced to sit through 30 minutes of explanations of how he knows what is wrong and why it’s wrong and why can’t anyone just do what he says…
I believe I fell asleep right around the time he said that the lug nuts had to be tightened only during the 14 minutes leading up to the Winter Solstice and that the front toe was inextricably tied to phases of the moon as it passed the galactic center…
Finally, after mumbling something about how “I’m going to regret this, Troy, but just go fix the the Gawd damned thing and leave me alone to do my crochet work in peace otherwise I am never going to get this sweater for The New Guy finished…”
Needless to say, with a minimal amount of work and 1, count ‘em, one, uno, a singular part!! the little blue car was repaired correctly, the Alignment Machine Warp Drive was returned to working order, global annihilation was averted and the entire world heaved a collective sigh of relief. And no Red Shirts were even harmed…
And for all this I was presented with the statement “Well, Mr. Smarty Pants, if you knew what was wrong, why didn’t you fix it? You know how many laps around the parking lot I made all red faced, mumbling obscenities? I was ready to just hop in my Galaxy Class 500, 000 Ton Pick- up Truck and cry myself to sleep!!! You’re an asshole, making me look bad in front of The New Guy…”
Yeah, well, Yippee Yo Kai Yeah, mother… to you, too.
And all this can be yours after 32 years of being in automotive repair…
I really need to take over the world and terminate with extreme prejudice all who oppose me. It would not be genocide, it would be more like adding chlorine to the gene pool. And folks, THAT is why that damned video clip is on the front page of the website. Honest to God, they made a video about me working on the Alignment Rack promoting the fact that I am the best at what I do. It would certainly be nice if they themselves believed what they wished the public to believe…