My Day, or Five Reasons to Become a Mechanic

Hello, audience. Believe it, or not, I've actually started several posts that kind of miscarried and never made it to finished and posted. Maybe someday they'll see the light of day, but today, I decided to share some thoughts stemming from my day.

In addition to getting up and working eight hours before noon, I got to take my car to the mechanic for some routine maintenance before I take a road trip next week. Isn't that just the best? Is there anything better than taking your car to a dubious stranger so that they can demand obscene amounts of money? It's probably my favorite thing.

I came to the conclusion today that I should become a mechanic. Screw my artistic aspirations and the apprenticeship I'm pursuing. Tattoos are clearly the wrong business, and here are five reasons why.

1. Appearing competent
When you work in a field like auto-repair, you have the comforting knowledge that 90% of your customers are completely ignorant. You tell them that a mischievous gnome has ripped holes in their car's mass air intake, and they'll probably nod sagely (so as to avoid looking incompetent or uneducated) and thank you for your attention to detail. And this is without even having to do any actual work to prove your ability. You could probably accomplish the exact same appearance of expertise simply by putting an oil-stained rag in your pocket and speaking authoritatively while standing in the office of a garage.

You can tell he's experienced by the way he's trying to use a wrench 

on a  tire attached to nothing. And he has coveralls!

2. Charging for your presence
The accepted term for this is "labor," but as far as I know these fees require no actual labor. Glancing over a car long enough to say, "Your front tires exploded and the hood is folded in half," counts as an inspection and therefore ground for labor costs. You can spend an hour in the same room as a car and it qualifies as billable time.

3. Innumerable reasons for fees
Cars, as you may or may not ("Meyer may not") know, are a complex, interdependent system, so that one problem may stem from many underlying issues, or the other way around (one underlying issue causing many problems, for those who couldn't quite keep up.), so there are a thousand different things that could be wrong, and each one of them is a reason to charge more. Because time is money. So the more theoretical time you might spend on a thing, or the more complex it is, the more you charge. See how that works? Potential time for a repair + actual amount of time spent on a repair + between two and four times the costs of parts + number of things that could potentially have been wrong = total bill.
So, if, for example, you could have spent eight hours on a repair, and you actually spent three, the part costs fifteen dollars, the problem was loosely connected to the exhaust system, and the moon is waning, you would charge the soul of their firstborn and two months wages. Simple, right?

4. No necessity to do actual work
Especially when you run your own place of business (this isn't limited to mechanics), there are often underlings of a lower pay grade whose sole existence is to perform grunge work, so when one is a mechanic and hired to fix an automobile, one's primary job is to stand in the office and explain to bewildered (soon to be penniless) customers what exactly is wrong with their car, and how that gnome seems to have expanded his activities to the throttle body and the transmission, at which point the appropriate thing to do is show them a neatly outlines list of the things that need/might need/might actually be done in order to correct this problem. Of course, including the expected costs of parts and labor -_-

5. Ensuring future employment
If you recall, as I hope all of you without crippling short term memory loss would, I mentioned in #3 that cars are delicate, interconnected systems that all build on one another to create a two ton metal box for you to give rides to drunken friends, and many, many different things can go wrong within that complex machinery. A common practice that has recently gotten a lot of attention is slightly tweaking a few things in that mess of systems so that cars run less than optimally.

Yes. There are mechanics that break cars so that you have to come back and pay them some more to look at your car and say knowledgeable things.

If you think about it, it's a brilliant way to make money (assuming you don't have any qualms about stealing or ruining people's lives, but, really, who does these days?). What more effective job guarantee could there be? It's like a homicide detective going out and murdering people on the slow weeks.

I feel like there's a show about that...

Anyway, the only conclusion I can come to here is that I should become a mechanic and make money hand over fist. I've done work on my car, and it's pretty easy stuff if you know what to look for.

And that tiny fact-- "as long as you know what to look for"-- is the basis of the entire trade. As long as you know something someone else doesn't, you can make them pay through the nose for that ignorance, right?

On Gifts and Narcissism

Hello, audience. Happy not-quite-Halloween. It's been a little while since I've posted anything...Like since August. I haven't forgotten my blog, though. I'm still here to spew my nonsense into the ether by force. I've just been somewhere between unmotivated and busy. Not that anyone reading my blog is wildly invested in what I do outside of my blog. NO! We are here to be amused, not regaled with accounts of my monotonous daily life!

Any, this is actually a combination post of something I've been considering writing about here for a while and something I've been considering privately due to recent events fringing my social circle.

The second shall be discussed first!

Everyone likes presents, right? Gifties that other people give you that are both free and pleasing. That's why we go so freaking berserk over gift-giving events (Christmas, birthdays, weddings, baby things, and so on). But the other side of gifts is the giving part.

If only these weren't both right hands...

There's two sides: the giving party and the getting party including at least one person each. Unless this is a present to oneself, in which case, the whole discussion here is moot.

(Which is, on a total side note, one of my favorite words to say for irrelevant nothing things. Like jack, squat, and BUMPKIS!)

This is possibly because of my upbringing (and my mother's upbringing), but I have a very turtle-parenting approach to gift-giving.

You all understand this comparison, right? Turtles--sea turtles, I believe--have a hands/flippers-off parenting method: they lay their eggs on a beach, and then take off. "Good luck, fetal turtle spawn! Come find us if you ever hatch!" Once they lay those suckers, their job is done. Off they go to frolic in the ocean and be endangered.

This is how I give presents. I choose something I think the giftee will like/appreciate/use/etc, I give it to them with or without any kind of ceremony or pretty wrapping (usually without either, because I procrastinate). The end. Once I've given something to someone as a gift, it's theirs, no strings attached, no expectations or conditions about what happens after that. They can cut up, regift it, or leave it in their garage for the next fifty years for all of the involvement I expect to have. Yes, I'll be somewhat hurt if they don't like it, but that's not the point of giving a gift.

Recently, someone received a gift from relatives, who promptly sent a note a month later to explain what a selfish douchwaffel she was for not sending an effusive thank you note. Because everyone knows a GIFT is actually an exchange of goods/services for thanks/services.

WTF, bro?

I've actually known a few people who get really butt-hurt about not getting thanked in the form of a card, or who don't get a return present at the next possible opportunity. This irks me because you are as obligated to give people gifts as you are to feed wild animals.

Barring those "gifts" that are actually help when people genuinely and desperately need it, but I would call that help, not gifts.

The point is that they're not necessary. If you don't want to give someone something, don't. It's that easy. The thing about gifts is that they're not supposed to even involve obligation or entitlement. Gifts are not deserved, and they're not relational commerce.

And that was about all I had to say about that. It seems remarkably self-centered to give someone else a present and then have expectations and demands for something you freely gave.

Speaking of self-centered: Narcissism!

As much as my siblings joke about being narcissists when referring to our vanity and general fabulousless and self-assurance, we are aware that there are other people who also important and living their own lives totally separate from us.

We're probably not always aware of this, but I don't think anyone is.

Because I have news for you, people (assuming you've read this whole post, which is not inconsiderable in size)

YOU ARE NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN OTHER PEOPLE. Your time is not worth more; your agenda is not more pressing; your plans are not more important.

Unless you have managed to earn a place at the top of the human pyramid, you're just as worthless as all those people you speed past in traffic and all those people you thrust your money at without even glancing at.

I'm beginning to have this theory that everyone is some level of sociopath. Yes, we sometimes experience empathy for people we already care about, and we can sometimes dissect other people's actions until we can understand and condone them, but we all operate from our own little world of me, me, me, me, me, and me. We are the only person we consider about 90% of the time.

And, honestly, I'm mostly cool with that. I think Ayn Rand had a lot of things right (unpopular and insane as she might be), but as one of the millions of people on this planet regularly treated like crap for a paycheck, and as someone with what looks like Tourette's in heavy traffic (or light traffic. Or any traffic, really. If there are other cars in the street, I hate them with a fiery and very verbal passion), I'm noticing more and more just how much we seriously don't give a crap about people, because it doesn't even occur to us to consider them as fellow human beings. They're props and inconveniences in our story, not people with lives and plans and hopes and motivations and needs all their own. (See Cracked's article on the Monkeysphere)

It's kind of appalling.

That prick that swerved in front of you is just a bloody moron, but if you abruptly swing into another lane, it's because, crap, your turn is coming up, and you didn't realize it. Or when someone zooms past you, weaving lanes and cutting ahead, they're  inconsiderate and irresponsible, and that idiot shouldn't even have a license, but when you're late, you can rush through traffic in whatever way gets you there quickest. It's okay to leave your table in a restaurant a mess, but if you have to sit down at a dirty table, someone is rude and disrespectful.

We have these absurd double-standards that dictate that we can do no wrong, and everything that inconveniences us is because everyone else sucks.

There's some fantasy novel I read at some point. It may have been Green Rider, where there's this water bucket hanging from a tree by the road so that travelers can drink, and above it is a sign asking whoever drinks to refill it for the next person, so that no one has to come to it without being able to get a drink. So don't be a douchebag. People come before and after you, and they matter just as much to themselves as you do to you. It's the frickin' "golden rule" that everyone leans as a wee, little child. Just apply it, and everyone will hate each other less.

Also, here's an article with some nice suggestions to do just that.

Five Valid Reasons Not to be a Stripper

Maybe I'm the only one who keeps being told that being a stripper would be awesome. If so, feel free to skip this post and waste your time and entertain yourself in some other way.

In almost no particular order:

1) EXERCISE

Because no one ever wants to do that except crazy people. Apparently pole-dancing takes some serious muscle.  And, lets be honest, guys, no one wants to see someone's half-naked flab, especially when they're not at all invested emotionally. Most people don't even want to see clothed flab, barring some terrifying fetishes. Also, apparently being attractively toned and athletic is kind of important in a trade where you sell your body.

Did you know that they offer pole dancing classes at a lot of gyms now? They're largely populated by pathetic, suburban soccer-moms.

2) TAN

For some mysterious reason, those of us the color of a luminescent glass of milk are not the standard for beauty.

Whatever happened to the times when this was the height of health and attractiveness?

And that's the creation of Eve, so so obviously the real standard.

So unless you were aiming for some vampire-fetish or goth strip joint (Do they even have those? I don't think strip clubs follow the rule of internet porn subject matter--If you can conceive of it, it exists somewhere.), you'll have to either sit outside under the sun's fiery rays, get baked under artificial, carcinogenic lamps, or coat your skin in some horrifying shade of oily grossness.

3) OUTFITS

Of all the possible horrible outfits that professions can have, I think strippers got the short end of the stick, which shouldn't be possible given that their whole job is to take clothes off. But seriously, watch any movie, videogame, or tv show in existence and tell me you wouldn't feel like an idiot in that stuff.

Little do I know that they're intentionally awful so that people will gladly take them off when they're at work.

4) STAGE NAMES

Have you ever heard a stage name that you wouldn't wince at? I can understand not wanting to use your real name for several painfully obvious reasons, but why do half of them sound like sex-obsessed My Little Ponies? Is it so that there's no confusion? "Wait! That sounds like an actual name. Does that mean the clothes stay on??"

5)TIPS

Think about this for a minute: strippers get tipped by their adoring and horny audience stereotypically in singles. Not only is that not that much money for a very long time, it's going to add up. Think about the number of  dollars that they get on a regular night. Now imagine trying to wrestle all those ones into a wallet. Just think about that. Lots and lots of single bills.

Someone once told me that nearly every time she gets a dollar, she thinks to herself, "I wonder if this has been in a stripper's g-string."

This is the real reason for this whole post. I was carrying eighteen one dollar bills when I left work tonight, and getting them into my wallet was murder.

And that's really why you should finish high school and learn a real trade.

You know, aside from the part where you voluntarily make yourself a sex-object (and the rest of us by extension, men and women), and the creepers peering at your body.