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Man, I tell ya 50 hour weeks really takes it’s toll on your expendable time. Then you got the people outside of work asking you to work on their cars too. Remember Eric’s video about having mechanical skills being like having magical powers? Lol.
In any case people seem to love to ignore their MIL quite a bit. At least 17 cars with a flamboyant issue have come in for ROUTINE maintenance (oil change, rotation, tune-up) this week alone so far with the MIL on. It helps up-selling, but I wonder why these people are so oblivious to major issues and the work orders rarely say “perform diag on codes”. I tell ya, some people. Transmission making grinding noises? Just ignore it and turn the radio up :angry:
In any case, tomorrow I have two side jobs lined up…on my day off lol
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We have a record amount of used cars that need to go though the shop and no room to hire more techs even if we wanted to. My boss is getting nervous about “drowning in used cars” and next week is going to start having us drive them home so we can get one extra driven and looked over for the day. And of course I’ve got 4 side job people pestering me for things ranging from a yearly state inspection to diagnosing customer-perceived low vacuum on a highly modified 500hp Evo. I’ve been restraining myself to 50 hour weeks lately to keep from burning out. I totally get it man.
Only 50 hour weeks, Man you are getting off easy Chevyman. Harvest season is starting here and I will be lucky to get less that 60 hours a week. And my Arthritis is getting worse to the point I have to have others pick things up for me. I get done with work go home and collapse on the couch.
I hear you on that. Here at my Mazda dealership, RX-8 Season has just started (Cold weather makes rotary engine issues far more apparent) and I’m putting in 60 hours a week. Thank god I’m still 19 and can deal with the intensity. I will say 60 hours a week flagging 60 hours beats the hell out of 40 hours a week flagging 20 though. August was rough.
Some of you working 60 hour weeks? Damn. I suppose I am getting off lucky. I’ve always believed in a balance between work and life.
In any case fall is coming and things are probably about to ramp up for all of us technicians across the country. First the back to school crowd comes in, then the winter preppers, all to get us prepared for the holiday rush.
Overtime helps pay for presents and other goodies though, thank God for overtime.
It’s feast or famine in this career. It’s not a 9-5 M-F job. Few people have that setup in our field. Nope, you are either working your butt off or you are sitting on it. Not as bad as construction, but closer to that of working at a bank. I truely understand why a lot of people go for jobs with commercial accounts.
[quote=”Jasonw1178″ post=147222]It’s feast or famine in this career. It’s not a 9-5 M-F job. Few people have that setup in our field. Nope, you are either working your butt off or you are sitting on it. Not as bad as construction, but closer to that of working at a bank. I truely understand why a lot of people go for jobs with commercial accounts.[/quote] That’s why it’s smart to be conservative during feast time so that you can survive the famine.
About the time I got out of high school I worked in a full service gas station dispensing gas, going over every car, and performing relatively minor auto repairs.
At one point we were short handed and I had to work 98 hours a week. Seven days a week, fourteen hours a day, and no lunch break. After a week of that I was as close to being a zombie as a guy could get. A few times I would be standing at a podium inside the building doing daily reports and would fall asleep while standing up with pen in hand.
Falling over and banging my head into the podium usually woke me up…….Needless to say, this also gave me a short fuse and my tolerance for putting up with douchebags was very, very thin.
We had a pop machine that used to screw people out of money and they expected me to reimburse them even though the company really had nothing to do with the operation of that machine. Repeated calls to the soda pop bottler got nowhere.
After the 3rd complainer in one day and me bordering on homicidal rage due to 14 hour days I resolved to fix the pop machine at closing time that night.
I worked that thing over with the bar from the tire mounting machine and that fixed that. I called the bottler and told them their machine had been vandalized during the night; probably by an irate consumer who had lost their money in it. That took care of that problem………. 🙂A few weeks later I had all of that 98 hours a week I could stand and quit.
I can so relate. When I first go into this business I worked at the now gone Big 10 Tires. I was so green, a total newbie, and my other two coworkers who didn’t know their job either just totally dissappeared, I was the only one. Came in at 7am, worked to 9pm, luch was very short, and did this 7 days a week except Sunday we closed at 6. At first it was the highest hourly job I have ever had, and then I was getting some killer overtime, year somewhere around 80-95hrs a week and it kept me motivated for a while, then started to really suck. One day I woke up at home, and knew I didn’t work there anymore. I can not remember exactly what happened but I was on edge and knew that “one more BS day and I’m out”.
More recently, I worked 2 jobs for two years. Goodyear franchise from 8am to 6pm, then Home Depot from 7-11pm. Wasn’t every day, made sure I had Monday’s off and didn’t come in until noon on Sunday at HD. It was fine for a while. Came to be that even though the pay was less, I really liked working at HD better, but it got old. Eventually I had to hang it up on HD.
Working extremely hard at first feels very rewarding, but then the agony of always working starts to overcome the pay, and it just gets a little worse every day.
i had done that…first job out of trade school…only 2 wks after i left school. work there 12-14 hours a day, for 6 days…finally they said we need to work 7 days…back in 2004 with 1200/month ….more like 4 dollar hour around…once i was registered apprentice..they wanted to pay me $9.hour….they paid 25 year ex mechanic for 17/hour…pretty sad…
learn so much there yet…i hated work condition like that….working McD would been better at that time…
tire shops gets pretty old though…had to fix kids f-up daily…cross threaded lug nuts and bolts…nice…way too many of that…
p.s. i know that ” one more bs day and i am out”. i work flat rate right now…that’s like that for last 1.5 years here…
i am so ready to move yet…it’s hard to call it quits…I hear you on the getting calls from people part. After literally months of trying to get my brother in law to fix his truck (suspension, brakes, Chevy 1/2 ton with 200,000kms) I finally got him to come by so I could take a proper look at it. We get access to the shop on the 2 nights the dealership is open late, so as far as I’m considered if they aren’t willing to show up in those times, they can pay retail. So ya, the front end is a shit show of failure and there’s only the one night this week that I can get him in with the kids and sports and whatnot.
So I’m thinking to myself, OK, it’s going to be a hard 4 hours but I think I can get a majority of it done in one shot. And then…. My brother texts me saying he’s getting a grinding noise from his rear axle and is wondering if I could take a look at it. Ugh. Another night gone, just gone. It’s not even about money, I seriously don’t mind helping out the people in my inner circle. They’ve been there for me and never asked for anything. It’s just it all seems to happen at the same time.
I really must find one of these shops with too much work. Honestly where I am now, just can’t possibly work out. Does the phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” mean anything to anybody? That’s our managements strategy. They sent our 2 lube guys home the other day while the full line techs were on lunch. Come back and there’s 4 oil changes sitting there. Want to see an excited flat rate tech, tell them they get to do a few oil changes for .3. And we have 1, as in a single, solo, mono, individual squeegee for a 14 bay shop. Oh, there’s also barely any work after lunch left to be done. I’ve been there til the end of my shift once in the last month.
[quote=”DaFirnz” post=147563]I hear you on the getting calls from people part. After literally months of trying to get my brother in law to fix his truck (suspension, brakes, Chevy 1/2 ton with 200,000kms) I finally got him to come by so I could take a proper look at it. We get access to the shop on the 2 nights the dealership is open late, so as far as I’m considered if they aren’t willing to show up in those times, they can pay retail. So ya, the front end is a shit show of failure and there’s only the one night this week that I can get him in with the kids and sports and whatnot.
So I’m thinking to myself, OK, it’s going to be a hard 4 hours but I think I can get a majority of it done in one shot. And then…. My brother texts me saying he’s getting a grinding noise from his rear axle and is wondering if I could take a look at it. Ugh. Another night gone, just gone. It’s not even about money, I seriously don’t mind helping out the people in my inner circle. They’ve been there for me and never asked for anything. It’s just it all seems to happen at the same time.
I really must find one of these shops with too much work. Honestly where I am now, just can’t possibly work out. Does the phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” mean anything to anybody? That’s our managements strategy. They sent our 2 lube guys home the other day while the full line techs were on lunch. Come back and there’s 4 oil changes sitting there. Want to see an excited flat rate tech, tell them they get to do a few oil changes for .3. And we have 1, as in a single, solo, mono, individual squeegee for a 14 bay shop. Oh, there’s also barely any work after lunch left to be done. I’ve been there til the end of my shift once in the last month.[/quote]
sounds familiar of my auto group….where in canada are you? i am in great prairies…only border city in our country…
my family does same thing when they need something…lucky for me that they live about 14-18 hours away from me…they drive vehicle to the ground expect mechanic family to perform miracle…for a instance…my dear sister drove a nissan in past, heard from my mother that my sis kept drove her vehicle till overheat on highway…for a couple of months before they asked…my answer ” did u fill it up with coolant back up?…” silence…..from mom…..next suggestion was ” it will be good paper weight soon..i would get rid of it…asap….”
idk.. they are crazy enough doing it so many times…eventually they got different vehicle now but, lucky for kia dealer techs…they get to work on my sister’s vehicle…sure…she is my family…i know how her and her husband drives….they used to have scrape on each of side of vehicle…left side my sister, right side my brother in law…nice…perfect couple isn’t it..
nightmare customer if you ask me.
I’m about 10kms west of the geographic middle, think Winnie the pooh. I work for a group with an east Indian sounding name. Apparently there’s a few different cousins with their own groups across the country. The group in Vancouver is particularly large, but there is no direct association. Or so they say, I’m pretty sure they all have the same hack and slash approach to anything that is on the other side of “the wall of caring”.
You see in our building there is a single uninterrupted wall that runs the width of the building and it separates the shop and service drive from everything else. Everything on the other side upper management cares about, sales, leasing, even our parts department got the shop closed for a whole fucking day so they could do inventory. They seriously might have a thousand square feet of space and they never have anything more than brakes in stock. Oh, and nobody thought to tell us until the day before at about 10AM. Everything on the other side of the wall, we’re treated like a parasite that the host has to keep alive to ensure their own survival.
Ya, there’s been enough shit going on in the last month that resumes have been sent out.
[quote=”Jasonw1178″ post=147222]It’s feast or famine in this career. It’s not a 9-5 M-F job. Few people have that setup in our field. Nope, you are either working your butt off or you are sitting on it. Not as bad as construction, but closer to that of working at a bank. I truely understand why a lot of people go for jobs with commercial accounts.[/quote]
Most of the people in the technicians only forum have a pretty firm grasp on how the job works. Maybe the dudes that shower in oil at Jiffy Lube don’t really have an understanding. But then again they shouldn’t really be in this section of the forum.
[quote=”Pitt” post=148050][quote=”Jasonw1178″ post=147222]It’s feast or famine in this career. It’s not a 9-5 M-F job. Few people have that setup in our field. Nope, you are either working your butt off or you are sitting on it. Not as bad as construction, but closer to that of working at a bank. I truely understand why a lot of people go for jobs with commercial accounts.[/quote]
Most of the people in the technicians only forum have a pretty firm grasp on how the job works. Maybe the dudes that shower in oil at Jiffy Lube don’t really have an understanding. But then again they shouldn’t really be in this section of the forum.[/quote] It really depends on the individuals situation, I mean theres hourly techs and then theres flat rate techs. Then on top of that different shops will have different hours of operation. One shop may be open 7 days a week 6-6, another 6 days a week 7-5 and another Tues to Sat and no mondays or sundays.
You can further go into the type of shop such as quick lube shops, tire shops, repair shops, commerical, fleet jobs, and restoration shops each varying in policy.
There is no one size fits all in this industry, but one thing is for sure, if you work for someone else you conform to their shops needs.
Jiffy lube guys….lol I don’t think they even trust those guys to lift a car properly(hence the pits) nevermind do anything remotely skilled in the trade.
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