mh-z web-log

There’s a weird dance you have to do with auto mechanics. I strongly believe in second opinions, but that culture doesn’t really exist, as far as I can tell, with respect to mechanical repairs. I feel like if I’m told “your O-ring distributor valve spark-plug pan gasket is broken” and I say “I want to get a second opinion on that”, that I’m directly calling into question the mechanic’s honesty, a clear affront. We all know the human body is extremely complicated and that when a doctor makes a diagnosis, it’s a sort of very educated guess, basically a deduction based on symptoms, and doctors themselves are (or should be) happy to have a diagnosis checked — (strongly encouraging towards, even). It’s not about honesty in medicine, but about the realities of the trade. Some conditions might have a very obvious diagnosis (in which second and third opinions will always agree), and some might have subtle symptoms where other doctors would not agree — in which case the other opinions give you (and each doctor) more information to work with. But a car is just a mechanical thing, and we assume a good mechanic should be able to tell what’s wrong with 100% accuracy — if there’s doubt, just take it apart some more until he //knows// what’s wrong for sure, although it should generally be obvious. You never hear “well, we //think// it’s the master slave cylinder, but we still have to run some more tests…”

Anyway, the fundamental issue is that I don’t implicitly trust auto mechanics, even when they’ve been specifically recommended to me. Well, why should anyone, given everything you hear? (…All those “hidden camera” operations where 4 out of 6 garages will claim they’ve fixed something but really haven’t done anything, and so on. E.g., the [http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/scams/jiffylube.asp Jiffy Lube scam]. If it happens in big chains with lots to lose for getting caught, you can bet it happens in independent garages.) Actually, the recommender’s word carries some weight, but then (in a specific case of my own yesterday, moving from the hypothetical to the real) I got a call telling me I needed a couple thousand dollars’ worth of additional repairs. Power steering rack and pinion system needs to be repaired because of a leak ($700)? Huh? Master clutch cylinder has a leak ($300)? Why have I never heard of that part before? Anyway, my point is that because I don’t have a detailed understanding of everything under the hood, I don’t have a way of fact-checking what a mechanic tells me besides my intuition, and that’s (as mentioned) limited — all the knowledge I have is from past repairs and from what I’ve tried to pick up by looking under the hood myself now and again when smoke starts pouring out, or something.

But I do have one trick up my sleeve, and that’s the ability to play one mechanic against another — to get that second opinion. What I like to do sometimes is bring my car to a dealership, pay $100 for a full inspection, and see what they find. I feel like dealers are pretty (or at least //more//) reputable in telling you what’s wrong with a car, because they charge enough for actual repairs to not have to bother with faking problems and/or work. Anyway, I take that list of carefully itemized stuff, call up independent garages, and ask how much said repairs will cost: There’s your second opinion on parts & labor, as opposed to the problem itself. (I’m not even bothering to cross-check the dealer’s price, here; that’s going to be several times other mechanics’ prices just as a given. But people actually pay those prices simply because they don’t trust the average independent garage — and understandably so. And I’m making an assumption that dealers are trustworthy, too, but it also seems more likely they would be simply because they have more on the line if caught than independents.)

So (back to reality), I brought my car in yesterday to a garage recommended highly by a coworker (and highly rated on Google Maps, too), because the engine was overheating, according to the guage. No problem, they diagnosed that as a faulty themostat. Okay, I’ll pay $160 to fix that. Maybe it’s on the high end of the price scale, but it’s not worth the time to shop inexpensive things around. But their suggested $2000 of additional repairs? I’m usually told about those various leaks (if they seem serious) whenever I get an oil change, so the sudden appearance of all these expensive mechanical issues puts me on guard, and I have to tell the nice mechanic or “garage salesman” (since I’m sure he wasn’t the one actually doing any of the work) not to fix anything other than the thermostat (and change my front tires, all right). After having described and detailed all those other problems in such a grave tone of voice it was almost strange that he didn’t further attempt to sell me on the other repairs, as in “…but your car’s gonna explode if you don’t fix this!”, like there was some sort of miscalibration in the story — it was just a light “okay” now, as if he tacitly recognized that I wasn’t a sucker and immediately backed off. I threw in a “…but I’ll watch out for the other issues” to validate his mechanicsmanship, and asked him to itemize all of the findings. So now I’m tempted to bring my car in for a dealer inspection and compare the findings from that, side by side, with these — the proof should be in the pudding, as it were. Or maybe my car did have these problems, but “seriousness” and “price-to-fix” were both exaggerated. But this had me wondering, how often do people do this kind of thing (seek second opinions under some other guise)? I’m sure there are trusting and mistrusting folks. Some people (“suckers”, assuming widespread dishonesty by mechanics, which there’s evidence is the case) who do exactly what’s suggested and pay full price for it every time. But of the ones who compare, who get second opinions… What if mechanics colluded, and had a secret online database where they shared fake repair findings tagged by license plate or car description? Okay, that seems too far fetched, now that I write it. Especially because other fields with even more nebulous findings don’t need to stoop that low. (I was reading about chiropractors the other day, and how second and third opinions very frequently report completely unrelated conditions, as if diagnoses had been pulled out of a hat.) So I don’t worry about a hypothetical level of collusion among independent mechanics (even the ones next to dealerships) but still, my intuition pinged, and now I want to get that second opinion just so I can personally validate what //seems// to be a general trend in the car repair community. And show up the guy who recommended this particular shop.

I hope I didn’t just get a ticket. 2 AM, no cars in sight, stopped at a light at the intersection of Wilshire and Sepulveda. I’d come to a full stop, and moments later the red-light camera at that intersection flashed a bunch of times. I guess because my front wheel was half a foot over the limit line (of the crosswalk — not even the intersection proper). I was about to get out and take a picture of my own from the side to show where exactly the wheel was, but a couple cars were coming from behind and by that point the light had changed, so it was safer to just proceed, and anyway the evidence had already been collected. Hopefully a false alarm and the camera was just doing it’s thing, starting off an attempt to construct incontrovertable proof of antisocial driving behavior from the moment I first poked my nose across the line, but since the remainder of the series just shows me sitting there and not proceeding across the intersection, it’d be ridiculous to say I “ran a red light”. I don’t have high expectations for //not// getting a ticket in the mail and having to invest a few man-hours fighting it (and ultimately failing) so that I don’t have to burn my “get out of jail free” traffic school card (or perhaps I’ll pay now and save that for my next ticket for going 80 mph on the freeway just like everybody else). I’m not bitter! There we go, that was cathartic. On to better things.

I don’t grok: cops on bikes, telling me I need to walk my bike. Excellent leadership by example there, guys!

I just made some coffee and realized I’d run out of milk, so I added a scoop of vanilla ice cream instead. Yum.

The ice cream’s [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocculate flocculated] (what a great word) somewhat, but it’s still good.

I had my wisdom teeth out this morning. All four of ‘em. The bottom two were really the ones which had to go, since they pointed forwards. It was a stable configuration, creating a perfect storage pocket for a cyanide capsule on one side and a micro-nuke on the other, but I’d since moved on from espionage and it was time to move on dentally, too. The top two were just going to be lonely without their mates on the bottom, not that they’d been doing much mating before given the orientation of the bottoms, so to speak, but if at some point I ever want them back, I’m sure science will have discovered techniques for growing teeth in a petri dish by then. And hair. Teeth and hair.

In retrospect, running four miles with shoes but no socks was a bad idea.

But then, I wanted to run, and hadn’t brought socks. What was a fleet-footed footwear-forgetting flip-flopped fellow to do?

As you may have realized, the subject refers to the prior sentence.

When I was little, whenever I felt something wasn’t fair, and I went and complained to a parent or teacher, etc., and got a “well, life’s not fair!”, that response always bothered me. I would reply, “Yeah, life’s not fair, but the whole point of everything we do is to work towards making it as fair as possible, so ‘life’s not fair’ is just a cop-out, it’s you saying that although you recognize that this situation isn’t fair, you just don’t care enough to do anything about it.”

I’ll remember this in case I ever end up with kids someday, so I can respond more diplomatically when I really don’t care enough to do anything about it.

The woman in the passport wing of my local post office was nice. She reminded me to check my parking meter based on the time she’d seen me walk in. She posed me oh-so-carefully for my Polaroid photo: “Turn your head a millimeter to the left, okay, now up a tiny bit, no, a few angstroms down, good.” (Those weren’t her //exact// words.) The photo came out well. I wanted to ask her out, even though she is probably 20 years older than I am. Maybe I’m just kidding.

Experience points gained from:

1. Installing and driving with tire chains.
2. Lodging in a real lodge, i.e., less than 20 meters from slopes/lift.
3. Rolling around in snow, jumping back into hot tub. (Observation: causes pain!)
4. Preparing over twice as much food (with five people) as would have filled us to capacity, including broiled steaks.
5. Eating all of the above.
6. Digging my car out from under a mountain of powder.
7. Extremes of soggy clothing.
8. Smoothness of driving after chains are finally removed.
9. General lack of soreness.

Experience points applied to:

1. Increased snowboarding skill.

Minor site redesign. Now you can comment. Importing old posts. Writing new. Vacation is nice. Reading. Got an iPhone.

iPhone has interference issues when placed next to electronic things with speakers. If it’s within a couple feet of my alarm-clock-radio, the radio emits a low morse-code sort of noise every few minutes. You may have heard this kind of interference sound caused by someone’s BlackBerry. If within a few feet of my music keyboard (e.g. in my pocket), I also get this through the keyboard’s speakers. Electronic resonance.

Activating the iPhone, I tried the “999-99-9999″ Social Security Number trick (as referenced in the [http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/iphone-review.ars Ars Technica iPhone review] and elsewhere, which didn’t work. “Invalid Social Security Number.” So I tried “111-11-1111″. Same. So I tried “111-11-1112″. That worked, and I was kicked over to AT&T’s contract-less GoPhone service, paying a little more per month but avoiding a two year contract. Such half-heartedly cat-and-mouse-like disabling of a couple SSN’s is silly. I can’t call myself a l337 h4xx0r when the h4xx1ng is just barely so.

Why you should always have health insurance coverage: A friend of mine moved from one job to another and didn’t get around to mailing in a check for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRA_(insurance) COBRA] (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, although what that has to do with health insurance, I don’t know (sounds like a manufactured acronym, or “manufacronym”, as it were)) insurance form. This allows you to simply pay directly (whatever your previous employer had been paying) to keep the same health insurance you had while at work until some other form of insurance kicks in.

He broke his arm snowboarding, and needed surgery to set and pin the bones. The hospital bill was around $25,000, and he has to pay that out of his own pocket. He can pay the bill over a period of time (several years), but that’s still a sizable chunk of money.

Admittedly, there was a period in between jobs (when I left my job-before-last and went off on my own, actually) that I also did not continue under COBRA and was uninsured for a period, though I made it through just fine (before signing up for a Blue Cross PPO plan at about $60 per month), and there’s no decent safety net, otherwise, for what can end up costing far more than you can afford.

What’s odd: He says COBRA was around $300 a month. That’s strange, considering the cost of my simple Blue Cross plan. (Correct me if I’m mis-remembering the exact figure, but I do know the difference was very large.) Why is it so much? Isn’t this a government program to encourage and facilitate people moving between jobs keeping medical insurance at all times?

I was walking down the street. Sneezed. Sounded like someone honked a horn at that exact moment. Horn kept honking; apparently it was a car alarm. So my sneeze was powerful enough to set off a car alarm from at least ten feet away. Impressive.

It doesn’t matter what your talent is; as long as you’re prolific you’ll probably end up making something cool.

On Monday, I took the bus to work. Just felt like doing something different. Busing it takes an hour whereas driving takes half an hour. I’d planned to spend as much of the time as possible reading, and got through 30 pages of The Know-It-All. Not nearly as fast as I hope I can read without jarring bumps as the bus goes over pot-holey streets, without distracting announcements by the driver as we pass each stop, without time spent squirming in uncomfortable seats and glances out the window to check my stop isn’t nigh, and this isn’t a particularly cerebral book either (despite the title), but it’s something. It was nice not having to pay attention to traffic, wait for red lights, shift gears or flip endlessly through radio stations. There’s also that element of connectedness, of being part of the life of working Los Angeles, going about its daily business, not isolated in my own box. I think I’ll do it again tomorrow.