Mea Maxima Culpa

No, this will not be about religion. It's only Marty employing a little bit of the Latin he knows. Mea maxima culpa translates into through my most grievous fault. In short, it means my bad, my really truly bad.

I found a drip from a radiator hose on my van this morning. As I went to pull away from the curb I saw steam coming from under the hood. A hose had a leak, dripping anti-freeze onto the hot manifold where it burned off as steam. On to my mechanic then rather than my sales trip. Should I mention this was about 4 AM this morning? I'm really quite happy to have discovered it then instead of when the hose would have blown completely several miles down the road in the wee hours of a cold January day. Reading in a warm bed beats sitting by the side of the road in the dark. I can make the sales trip well enough tomorrow.

So I go back inside and at 8 I begin the trip to Sam, my mechanic. He's only a mile and a half away so I figured I could drive that far as it was only a slow leak. But I texted my brother Phil to please pick me up at Sam's around 8:15. He never replies.

Well, he's occupied but he'll see the text soon enough, I figure. I drive down to Sam's and get the repair set up. We're good to go at 8:20, but no Phil to get me. Okay, I was a little put out. But I walk more than a mile and half routinely in the morning. I started walking home. Phil will know which way I'm headed, I reasoned.

Half way home, then three-quarters of the way home, and eventually all the way home. No Phil. I must confess (don't fret, still not about religion) that I was by then kind of upset. About then I got a text...from my friend Mike. He wanted to know who Sam was and why he should meet me at his place. I had texted the wrong person.

I had to walk all the way home from my mechanic. And it was my most grievous fault after all.

The polar opposite

As I related yesterday, I took my van to my mechanic. He tuned it up and it's running great. Yet there's still something wrong.
Driving home, I couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't quite right. It drove smoothly and accelerated well. It did better than it's done in a long time in fact. I couldn't quite put my finger on the problem though.
That's when I noticed this blank spot on the dashboard. That blank spot didn't look right at all. I wondered what it could be. I began to worry about what it could be.
Then I realized that my service engine soon light was not on. My mechanic had tuned up the van, and that apparently caused the warning light to stay off. So today, right after stating that I did not worry about idiot lights begin on, I'm concerned about the fact that one particular idiot light, one that I'm very used to being on, is off.
It'll be weeks now before I'm really comfortable driving the thing. Maybe I should have left well enough alone.

It's just a car

I took my van to the mechanic today. It's been running rough when accelerating, although when I get to speed it holds the speed well.

I tend not to fret about my cars. If they start and get me from point A to point B, I'm happy. To give you an idea of how little I watch my cars, I never, ever worry about the 'check engine' or 'service engine soon' lights being on. All they mean are that the mix of air and gas isn't spot on or that the engine is somehow not running ideally. I say the hell with that. Live with it; all those sensors cars have these days simply detect too many things too delicately. Check oil lights and heat gauges are the ones to watch. If you're car's running too hot or has low oil pressure, those are the real danger signs. If it's making noises it obviously shouldn't make, then be concerned. And of course, check fluids regularly. Otherwise, no worries.

Anyway, the old girl's been running rough enough that I figured it should be checked this time around. "Does the check engine light come on?" my long time and no doubt long suffering mechanic asked.

"It's always on, Sam. You should know that, " I answered.

He snickered, "Right. Well, does the light flash when you accelerate hard?"

"That it does. Then it stops flashing when I reach speed."

Sam responded, "It probably just needs a tune up. I'll put the tester on it and let you know."

Boom. No worries, no big deal. Don't worry so much about your cars, folks. I would have kept driving it if I'd known that was all there was to it.

The intermittent starting conundrum

As a repairman of sorts, one of the things I hate is when a unit works some of the time and not others. It is much easier to diagnose an issue when something simply doesn't work than when it takes spells of not working. Now my car is doing the same thing.

The first mechanic who checked it said that his diagnostic program didn't show anything wrong. So of course the car worked for about a week afterwards before becoming reticent.

Yet the next day it started all right. I took it to a second mechanic, whose diagnostics told him that the 'cam sensor' was bad. I won't even bother with the details of what such a thing is or how it works, but I do remember another van I had where that same thing went bad. When replaced, that van worked for the rest of its useful life.

Of course my Aveo worked for about a week and decided not to start again. And of further course it started immediately for that second mechanic, whom I took it back to as he had most recently dealt with it.

He's going to let me know what else he might find later. In the meanwhile, my horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse!

The neurologically challenged mechanic

Grandpa Joe rented arc welders, some of which were powered by six cylinder gasoline engines. He had a mechanic, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who worked for him part time. Cloyce was a very good mechanic, to give him his due. He also didn't drive. He also drank profoundly. One day when a welder was on the fritz in Rochester, about 30 miles north of Detroit, and no one else was available, Joe had me drive Cloyce out to fix it.

We loaded some tools and a box of commonly used repair parts into a pickup truck and off we went. I was a rather naive young lad of 16 and had only been driving for a couple of months. Consequently I was slow to read the signals that something was going seriously wrong.

At first it wasn't much. Cloyce had begun, well, not quite slurring his words but drawing them out. When he would speak to me he would start sentences with, Mawr-ty, and then say whatever he had to say. It didn't matter to me. I was just doing my job. Then he said with an odd emphasis, "Mawrty", almost like a command. I turned and said, "Yeah, Cloyce?". He was pointing his cigarette lighter, which looked like a pistol, at me. He made the sound of a gunshot - pschew - as he pulled the trigger, lighting a flame at me. "Funny, Cloyce", I said. But at the time I needed more than a simple clue that things were amiss. I needed to be hit with a pile of bricks.

The bricks fell on me when we were almost to our destination. "Mawrty," I heard, "Could you pull over to that pawrty store so I can get some Coke to mix with this?" I looked over to see him displaying a half drained fifth of vodka.

"Put that away Cloyce! Do you know how much trouble that could get us into?" I half screamed. By us, I meant me. I was the driver who knew what the law said about open intoxicants. And then I remembered, I don't anything about fixing engines. He's got to get that welder running.

What to do, what to do? All I could think was to get him to the job and hope for the best. So that's what I did.

We arrived, and I made Cloyce stay in the pickup while I found the foreman. He came out of his trailer office and directed me to where the machine sat. It was on the other side of an eight foot berm. Great.

I drove over to it, got the tools and parts over to the welder and then got Cloyce and hobbled him over the berm next. He commenced to stumble around the machine, doing this and that and I don't know what while I prayed he would somehow get us out of the mess we faced. I faced. In a few minutes the foreman came along to check on our progress. He couldn't help notice the state Cloyce was in. He leaned towards me and whispered, "Is he okay?"

"Oh, yeah," I answered. "He's just got a neurological disorder." It was all I could think of.

The foreman looked at me with a skeptical raised eyebrow. But right then we heard the roar of an engine. Cloyce had gotten that welder running, Lord knows how.

The foreman pursed his lips and patted my head as if to say, all right, we're good, problem solved. He walked away. I got Cloyce and the tools and parts back over the berm and started home gratefully. But the next time I took Cloyce to a job, I made certain there were no hidden bottles in the truck.