Sick and Tire-d, or, ♫My Name is Larrrrrrryyyyyyy....♫

[captainsblog]

We tend to choose, and then support, smaller businesses for our various needs. Makes sense, for I'm as small business as it gets in terms of staff (just me), and Eleanor, when she did outdoor contracting, was the same.  We follow our providers when they move- or in the case of my dentist for the past 35 years, we go back to them even after we have.  So when one of these business relationships gets strained, it hurts.

We both left a physician we'd been with for years, at the time a solo and now partnering just with his brother-in-law, after he first left Eleanor with a bad feeling about an experience and then could've killed me with prescribing a dye test that the radiologist refused to give to a patient with just one kidney.  I had longtime good connections with computer guru types- one back in Rochester, strained when he got pissed at me for not defending a lawsuit he never told me about; and one here, who left the business and ultimately got pissed at me over a cluster of a dispute that I handled for free.  We've both replaced the doc with a very good practice; I've never really found anyone to handle the computer needs.

The latest quandary has arisen over the mechanic we've been going to for at least 15 years.  They were small and never flashy; they occupied a couple of bays in a former full-service gas station that got subdivided into a small Stop-and-Rob connected to the pumps and their business in the garage. They were a brisk walk from both home and where Eleanor worked at the time if we needed to leave a car there, and they were always reasonable and prompt with anything we needed, especially on older cars we, and Emily, had at the time.

A few years ago, that building got demolished for a fancier brand-name convenience store, and "Tom" (not his name, but in honor of the departed Magliazzi brother) moved it several miles away from us to a bigger lot where he also ran an auto transport business.  Once Eleanor switched to electrics and I got my own Smart car, we had little business to give them, but particularly after Mercedes dropped the brand and started treating us like red-headed stepchildren when we came in for service, we tried to give them whatever we could.  So it was this year; Eleanor's still under warranty for everything, but mine is beyond that- I don't even get calls from the monolith about it-



- so Tom's been doing my 10,000 mile servicings along with annual inspections and anything required by them. Last year cemented that connection even more; an emissions idiot light came on right before the inspection was due, whereupon I discovered that only the Mercedes dealer could diagnose it ($150 just to tell me), and only they could replace the tiny but expensive part needed to fix it so the car would pass. I resolved not to give them a nickel more at that point that I didn't have to, so Tom handled the subsequent inspection and, at the end of the winter, I had new all season tires put on the back to switch out the snows.

Then COVID came, and there were barely 4,000 miles on those new tires when inspection time came this month. No idiot lights, so it passed, but the brakes were getting close to needing service as they do every 20-30K, and the old snows and the slightly newer front all-seasons were all getting long in the tooth.

Tom has another guy there who does all the work; continuing the Car Talk motif, we'll call him Crusty. HE put new snows on the back and moved the almost-new all-seasons from back to front.  I questioned this, because the dealer had told us they never rotated the tires because they were not the same size. No, Crusty assured me, they were the same.  So I toodled off, $300 poorer for the two they did put on and the other work they did.  A mile down the road, I knew something was wrong, and as soon as I was on the 290, it was WAY wrong. The car was shimmying and shaking on dry pavement with no particular wind.  I called, and Crusty sounded peeved that I was questioning his workmanship. But hey- I had to go back for finishing the brake job on Monday anyway, so they'd check it out....

only no parts, still, or replacement snows to put on the front in case that was the problem. Tuesday, I had appointments of my own all day and screwed up the arrival time, so Wednesday was my fourth stop there in five working days. This time I waited with it while they did the brakes, another expensive proposition because of the proprietary German parts; and they checked the alignment and inflations. I absolutely knew, and told them, that the front and back tires required different pressures, because every time the CHECK TIRE PRESSURE idiot light comes on- as it does whenever the outdoor temperature changes significantly or if I've let one go a little soft- I check it.

See?
 


So they adjusted pressure accordingly, and it seemed to drive better- but what should appear on the dash but

CHECK TIRE PRESSURE ?!?

Now I actually read all of the damn label. Front and back are not just different pressures, they're completely different sizes.  Plus, Crusty simply moved the different-sized all-seasons from back to front on their rims. I'm not completely sure, but I've read something indicating that the pressure sensors, mandatory on all new cars now, are specific to the rims and the computer needs to be reset if you move them round during a rotation or other reconfiguration....

which, one quick visit to a tire place yesterday confirmed, has to be done at the @#$%! Mercedes dealer.

The good news is, they always run a tire sale in December and January. I need a new front pair of all-seasons in the correct size, which, for at least the tires themselves, will cost less than Crusty was going to charge me for the wrong-sized fronts. Then, when winter is over, I have the old all-seasons which are otherwise fine to put back on the rear....

as long as I don't wreck them in the next three weeks, because Herr Benz can't do it until the 31st.

That should be fine. I'm sick of living in automotive joints anyway, especially now,  I take Eleanor's car on longer trips anyway, and four miles a day to work or Wegmans and back shouldn't be an issue. But we're going to have a chat now with Tommy, about how Crusty has been doing his job. At a minimum, when the tires need to be switched out in the spring, I'm going to ask them to do that for no charge- and to absorb anything extra coming from the dealer on account of having to move rims or clear codes on account of putting the wrong sized tires on the front.

He may cop an attitude.  We'll find another small business if he does.

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The Sun is doing a Zoomed happy hour tonight from folks from back in our day. At least some will be there who I haven't talked to in ages.  It also keeps me back in Wayback mode; in the Learned League quiz of the day this morning, one of the questions involved a song by Bob Seger. THAT took me back to my previous stories about my brief roommatedom with "Link" (aka the Missing one)-



-who once famously came home from a bad day in class, put "Turn the Page" on the turntable, and solemnly declared, "When I listen to Bob Seger, you know I'm depressed."   Link is a school superintendent in the Catskills now; I wonder what he plays for THEM.

But once in this rabbit hole of history, I was drawn back to even older memories of someone I have no pictures of, because he was largely the Man Who Wasn't There.

But his crickets were.  Apologies if I've told this before, but I can't find that I have....

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My freshman roomie, on the fourth and top floor of a  cinderblock dorm so hideous no Cornell donor would put their name on it, was named Larry. It was actually Laurence with a U, and he was the son of an Agriculture College professor. He got a full ride, so he took up half of a dorm room. With me. I shouldn’t complain, because he went home every weekend, plus he was premed, so I hardly ever saw him. But that’s what led to the dreaded cricket incident.

Most of the premeds took the Boot Camp bio course, but that year, they offered something more hippy-dippy. The cornerstone of it was every student had to design, execute and report their own semester-long biology experiment. My future roommate Jay, who lived across the hall that year and is now a physician in Ithaca, went out to the woods every weekend to study the migratory patterns of birds. Larry, being more of a stay at home kind of fella, decided to study the sex lives of crickets.

Stay at his parents' home, that is, so I was the one who got the note on the door to come to the mail room and pick up the huge box from the Flukers cricket farm of something, Wisconsin.

Go ahead, Google it. I swear I’m not making this up.

Eventually, Larry showed up and started color-coding the backs of their little thoraxes before leaving for the weekend again.  Before he returned, I was the one who got to make the first entry in the official Bio 206 experiment notebook:

Crickets can chew through cardboard.

The whole four-story building was infested within hours from our fourth floor room on down. But. The girls were all on the second floor. The guys on the top two didn't give a shit, but once Cricket Armageddon hit the girls' communal bathroom, we heard the screams. And before long, little beach sandpails with crickets were being re-deposited at my door. I wound up smashing most of them, which is why Larry stopped talking to me when he finally showed up.

I think he took an incomplete in the course, eventually one in his degree program, and last we heard at the time, he’d become a ski bum in Utah. I googled him a few years ago, and thanks to the U in his name, I’m pretty sure he’s now living in Connecticut, writing occasional angry screeds to the Hartford Courant.

And, I think, teaching somewhere. I fear for those kids almost as much as I do for the ones in the Catskills.