PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

It is apparently illegal to take inspection stickers off of the old windshield and put them on the new one, so I'm taking the Murano to the mechanic this morning to get new ones...

 

Yesterday there was a snake stuck in the bird netting around my strawberries, came back today and something chewed the head off.

 

Fun Fact: Did you know the opossum has built up a resistance to most all venomous snakes found in North America? And that they do eat snakes?

"The opossum survived the venom of the following snakes of the Family Crotalidae: eastern diamondback rattlesnake, western diamondback rattlesnake, copperhead, cottonmouth moccasin, Korean mamushi, and Central American moccasin" (1)

(1) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0041010177900666

 

That was actually what l think got at it, it ate the head and about the first 6 or 8 inches.

 

Was the snake still alive when you first saw it?

 

@6 gearT444E
@ABA180
@Bishop84
@ColoradoTJ
@Just_A_Guy
@Lt. Dangle
@shakerhood
@Speedytech7
@steelcity2
@TnShooter

It looks like I got a job! It's far from being my dream job, and it's likely not a permanent job, but I would be stupid not to take it for numerous reasons! My girlfriend @Stitchgirl90 has been working as a server at a Jewish nursing home right around the corner from my house for probably just over a month now. It's a full time job and the base pay is $15 an hour; Amanda works a lot of overtime. She let her supervisor know that I was looking for a job, and earlier this week the chef told her to "beg" me to apply for a job as dishwasher. I was initially on the fence, but then Amanda told me that several things would be done to entice me...

For starters, Amanda already requested and got approved for time off during the first week in August for the Carlisle Truck Nationals; I have been guaranteed this time off since we're obviously going together. I would also be getting the same hours and pay as Amanda, and we'd have the same days off so we can be together. Amanda absolutely loves it there. Another obvious benefit is that it would solve the issue of Amanda not having a car until, well, she can afford to buy one. The total mileage put on the truck per year picking up Amanda, driving to work, dropping off Amanda, and driving back home would only be 7,200 miles. I will still scrap the occasional air-conditioner as a side hustle, but this job pays so well that I won't need to drive all over creation for scrapping or DoorDash/Uber Eats; I can finally say after next weekend that I am done doing DoorDash! I want my Tacoma to last until (A) I have enough money to pay for a new drivetrain, or (B) I have enough to money to buy a newer truck. Amanda is going to buy a 4-door sedan of some sort, and I am not going to buy anything but a truck!

So, obviously I don't want to spend the rest of my life working in a nursing home. I plan on getting my EPA certification (for handling A/C refrigerant), and this job will allow me to pay for it all by myself! Having the EPA certs will allow me to get my foot in the door at most if not all HVAC companies, and I could be ready for that in no more than a year and a half!

 

Congratulations buddy ! Like u said, not a dream job but it's money in the pocket and same hrs as Amanda.

 

@ABA180
@ColoradoTJ
@Just_A_Guy
@shakerhood
@steelcity2
@TnShooter

I did not get my first real job until I was almost 25 years old, and I didn't get a job that I spent several years at until about a year a later. When I was in my early teens, I got an allowance from my parents and did odd jobs like shoveling driveways. My aunt and uncle also paid me to watch their dog for a week at least once a summer while they went on vacation. I got a lot of money from my parents and other family members when I graduated from high school in 2007. I started going to community college in January 2009, starting out as a business major and then changing to journalism when I almost done with the first major...



From 2006 to 2008, I worked at CVS, but I was paid by the Central Bucks School District's special ed system and not directly by CVS; I also worked at the Bucks County Public Library. Because of a loophole, I was paid less than minimum wage, but it still allowed me to put decent money away; I also worked in maintenance at a nursing home through this program, and regularly clashed with job coaches at all of these jobs for numerous reasons.

I got my learner's permit for the first time in December 2005, three months shy of my 17th birthday; I unwittingly let it expire and procrastinated on taking the test to get a new one for more than two years. In August 2009, a few months after leaving the job at the nursing home, I finally got a new learner's permit. In September 2009, my parents bought me the Tacoma that I still have.

I finally got my license in May 2011, and one of the reasons I refused to get a job back then is because I was of the mistaken assumption that all employers would be like the job coaches I constantly clashed with as a teenager; I also was afraid that some entry-level retail job would rob me of time with my family and friends. Since I was in college, getting good grades, and not wasting what little money I did have, my parents didn't force me to get a job.

I applied for my first job outside the special ed system in October 2013, at Dunkin Donuts; I quit probably three weeks later because the hours and pay were both shit, and my supervisor was kind of an asshole. I applied for jobs at both Dunkin Donuts, and an independently-owned deli a few doors down from Dunkin Donuts, at the same time; Dunkin called me back first so that's the job I took. A week or two after I quit Dunkin Donuts, the owner of the deli called me; I barely lasted three hours at the deli. At first it was fine, but the owner was a slave driving drill sergeant, for lack of a better term...

Another employee told me that if I didn't clean the sneeze guards thoroughly the first time, I would be forced to do it all over again; I was ultimately put on dishwashing duty, and I froze due to my anxiety and stress when my coworkers kept piling dishes in front of me. The owner said that it was not going to work out and dismissed me. I refused to work for more than a year, when an amazing woman named Sam gave me the swift kick in the ass I needed...

 

Congrats!

 

Congrats!

Be prepared to flip a lot of light switches on Friday nights and Saturdays

 

Awesome Man!

I worked as a busboy at a local restaurant the first 3 years of high school. Wasn't a bad job.
Worked nights, (4:00-10) Mon, Wed, (4-:00-11:30) Fri, and (8:30-1:30) Sundays.
Crazy how that was 23 years ago. And I remember it like yesterday. I met some really good people there.
Some shitty people too. But mostly good people.

Then went to work at a lumber yard my senior year in high school.

 

I was finally set to graduated from college in May 2015, and I had no idea where I was going to find a job that met the following criteria...

• At least ten dollars an hour
• Reasonable hours
• Easy and not incredibly stressful
• Boss who isn't an asshole

I had been frequenting a bar/nightclub/music venue since the summer of 2010. A half-Korean woman named Samantha (Sam) moved out to Pennsylvania from Nebraska and took a job as assistant manager at Puck in late 2010. I got my driver's license in May 2011, and the reason I mention this is because my truck pays a pivotal role in how I met Sam; I have no idea how Sam worked at Puck for a good five or six months without me ever seeing her.

There are two "manager's spots" directly outside the patio portion of Puck. One of them was always reserved for the "Puck Van", a 1999 GMC Safari that served as an errand running vehicle and mobile billboard. When the Puck Van got kind of old and the owner gave it to her brother, my Tacoma partially took over its role. The Puck Van's official replacement was a 2005 Honda Element that was up to the role of picking up liquor and other supplies, but couldn't carry large pieces of furniture.

Anyway, I parked in one of the manager's spots one warm Wednesday in the summer of 2011, just like I always did. It was open mic night, which was always on Wednesday and which I always went to because several of my friends played there. I had probably had my license for a month and a half at most; I parked my truck, and the next thing I knew, this fiery Asian woman who I'd never met before and who looked to be about my age confronted me at the gate (FUN FACT: Sam is four months older than me, so we were both only 22 when we met). An intense argument erupted, but I ultimately backed off and moved my truck once I realized she worked there. One of the veteran bartenders, a woman in her 50s named Lynn, approached me and said that I should probably do what she (Sam) said because she was the general manager. Sam must have just been promoted to general manager, because again, I had never seen her. Regardless, I freaked out...

I found Sam and went into full ass-kissing mode; I was worried that I would be banned from my favorite hangout/watering hole. Sam assured me that everything was fine and even bought me a drink to prove it; Sam would later tell me that our little argument increased her respect for me, as nobody had ever "stodd up to her" in that way before, and my apology increased it even more.

In 2012, Sam got a puppy named Tully and by that time was living within walking distance of Puck; I bonded with Tully, so Sam started paying me and giving me the occasional free beer in exchange for walking her and spending time with her when she was busy at work. I frequented Puck from the summer of 2011 through the summer of 2014, and on Thanksgiving Eve in 2014, Sam asked me to come in and help her prep for the biggest drinking night of the year. She would make it worth my while, she told me; I was just excited to be hanging out with a good friend who at the time I also had a bit of a crush on. So, I drove to Puck and spent seven hours with Sam. We picked up the liquor, we went to now-defunct restaurant supply superstore called Benjamin Foods to pick up supplies, and she went over everything with me. Little did I know, this was my assessment. That evening, she asked me if I knew exactly how many hours I'd been there; I said seven hours, and she wrote me a check for seventy bucks (hourly pay for a barback the entire time I was there, was $10). She wrote it on one of Puck's corporate checks too!

In early December 2014, I was pretty much done with college for the semester and bored out of my mind, so I was just hanging out with Sam in the outdoor area behind the club where employees had smoke breaks. She asked if I wanted to work for her; I forget what the actual weekly payout was, but it was the equivalent of $12.50 an hour. Puck was just starting to get successful at that time after years of hard work on Sam's part, and I don't think it was in the budget to put another barback on the books; Sam was making decent money, so she ended up paying me out of her own pocket for nearly a year. Sam knew I had autism and at one point wanted to be a special education teacher, so she had taken college classes and knew a thing or two about that. We also both came from military families, and she thought I had very good morals. I of course said yes, but I had to keep it a secret for several months. Only Sam and the owners of the bar were aware of the arrangement, and Sam told me that I would be let go if I spilled the beans to any other employees. Unlike the typical bureaucrats who worked in special education, Sam was a bar manager and not a teacher. As such, she could do things her way and was not bound by the rules of any public school or service provider. She was concerned that my parents would not be wild about me working at a bar, but she was worried for nothing, because my parents were thrilled!

My maternal grandma passed away in January 2015 at the age of 88, and left each grandkid $15,000; I put most of it into a savings account. By the end of the decade, so 2019, I'd stupidly spent all but probably $1,500 of it...



I've always had some money, but it was nowhere near the amount I'd probably have today if I had saved more of it instead of spending it on stuff like truck modifications...



Anyway, I graduated college and once again got a ton of money from my parents and family members; I had a job and I had more money than most 20-somethings probably had in that day and age. Putting me on the books officially was still not an option in the summer of 2015, but as stated above, Sam had given me the swift kick in the ass that I needed to join the workforce. There is a steak and hoagie place called Coach's just down the hill from Puck; I knew the owner and his then-girlfriend (now wife) and frequently bought lunch there. The owner was legally blind and had to stop driving, and his wife had a shitty 1997 Jeep Wrangler that wasn't up to the task of hauling mass quantities of food from Costco. They decided pay me $30 cash and a free lunch one day per week, and that lasted several months. Still desiring cash, I took a job delivering pizzas for an independently-owned pizzeria; I worked there from July 2015 to November 2015.

In either late 2015 or early 2016, I found out that I would have to file taxes as an independent contractor because my earnings for 2015 had way exceeded $600; I knew I would get hammered on taxes as a result, and I threw a fit. Sam was initially hesitant to put me on the books, but the owners ultimately approved it, and in 2016 I started getting paid as a Puck employee rather than an independent contractor. I somehow managed to avoid paying taxes as an independent contractor for 2015, and actually got money back from the feds if I remember correctly.

In 2016, 2017, and most of 2018 barbacking at Puck was my only source of income and I did fine because I was lucky enough to live with my parents. Towards the end of the summer in 2018, I realized that working as a barback for the rest of my life wasn't going to cut it; I applied for a job as a car detail at Fred Beans (a large family of dealerships with locations all over the Philly suburbs as well as in New Jersey); I very quickly regretted taking that job for reasons that are too numerous to list here (and the Fred Beans debacle is a story worthy of its own post). Unfortunately, in October 2018, Sam told me very solemnly that she something to tell me and promptly dropped a bombshell; Puck would be closing indefinitely in January 2019, due to structural issues with the building if I remember correctly. I was one of the very first people she told. Luckily, I was able to stay employed up until the bitter end, and I also started doing Uber Eats in December 2018.

I started working at Fred Beans in September 2018, and I was ready to leave before the end of that year, but the unexpected situation with Puck left me with little choice but to stay there. My boss at Fred Beans gave me a very positive 30-day assessment in October 2018, and that also played a role in my decision to stick it out. Working at Fred Beans in the fall, winter, and part of the spring wasn't so bad. I didn't really do anything (like go to car shows) during the winter. However, the shop did not have air-conditioning. By May, the lack of air-conditioning was beyond old; I also couldn't stand the fact that 9-hour shifts were mandatory for part-time detailers like myself, and getting Saturdays off was very hard. At Puck, I had worked my ass off and thus earned the privilege of asking for days off to go to car shows and on family vacations whenever the hell I wanted.

On one of the rare Saturdays that I got off, I went to a car show in York in June 2019, and drank myself stupid at a local brewery in an attempt to drown my work-related sorrows; I didn't want to leave my truck in an unfamiliar area overnight, so I wandered around downtown York until I sobered up and drove the truck to my hotel. In mid-June, I put in my to weeks at Fred Beans and lied to my boss that I'd found an HVAC job; I signed up for DoorDash in July 2019 and kept myself out of the poor house by driving for both DoorDash and Uber Eats for the next two months.

My dad started working for a defense contractor called NAVMAR Applied Sciences in October 2007, right after he retired from the Navy after 25 years. By 2019, he was one of four vice presidents!

While on a business trip with his boss, the president and CEO of the company, the CEO suggested to him that I be hired at NAVMAR. My dad proposed this to me, and I immediately accepted. After barely six months at NAVMAR, COVID-19 shut down the whole damn country and I was furloughed for three months starting in March. My parents didn't want me working some retail job and potentially exposing all of us, but they felt really bad that I wasn't earning any money, so my dad gave me $500 a week for those three months I was off the job. I also got stimulus checks.

This obviously also put Puck on the backburner, due to all the stupid COVID restrictions imposed on restaurants. After years of bureaucratic bullshit with the borough, Puck's owners reopened the place at the original location (but it's not the same place and it's leased by a brewery), and due to the traveling liquor license loophole were able to open a new restaurant down the hill at another property they own. Sam manages the new place, which opened less than two weeks ago. I am still friends with Sam (and she is still friends with me), and I still use her as a reference when filling out job applications. However, Amanda and I are distancing ourselves from Sam by choice, due to something that happened, that I am not at liberty to discuss on a public forum (any of my close friends on here want to know, please PM me and I will tell you in private).

 

Excellent. Money is money, and this is more steady and whatnot. Worst case it's a short term bridge to something else.

 

I went back to the one guy's Glenside investment property to pick some more scrap, which included what turned out to be the shell of a 1950s RCA Victor television!

 

Thats really good news!

 

Yep, l didnt want to mess with it because it was highly agitated about being stuck, figured it would work itself free.

 

I'm with you.
It got itself into the net.
It can get itself out.
I'm not getting it out.......

 

Amanda needs vacuum; I scored two working Dirt Devils from one of my scrap sources yesterday, so now she has one!

 

I saw this deer shortly after picking up the rest of the pool...