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

With regards to the detail shop, Saturdays were mandatory because I was part-time. Full-timers got every other Saturday off and also got paid vacations. This Albanian guy who has been there since the early 2000s (and who I miss dearly; he’s one of my favorite coworkers) typically gets Saturdays off because he’s the best detailer there, he’s been there so long, and has kids he likes to spend time with.

Getting up at 6:30am every Saturday really wore on me. Some people can handle waking up early and working nine hours every Saturday. I found out the hard way that I can’t. I was losing weight and getting into shape because there was a lot of manual labor, but I’m also pretty sure I was losing my sanity by the time December rolled around (I started working there in September 2018, right after Labor Day weekend, and left in June 2019).

I have two friends (husband and wife) who work Saturdays. The husband, my good friend Dave, is a truck driver. He started out OTR, but switched to local so he could spend more time with his wife (plus the pay is better). He is a making a fortune, and generally does work every Saturday but has the flexibility to take time off if it’s really needed.

His wife is a union custodian who works at a school, and she generally only works weeks but occasionally picks up weekend shifts to make extra money.

I also have a third friend who works in the meat department at a supermarket and often works Saturdays.

None of my other friends work Saturdays! And the ones who do work Saturdays are certainly not getting up at the crack of dawn and working nine-hour shifts!

 

As a former Marine, I was hoping you could give your .02 here...

I have encountered a lot of veterans at car shows and in my day to day life. I’d say 99% of them are great people. The only two asshole veterans I’ve encountered are Mr. Buick in November 2010, and the owner of the GMC Sonoma who tried to reach into my truck and grab my camera in May 2016.

 

Last night for example my neighbors kids tried to hang a goodie bag on my door. I knew they were there from casting the shadows on my window but I couldn’t tell you was out there. Then once I checked I scared the shit out of them.

 

The other issue of the detail shop is that it’s what my psychologist refers to as “piece work”. It’s better known as flat rate or commission, and lots of people get paid that way. However, detailing cars at a dealership is different than selling cars, doing engine work on cars, or repairing body damage on cars.

If you are fast, you can do great. There was one 20-year old kid who could do a full detail in an hour or less and was clearing 80 hours a week (like $36K a year). That’s a lot of money for a 20-year old living with his parents!

I was not the slowest detailer in the shop, but I was not fast by any stretch of the imagination. I generally worked five or six hours on weekdays and, like I said, nine hours on Saturdays. I was making 25 to 30 hours a week, sometimes less; Just multiply that by $10 an hour.

 

This “family of dealerships” is so big and so profitable that detail technicians were encouraged to come in on their days off. I found myself doing this in order to “make my hours” and it very quickly wore me down.

I started working at the detail shop on September 5th, 2018 if I remember correctly. I believe we adopted Mandy on September 28th. Sometime in late October, Mandy was diagnosed with Congenital Renal Dysplasia. I put in my two weeks at the detail shop sometime in June 2019 and my last day was June 29th. Mandy was barely a year old when her failing health forced us to put her down on July 1st, 2019. Our first dog in almost a decade and we only had her for ten months! The fact that I had to work wonky hours instead of spending time with my terminally ill puppy stick upsets me to this day.

That was just one of many things that created a recipe for disaster...

 

There’s a lot that I will not be getting into, the grueling Saturdays and flat rate pay system were the biggest issues...

Barbacking, or any job in the service industry for that matter, can be just as grueling as detailing cars.

However, barbacks generally get paid
eight bucks an hour or more, while waiters/waitress and bartenders get less than three bucks and rely largely on tips. In addition to their higher hourly wage, barbacks get a minimum 10% of the bartender’s tips at the end of the night (more if the bartender is in a good mood and/or it’s a busy night).

At the detail shop, the faster guys (and occasionally girls) made out like bandits; I was not very fast. On slow days, you either got stuck doing fleet cars for half the pay, or sat around doing nothing and didn’t get paid at all.

At Puck, I was paid $10 per hour no matter what I was doing (running errands, making juice, sweeping, cleaning, walking the manager’s dog, etc). If I got stuck in traffic during a liquor run or supply run, I still got paid!

Retail sucks; Hell will freeze over, and pigs will grow wings and fly, before I work somewhere like Walmart, Target, or a grocery store. However, retail workers still get paid by the hour no matter what they are doing!

It also didn’t help that the detailers had to clean up the shop and do other stuff like shovel snow for no extra pay.

 

On a side note, I have more or less boycotted Walmart because those pricks fired my friend earlier this year.

Why did they fire her? Because my friend has chronic health problems and missed too many consecutive days. She now works at a call center for Safelite Auto Glass, which is much better than Walmart in in my opinion.

 

My cousin worked at Target for a number of years and proudly declared Walmart the enemy. He still thinks Target is vastly superior to Walmart and refuses to shop at the latter unless it’s an emergency or there’s a particularly good deal. However, he did not like the actual job at Target one bit, and was jumping for joy when he finally got his dream job working as a park ranger.

 

Long story short, I love my
former coworkers from the detail shop and miss most of them dearly (the only ones I genuinely disliked have either gotten fired or just quit, though unfortunately some of the ones I liked quit too). However, the job just was not for me!

 

Also, going back to the one Aspie friend I was talking about earlier...

I am considered quite extroverted for somebody who has any form of autism, so much so that it often goes right over people’s heads that I’m on the spectrum. As a result, I have easier time socializing and making friends than many people with even high-functioning autism.

Instead of working to improve his own social skills, my friend resorted to getting insanely jealous of me. Before I was working at Puck, he got annoyed that I was “treated like a god” while people either ignored, barely noticed, or disliked him. He resorted to adopting my mannerisms, but not improving his personality or habits to match mine , and this did not go well for him. He did not seem to grasp that you have to have a certain personality in order to act a certain way. He tried to act like me without adopting my lovable personality, and I ended up having to vouch for him to keep him from metaphorically getting “voted off the island”.

One time in 2012 or 2013, in the parking lot at Puck, he told me that I should stop spending so much time at Puck because my so-called friends were only using me and taking advantage of me. He then added that he’d “seen this before.”

I am pretty sure that I had been drinking prior to this exchange of words in t he parking lot, so I would not have been in a sound state of mind and was not exercising the best judgment. I grabbed my friend by the shoulders and shoved him into the side of his SUV (he totaled his 2003 Highlander in June or July 2013, so this was sometime before that). I then stormed off, but later came back and apologized. That’s he admitted that he was jealous of my popularity and we made up.

 

One time in 2014, I was invited to see a Phillies game with this friend and his family. His dad had a season pass, and we got to sit in the VIP area (one or two steps below a private luxury box). I had a good time and had a beer or two with dinner. It was summer, and I’d say it was only 7-8pm or so and still light out. My friend and his parents were ready to head home and wind down after dropping me off. I was still full of energy, hopping in my truck and driving to Puck as soon as they dropped me off.

A week or so later, I saw my friend and he told me how he and his parents had been talking after I’d gotten out of the car, specifically about me wanting to go out and party after the baseball game when they were ready to call it a night.

I gave a him a “WTF?” look and demanded to know why they cared so much. The matter was never discussed again...

 

Here’s another random but fun post...

States other than Pennsylvania I would consider moving to if I got a really good job offer or something, listed in alphabetical order:

• Alaska (Southernmost region only)
• Arizona
• Florida
• Georgia
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Maine
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• North Carolina
• Oklahoma
• Ohio
• Oregon
• South Carolina
• South Dakota
• Texas
• Virginia
• Washington
• West Virginia

 

States I would never move to even if my life depended on it:

• California
• Minnesota
• New Jersey
• New York
• Utah

 

Utah because of it’s stupid alcohol laws and Minnesota partially because it’s cold and largely for a reason I’m not allowed to publicly discuss here...

 

Didn't want to fill up the radio thread with unrelated crap. Hardbodies are near impossible to find because they were either beaten to shit or mothballed. People don't want to part with the decent ones!

It's times like this that I really miss my '96 Pathfinder...

 

On here or the other thread?

 

Agreed.

But, the A/C sure does work good doesn't it? You need that in Texas...

 

What I don't get is why Toyota didn't switch to 4-wheel disc brakes like the Frontiers have...

 

Your dad bought a brand new truck; Unless it breaks down by the side of the road, don't complain about it!