Sigh. I am so pissed at myself...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

GAAAAAAH!

So I’ve got this job that has become a living hell, where I’m completely miserable. My plans for July, which is one of the months when my job is extremely dead, were to go out and find a new damn job (most of the year at my job, we’re so busy that there’s practically no time for job hunting).

July 1 rolls around, and I’m all set to start putting in applications and resumes. But I’m driving around running some other errands, and as I’m on my way home I glance down at my dashboard and notice, to my horror, that my temperature gauge is almost pegged into the red.

Great. I just spent $360 that I really couldn’t afford, a few weeks earlier, having the fuel pump replaced after I’d been driving to Wal-Mart and my car up and quit right in the middle of one of the heaviest-traffic parts of town. And now this, going into the month where I’m not going to be making any money. I got home, waited for the engine to cool down, and checked the radiator. Plenty of water/coolant in there. My best guess, knowing nothing about auto mechanics, was that the water pump had gone out like the fuel pump did.

Fuck. Now I couldn’t drive my car more than few blocks without it overheating. I could drive it to the grocery store and back, or to work and back — both are very close to my apartment — but driving around town looking for a job was out of the question. And given that July in my town means 100-degree+ temperatures, there’s no way in hell I was going to walk. I can’t show up and ask for an application while I’m dripping sweat from head to toe.

So I spent all of July with, basically, no car. So last Sunday I asked my church if they could help me with getting it fixed, and they readily agreed to help me out. (Man, it’s hard asking for help, isn’t it?) I’d made an appointment with my mechanic for today, August 1, but the drive from my apartment to his shop was too far to go without my car completely overheating. So I drove the few blocks to work yesterday, then after work I drove a few more blocks to my church, left the car in the parking lot there, and walked home. Then, this morning, I got up early, rode my bicycle down to my church, locked the bike inside the church, drove the car a few more blocks to the garage and left it there for them, with the key. Walked back to my church, hopped back on my bike, and rode home. Rode my bike to work at noon.

I’d left instructions for my mechanic to call me before doing any work, since I needed to let my pastor know how much money we were talking about. Also, having already spent more money fixing this car than I paid for it in the first place (I paid $600 for a 1992 POS Mercury Topaz), I’d already decided that if it was going to cost over $300 I was going to tell my mechanic “never mind” and send the POS to the junkyard. Instead, he called me around 3:00 to tell me he’d fixed everything (and that he’d also noticed my oil was about 2.5 quarts low, which he topped off for free).

It wasn’t the water pump. It wasn’t the radiator. It wasn’t even the thermostat. Instead, it was a little 5" long hose that had sprung a leak. Total bill: $98.07.

Well. I could afford to pay that myself. Got my boss to let me go get my car, and got a coworker to drive me down to the garage to pick it up.

And now I’m completely pissed at myself. If I’d forced myself to ask for help with the money right away, I could have had my car in the shop within a few days of noticing the problem (and discovering that it wasn’t as expensive as I was afraid it would be), and I’d have had full use of my car the whole month. And I could have been out looking for different work. Now August is here, and things at my current job are going to start picking up, leaving me little time to look elsewhere :mad:

I feel like taping a “KICK ME” sign to my own back.

2

I think today’s Cracked articlemight be useful to you.

Why would you beat yourself up? I know it’s so hard to accept help or ask for help. But yay! It wasn’t a big deal! And you can’t tell with a car. It could have been a five grand fix, right? I’ve had not the money but the guaranteed help (via First National Bank of Dad) for the coolant thing and played the Crazy Coolant video game (the one where you can keep going if you don’t have to stop! so you make the block and you see the light and you just make it and… great game.) What did you do wrong? If in your deep gut it was ‘ask for help’, then quell that. When you’re in a better place, do that for somebody else.

3

Heh. I read Cracked every day, and read that article in between dropping the car at the garage and going to work.

The “asking for help” is one of those things that I think may be common amongst children of Baby Boomers like me, something that comes down from my parents being children of the WW2 generation. That is, the idea that you have to EARN everything you get, and that if you can’t pay your own way, there’s something wrong with you. When I was growing up, any time I wanted my parents to pay for something I wanted, or simply help me get something, there was always this list of conditions that I had to fulfill to get their help. It taught me to never ask for help. So the idea that I can say “help me” and somebody will say, “okay, here you go” is hard to wrap my head around.

This, even after I asked for help with a dental bill a few years ago, and my pastor came down and paid it for me. I promised to pay it back, and he was all, “No, Rik, you don’t have to. That’s what we’re here for.”

4

What if you no longer want their help? Bc they make it so complex when it could be so simple…

5

I’m not seeing why you should be kicking yourself. You asked for a bit of help and ended up not needing it.

6

My first car had an oil leak that some mechanic told me was a head gasket that needed replacing for something like $1000, and I fed the damn thing oil for a couple of years trying to save up that much money. When I was finally ready to do this repair, it turned out that tightening a couple of bolts on a valve cover fixed everything. I spent YEARS worrying about it and dealing with slimy oil bottles in the car every few days, for NOTHING!

We can make ourselves crazy, kicking ourselves over things like this.

You didn’t correctly guess yesterday’s winning lottery number, either. The fact that you barely missed some much better outcome isn’t your fault. I completely support shrugging this one off!

7

I’ve owned an 86 Tempo (the Ford version of the Topaz) which was a very good car. Then I bought a 94 Topaz which was a giant POS. The gas tank rusted out in under 7 years! Many other things went wrong. Fortunately I do most of my own work.

Anyway I’m confused. What kind of job has you working so many hours that you can’t look for another job yet you are so broke?

I’ve worked 60-70 hours a week before on a salary job and you can bet that I still found time to find another job. I also started to not work excessive hours while on salary. If you want me to work overtime, you are going to pay for it by making me hourly or guaranteed bonuses.

8

It’s not so much the looking as it is scheduling an interview. I’m a cook in the convention/catering business, which means that I often work 12- to 16-hour days, 6-7 days a week, a different shift every day, and have a complete inability to predict my own availability for anything the following week, because we don’t get next week’s schedule until Friday. I’ve spent the last 7+ years at this job being completely unable to commit myself to anything outside of work more than a couple days in advance. So unless I can get an interview at the same time I’m filling out/handing in the application, odds are that if they call me I’m going to be at work when/if they call and unable to take the call, and even if I do take the call, I’m probably not going to be available for an interview at a time that works for them due to my erratic schedule.

I really want to go back to line cooking in a regular restaurant, and there are certain times of day that are considered appropriate for asking about a job (i.e., not in the middle of a lunch/dinner rush). Basically, it’s best to apply between 2 and 4 PM. Lunch is over, dinner hasn’t started, and the manager will still be there at that time of day. Applying at other times a day could suggest a lack of understanding of the business, an impression I don’t want to give. I’ve been doing this for 30 years; I know how it works :slight_smile:

9

Rik, it sounds like you might be coming down with a cold. Can you take a few days off to recover, and arrange your meetings in the meantime?

Sorry your work situation sucks, good luck rectifying it soon.

10

I’m really not sure why you didn’t go get an estimate the day of or after it started giving you problems. Why ask for help before you know you actually need it? So yeah, that was a silly thing to do, but hindsight is 20/20 of course.

11

Yep, that’s why I’m kicking myself.

Part of the problem is that I have a strong aversion to wasting other peoples’ time*, especially when that time is money. And I also have a tendency to immediately jump to the “worst-case scenario”; in this case, assuming that the problem was going to be the most expensive possibility. The idea of taking my car in, having the mechanic spend X hours diagnosing the problem to give me an estimate, only to have me tell him, “Never mind, I can’t afford that” is just … repellent to me. I know, it’s a bit silly, but that’s how I am.

*This is the same reason I’ve given up on filing for unemployment benefits during my job’s slow periods, choosing to just tough it out instead. I can’t seem to make the idiots at the unemployment department comprehend how the “seasonal” aspect of my job works. I file a claim, and for the reason I check the “temporary reduction in hours” option, and then I specify the date I expect to return to full-time work. And they still expect me to go out and make three work-search contacts each week that I’m claiming unemployment benefits. I’m simply not going to apply for jobs when I have no intention of accepting a job offer. Because I’m wasting those employers’ time, and that might count against me in the event that, in the future, I do want to work for them.

12

It’s really hard for me too and I’m in that age group.
When I broke my arm last year, someone at the farmer’s market asked me if they could do one of those funding webpages for me. Like a lot of the farmers I know, we can’t afford health insurance right now. We could cover some of the costs of my surgery but not all of it. I felt all ‘Does this make me a major fail etc.’ but I said sure because I was a little desperate.
Within 5 days, the community collected over $10,000 for us and I decided to shut it down.* People kept walking up to me or my husband at the market and handing us checks.** I never ever cry in public but I bawled like a baby for two weekends.

Flash forward to this April. Find out that another farmer family lost their entire vegetable crop to a massive hail storm three weeks before their 17 son was in a horrible vehicular accident. He had to be life lifted to the hospital and that ain’t cheap.
I did a page for them and it helped to defray a lot their costs. Just pay for forward whenever you can, however you can.
*I didn’t want to make money off of it in any way, shape or form. I knew the costs of orthopedic surgeon and the operating room. Who knew that the general anesthesia wasn’t included in the cost of surgery? It’s not like you can bring in your own drugs or anything.
** Except of course the Austin non-profits whose mission statements are all sustainable food communities and helping the farmer.

13

Now I understand. I worked as a cook decades ago. Last week I did a long bicycle ride with a guy who was a chef for over 20 years in that same industry. He said that there were too many chefs as all these cooking schools were pumping them out. He said that his pay was actually going down the last few years. Also the work was killing him as he was unable to exercise and working too many hours.

So he gave it up and now is working at Lowes helping people in the electrical and plumbing departments. He’s making a little less money; has steady hours (and fewer of them); and exercise. He says that he has the option of picking up some work as a chef part time if money becomes an issue. He was very happy to be out of that industry.

14

It’s hindsight now, but very often, you can stave off overheating by cranking up the heat to high and the blower to max.

Yes, you’ll be very uncomfortable, but sweating is better then blowing a head gasket or being broken down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.

15

Yeah, I’d heard that before and indeed did it a couple times. Though I’m not sure if it made much difference, since I didn’t dare drive more than a few blocks - to and from the grocery store, to and from work, etc. I’m not sure how it would have worked in my case, though — the part that was broken was called the “heater hose”, a little, L-shaped rubber hose. For all I know that “heater hose” was what directed the engine heat to the heater.