Episode 355: Mentor, or Tormentor

On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy gets in depth with all of the things that tech schools DO NOT teach their students. There is a real disconnect between what techs know when they finish a program and when they enter the workforce. There really isn’t any type of instruction that can adequately prepare a student for the chaos of a modern auto shop. We also get inso some of the new guy metrics from WrenchWay, deeper into the technician shortage, and take a look at what AI is doing to people going into the trades.

Also Uncle Jimmy brainstorms his merch line. 

This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome once again to Grease the Wheels, your automotive technician podcast that comes out of the pie hole of your Uncle Jimmy here at the Rock and Roll Garage. Hey, sorry about the week off. I was on vacation and I decided to just shoot the locks off and take an entire vacation from everything except eating and sleeping. I did plenty of both. I didn't even really fuck with the cars too much.

unknown 0:20

Woo-hoo!

SPEAKER_00 0:21

That's not like me. All right, so I'm back on track here. And uh sorry about uh missing out for you. Uh but this is the point in a podcast where I always tell you all how much I appreciate what you do, and I thank you as sincerely as I possibly can for what you do if you're fixing it, building it, making it, breaking it. If you got tools, you got equipment, you got uh all kinds of things you're working with, and you're sweating every day and making it go, making America work, making the world work. I don't I don't care where you are. I mean, if if you're in Germany helping America work, yay! If you're in America helping Germany work, yay. Again, also too in Australia, whatever you guys are doing, man, keep up the good work. Thank you very much for what you do. Appreciate it. It is appreciated by one, your Uncle Jimmy, okay? I know that uh some of your customers don't appreciate it too much because they have to pay. And you know, it's just I don't know what to tell you about that. Nobody wants to pay. That's what the problem is. Now, the subject of this week's podcast is what's going wrong right at the very beginning of an automotive technician's career. And I want to be very clear about this. I'm talking about uh some of the new hires, some of the fresh graduates from some of these tech schools out there, and I want to kind of uh put out a little warning for them and a warning for the people they're gonna go work for, and a warning for the people who already work for them. I've got some uh I've got some things to tell you about that. Okay. Uh one of the things I want to start off with is that a lot of people who have uh complained or have cited some of the problems with the catastrophic technician shortage that we have, and believe me, it is catastrophic. It uh it grows every year. Some of the figures I've seen uh as far as uh how many technicians are needed out there in really all fields, from collision to heavy duty to diesel to automotive, and even in uh aviation and uh some of the other genres of technicians out there, HVAC, the catastrophic shortage of people willing to do those repair those jobs, those repair jobs, those maintenance jobs. It's it's getting worse. It is getting much, much worse. The figures, it depends on who you talk to about uh what the shortage is going to be in the future. Uh so far, what I've found in the eight years I've been doing this particular podcast is their figures have been pretty much right on the money all the way down the line. There is a very large and catastrophic shortage of technicians. One of the things that people do when there's a shortage of technicians is they uh they yell and scream from the top of a soapbox about what the problem is. And a lot of times these are people who don't know what the fuck they're doing, they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, and they don't know what the fuck to do. So basically they should get fucking their ass kicked off of the soapbox and they should shut the fuck up and go to work trying to solve some of the fucking problems I'm about to outline for you. Okay. Well, one of the first problems is that they always go, oh, there's not enough kids going to tech schools. Well, I actually beg to differ. All right. I believe that honestly, uh there's a lot of great tech schools in this country and probably in other countries too. I don't know about those countries. But in this particular country, there's a there's an awful lot of kids, uh, girls and guys that are going to automotive tech schools to learn how to be mechanics because they have passion for cars or because they do it just like a steady, regular job where they're wanted and appreciated. And then sorry, it's not going to happen for you, but uh they're and then there's they're looking for a career. Now you can definitely have a career. I have, I have I have a career, I still have a career, I think. I don't know, we'll see what happens when I get back from vacation. But a lot of people who are complaining about what's what the problem is as far as the catastrophic uh technician shortage is, they will cite that there's not enough kids going to school to learn things like this, and that there's no automotive shop classes in uh high school and that sort of thing. And yeah, kids are not getting acclimated to uh how cars work by having one or working on them. And it it's it's really because there's so many other genres of information and uh and entertainment, honestly, out there to uh to entertain them, basically, is what it comes down to. I know when I was a young lad of 18 years old, the automobile was my life. It was my life. It allowed me to get away from the farm and and go over to my friend's house without having to ride a bike, and then I could get a job and I could do all kinds of different things with the car. So car became extremely important to me. And guess what? Even to this day, still, my vehicles are extremely important to me. They're they really represent like the entire arc of my life. That may sound pathetic to some people, but hey, you know what? I know people who collect other crazy ass dumb shit, and uh I don't criticize them, so I would expect them to show me this the same privilege of not uh you know not uh criticizing my choice of expertise, my choice of collection, my choice of interest. Okay. But uh very few kids these days uh latch onto the automobile is something that they have passion about. Sure, there's gonna be some, and and probably even really a lot, uh, not probably as many as there used to be, okay, because uh we we've heard the facts and figures, and uh 68% of the uh automotive technicians out there are either 45 years or older. It's like uh yeah, there's a big gap coming, folks. There's a big, huge, biggity big gap when over two-thirds of your technicians are close enough to retirement age to bail at any moment. Okay, and you you're gonna be left with you know your millennials and your Gen Zers and your Gen Alphas fixing your car. And from what I've seen, they're not really interested in doing it. They're not really interested in doing it because they research stuff, they look up stuff on the internet, they talk to people maybe, maybe they talk to people on the internet and they find out that the job kind of fucking sucks and it doesn't pay for shit. And guess what? Why would you waste time going to school to get a job to pay shit? So the job has to start paying. That's one of the things. Now, I don't want to tell you that I'm a lazy son bitch, but apparently lately I have been being lazy, and what I have done is uh and it's I'd like to avoid doing this, but I can't only because it's works so well. I was using AI to uh give me some points here, uh give me some talking points on what I'm trying to get across to you tonight. I'm recording this at night, I hope you know, but you're probably listening to it during the day if you're listening at all. And if you are listening at all, I just want to say a quick thank you. Uh what I did was I put to AI some questions about uh some of the things that are going on with our new technicians. Now, what is happening is that there is a, and you you know this, if you're in the field already and you're working, you know this. There is a fucking enormous chasm, a very great divide between what they're learning in tech school and what they need to know to be in our shops nowadays. Now, if you're gonna go work for an indie, you're gonna have to know a lot of different shit, a lot. And I have a great deal of respect for those guys that are out there working at indie shops because they have to know at least a little bit about everything and how some things are done by some manufacturers and how things are done maybe differently by other manufacturers, and they have to have to be on top of that. And I've taken the easy route out. I work for one brand at a dealer, and I don't typically work on anything but that brand. So I have their philosophy, their electronic philosophy, their mechanical philosophy, their engineering philosophy, their design philosophy. I have all of that shit in my head already. I know how they're gonna do stuff, I know why they do it. Sometimes I wish they fucking wouldn't, but I know I know how they do it. And I sometimes I do know why they do it, and sometimes I glad they do it a certain way. Other times I'm not so glad. But it it's made my life a lot easier to work on one brand. Now, are they teaching you that in tech school? Fuck no, they're not. They're not teaching you that shit in tech school. I don't care what tech school you go to, they're not gonna, they're not gonna prepare you to work on one brand or all brands out there. They're gonna give you the basics, the best that they can. I feel like that within the last couple of years only are they really starting to try to fill you in on what's happening with electric vehicles, which, if you haven't really noticed, they're kind of falling off the wayside a little bit here. Uh, they're not so highly sought after right now. And uh I kind of feel sorry for all these companies who jumped on the bandwagon and said, Oh, we're gonna go all electric by 2030. You know, and I I really said it to myself, honestly, at the time, I go, Yeah, no, you're not. No, you're not. Nobody makes such a wholesale change in how they do business that quickly. And with with the way that EVs work, it's just not a practical solution to a lot of problems. Okay, in the south, in the southwest, where it's warm and hot, in most cases, EVs work great. In the north, yeah, they don't work. They just don't work. It's too cold most of the time. It's tough to say. It's uh cold, cold up north here. I'm I'm still actually up north right now in uh New York where I live. And uh it's it's just it's right now the weather's great, and having an EV now would be yeah, just fabulous. But uh when it gets cold, yeah, no, they don't work as well. They don't work as well, they're very temperamental as far as the temperature goes. Are they teaching any of that shit in tech school? I don't know. Uh I believe that they would like to. I believe that they're actually just sticking the basics in you, and if they've got time left over, they're gonna teach you about eh, who knows? I don't know. I don't know. I think every school has a different curriculum, a different syllabus, and then they're gonna put as much knowledge as they can into your head, but they're gonna leave you drastically short of being able to walk in the front door and take kick ass and take names. You're just not gonna be able to, okay? So here's what I asked AI. This was the very first question. What are some of the things that should be taught in an automotive technician school that are not? And then its answer came back. Well, automotive technical schools do a solid job of teaching the fundamental physics of engine, basic electrical theory, and how to turn a wrench. There is a massive gap between a controlled classroom environment and the chaotic reality of a flat rate shop floor. Now, this folks, honestly, this is why I'm leaning on AI because they nailed it. They fucking nailed it. You go and you sit in a class from eight to five every day, and they they show you this and they show you that, and they show you this and that, and then they test you on it, and you either know it or you don't know it, and if you don't know it, they let you test again after you figure it out. You get out in the fucking real world. It ain't classroom like at all. It is not even close. You are really basically as a as a graduate of an automotive tech school, you are thrown to the wolves. Yeah, you might know how every system in a car works. You might know how to diagnose it, you might even have the right tools for it. I'd be a little surprised if that was true, but you are not ready for what they said was the chaotic reality of a shop, a flat rate shop floor. You're you're not ready for it. And then I don't want to have the discussion about flat rate or or salary or uh hourly. I don't want to have that discussion. The shops in the United States of America, which is a capitalistic, democratically governed country, flat rate will continue to exist until the automobile is extinct. Flat rate works too fucking well for dealers and shops for it to ever, ever, ever, ever go away. I'm sorry, it's just not going to go away. All right. I would love it if it did. I don't like it. Uh, if you know, I've said it a million times. I don't want to go on too much about it. If there's plenty of work, everybody wins. If there's no work, the shop still wins, you lose. Uh, here's what it goes on to say here to truly prepare a student for a lifelong career and combat the high burnout rate in the industry. Here are some critical subjects that should be in the curriculum, but rarely are. It goes on to say here, advanced diagnostic strategy and critical thinking. Now, folks, uh, if you've listened to this long enough, you know that your Uncle Jimmy's not really like a really cerebral guy. I'm not really like the biggest thinker in the world. You know, people aren't gonna go, hey, Newton and Einstein and you know, fucking any of these other scientists out there, and then they're gonna mention me in the same name in the same category in the same sentence, not gonna happen. Okay, I'm not a huge thinker. But when it comes to working on automobiles, when I've got a problem with an automobile, I have a tendency to stop for like a minute, maybe two, maybe even five, and sometimes ten, it depends on what the problem is. And I think about what that problem is, just wrap your mind around it. They're not gonna teach you that in tech school. And and some people never learn it, they want answers instantly. That's what our society has created. People who want answers instantly. And quite frankly, the iPhone has has bred those people. But do they really think? Do they really look into something and go, why did this happen? Why did this, why did this go bad? What is wrong here and where is it bad? And I've talked about it a million fucking times here. When I tell you, I say, look, it you know, you got a problem with something, comes up faulted, don't put your fucking eyeballs on it. That's one of the first things I think. It's like, let's just look at the fucking thing. Maybe, you know, and it could be stupid. And I do mean mean literally stupid. If you have a module that's not responding the way you want, and you know, the fault comes back, oh, this isn't working, and that isn't working, or whatever, and the complaint lines up with that, or even if the complaint's a little bit different, you can you can kind of think your way through it. You go, well, what causes that to happen, or what caused that not to happen? And then you go and you you you pick out maybe a certain module that might be causing you a problem or a certain system that's not working correctly. I mean, it could be anything from air conditioning to your transmission, your engine, you know, a fuel system, maybe the differentials, maybe even the half shafts, whatever it is. If something's giving you a problem, put your fucking eyes on it. Jesus Christ, take a look at it. You know, if it's electrical and it's not responding, go check the fucking fuse. I mean, why does it, and dude, and I and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna single anybody out because I've done it before. I've spent a good 10-15 minutes looking at a module, trying to figure out why it's not working, you know, looking at all the wires and the connectors, and then all of a sudden a bucking light bulb goes off above my head, and it's a really dim one, by the way, and it says, How about checking the fuse, Uncle Jimmy? That might be a good thing to do. And then I go in and I find the fuse is blown. But here's the critical thinking, folks. If the fuse is blown, you have to ask yourself the question, why the fuck did the fuse blow? Now, obviously, if it's a power outlet that lives in the console and this guy's got more shit plugged into it than a fucking atomic bomb, then obviously you know why that fuse blew. But if you've got a module that's supposed to just cruise along using five amps of uh five amps of power at 12 volts, and suddenly it blows the fuse, well, there's gotta be a fucking reason for it. So you put a fuse in it, you turn it on, and you start running it through its fucking tests, and you you see maybe maybe you try to figure out, maybe you use whatever it does, maybe it runs the power, the the power seats, or maybe it runs the power windows, and you start fucking with them, and then all of a sudden it blows the fuse again. Ah, a fucking problem. Now, now you're thinking, right? Do they train you how to think at tech school? I would say not. And and that's a problem, okay? And how can you even how do you even teach people to think? You know, if you say to people, hey, think, and they're like, oh, okay, you know, how do you how do you teach that? I'm not sure how you teach that. I know that uh a lot of the technicians I work with are real good at thinking about what a problem is, going at it, looking at it, and seeing what it's doing or what it's not doing, and and then discovering what is wrong. Okay, because that's our job. That's what we do. And then the critical thinking that we do, I think a lot of people give us absolutely zero credit for. And when you're a new guy, you are gonna get even less than zero credit for thinking you're it's just gonna happen. See, we're problem solvers, ladies and gentlemen. We're problem solvers. You and I are problem solvers. Somebody brings the cars broken, we solve the problem. If there's something going wrong in the shop, a lot of us, we know what the problem is, we know how to solve it. Problem is that nobody's listening to us, and there's no, there's no diagnostic uh scan tool for what's going wrong with your shop, or what's going wrong with the accounting, or what's going wrong with your service advisors, or what's going wrong with management. There's just no way for you to go in, detect what the fault codes are, and then eliminate the fucking problem. Problem it's with a lot of that stuff, the problem's not going to go away, and probably, probably it's gonna get worse. Who knows? It depends on where you're at and who's running it, and and so on and so forth. I just find that in my experience, a lot of uh people are in charge that probably fucking shouldn't be. Here's what it says here it says most schools teach chick students how to follow a specific diagnostic tree. IG that says here if step A fails, go to step B. Yeah, everybody can do that. And really, uh, and then this is the thing with critical thinking is that you probably have this diagnostic tree in your head. You know, if you got a module, it's not working, it's not responding, it's not communicating, it's not doing any of the shit it should do. Your brain should say, uh, check the bus, Charlie. And when you do that, it uh it responds, it turns itself on, and then you can go from there. And what I do a lot of times, and I mean, uh, you know, I don't know if this is good or bad. Uh you can you can make up your own mind about it. I will uh scan all the faults in a car, I will make note of them, I will look at them to see if there's any kind of a common link between all of them, and then I'll go look at whatever it is that's not fucking working. And if I don't see a visible problem with it, I mean, for Christ's sake's people, I have seen cars that have been shot, and I don't know under what situations or what the what the circumstances were, but people put bullets into them, okay? And if they hit like a control module, guess what? It's probably not gonna fucking work, right? I mean, it's as stupid as that sounds. That's part of your critical thinking is to put your eyeballs on that part, go and see that there's a fucking 44 mil a 44 a 9mm hole in the fucking thing. And then guess what? The customer's gonna need a new one along with a little body work, some bondo, and maybe some, you know, maybe some blending of a door panel paint, whatever. That's what you hate, that's what you have to do. And in your head, as a successful technician, and especially in a successful flat rate technician, which probably a great deal of you are, uh, that's what's that's one of the things that's gonna have to happen is you're gonna have to develop your own trouble tree in your head that you use to spot problems. You're gonna have to critically think about the problems you have, and you're gonna go at that problem with a trouble tree you have in your head. Okay. It says here, however, modern vehicles are rolling networks of computers where a failure in a blind spot monitor can take down a powertrain communication bus. Yes, and it can happen. I saw a car one time where a gallon of milk was spilled in the backseat and the car would not fucking start. Not shitting you. I am not shitting you. It actually did take out a bus called a powertrain bus. It was a PT can, and it had a resistor for some reason under the back seat, and there it was swimming in 2% milk. Not gonna work, folks. Not gonna work. Uh here's what it says here: the missing piece, students teaching students how to formulate their own diagnostic theories based on how a network operates rather than blindly following a flow chart or chasing trouble codes. Yeah, that's critical thinking. You want to be able to follow a uh trouble tree or chasing trouble codes, but you need to attach some real world thinking to what your trouble codes are trying to tell you. Number two, here it says real world skill, reading live data stream graphs, understanding multiplexing, you know, uh what all the uh the buses do, the CAN bus, your LIN bus, your flex ray bus, any other fucking buses you might have in the car. Some of them have several. Uh in the past, actually, there were uh upwards of uh almost a dozen. Uh they have trimmed back on that somewhat. Some of that stuff got taken off the bus because the bus was actually too efficient. Okay. And it says here, knowing how to use a lab scope efficiently to catch glitching signals that a scan tool misses. I gotta tell you, I've uh I've owned my own dual trace oscilloscope, lab scope, whatever you want to call it. I've never been able to catch a diagnostic bus in a glitch. My thinking is, and this is critical thinking on my part, a bus either works or it doesn't. I'm not gonna be able to catch a glitch because if you look at a bus long enough, it all looks like glitches. There's no way for you to interpret a glitch in a bus. I I don't believe. The only way you can do it if it's a dual trace and you're looking at the uh signal pulled high and then the signal pulled low, they're supposed to match each other. If they don't, then you know you have a problem. Uh, but that's usually, usually, typically pretty obvious, okay? Uh would a new guy know that stuff? I'm I'm thinking not. I'm thinking not. And if I saw a new guy uh dragging out a scope and on the third day he's working for us and he's looking at something when he's supposed to be changing the oil, I'd be like, hey, uh there's gonna be plenty of time for that. Okay. Uh number two here it says flat rate survival and time management. The transition from an hourly school environment to a 100% flat rate or performance based pay system is the number. Number one reason young technicians quit within their first two years. This is why I love AI, because I really think that that statement nails it. Because most technicians, I think, uh, what did Runchway say? It was 41 or 42% are gone in two years. Yeah. Gentlemen and ladies that do this job for more than a couple years, all of you out there who might be listening, you know, you know exactly what they're talking about. This job was tough, it was not easy, there wasn't a lot of help, a lot of stuff got done wrong, got done badly, and you wanted to quit. And then all of a sudden, I I think it's it's it's about two years. You either turn a corner or you grease the wheels. You turn a corner, you grease the wheels. And at 42%, it's you know, it's close enough to 50-50 for me. Here's what it goes on to say the missing pieces schools need to teach the business side of the bay. Students should learn how to hustle safely, manage multiple jobs at once, and clock their time efficiently. I'm telling you, that could take you another six months at the end of them teaching you all of the basics. Okay, especially this whole clock their time effectively. Nobody taught me how to do that. And guess what? I still don't really know how to do it properly. I struggle. I have an egg timer on my box. I always know when it's gone off when I wasn't standing there because people say, oh, your cookies are ready or cake's done. Or the bread rubber, you know, whatever. I mean, that the I set an alarm. I have a little cake timer. I yeah, if I need 12 minutes, you know, for two tenths or whatever it is, I'll set the timer because I I'll run an hour and a half on an oil change. I've done it, I do it all the time, because I don't think like that. I don't think in increments of time as far as what a job should take and what I'm gonna get paid for it. And it I know that it costs me, but I no one's ever taught me any better way to do it than the way I do it. And I must be doing all right because I don't get yelled at, but I could be doing better, and I could I would show up as uh I would show up as a much more efficient technician. But uh that's not really the name of the game, is it now? Efficiency. The uh the our idea of efficiency as technicians is just to do the job as quickly as we possibly can and get the next one and take whatever hours, whatever few tenths they're gonna pay us to do the last job, get it done as fast as you can, get the next one in. And that really, that really you know, first off, they're not gonna teach you that in tech school. And second off, they shouldn't teach you that in tech school because that isn't the way it should be. When you're trying to do a job as fast as you possibly can, what are you gonna do? You're gonna skip stuff that slows you down, right? Yeah, absolutely. Are you gonna set the tire pressures? I don't get paid for that. Are you gonna top off the fluid? Yeah, I don't get paid for that. How about the video? Are you gonna make a quality video? Fuck no. You're gonna take a 15-second video of the bumper on the car and go, hey, I looked at your car, everything looks good, thanks a lot. Boom, end of video. And you know what it shows up as? It shows up as a video that you did. It just says, oh yeah, he did the video. It sucked big, but he did it. It's like, and I don't do that myself personally, but you know, I'm just I'm trying to uh I'm trying to get started with a program where uh I help you guys all do videos that actually sell the recommendations that you make without having to rely on somebody who doesn't want to sell to make those uh make those sales. It's gonna, it's gonna count on you yourself, okay? That's what I'm trying to do. That's what Eric and I are trying to do. Uh nobody's really taking us up on it yet because they all think they know how to do it, but they're all full of shit. Okay. Everybody's a everybody's a self-proclaimed expert at it, and really nobody is. These people who think that they're experts at it have never done one. Christ almighty, your Uncle Jimmy's done 10,000 videos. You think he knows what he's up to? I would say, yep, here's what it says here. Next, real-world skill. Visualizing the workflow of a repair before starting. You do that by checking the repair instructions, don't you? How many times have you seen techs go at a car and try to repair something without even looking up the repair instructions? Yeah, plenty of times. And some of them they make out all right because they can see what they got to do, and maybe they've done it before, or maybe they've done something similar to it. So they're okay, they're ahead of the curve. But as far as a new guy with less than two years, you better be looking at them fucking repair instructions. Because if you forget something, or if you do something wrong and you break something or you lose something, it's gonna be trouble, baby. Setting up a bay for maximum efficiency and learning how to accurately estimate the time a job will take versus what the labor guy dictates. See, there's another there's another uh sticky wicket right there, okay? Because how long a job will take, especially if you're only in, you know, for less than two years, it's gonna take you longer than what a labor guide's gonna say probably to do that job, unless you're really, really good, or you've done it before. And chances are uh in a lot of cases, you have never done it before and you're not really, really good yet. So you'll have to you'll have to uh actually probably lose your ass for the first couple years, which is another reason why young technicians quit within their first two years. They're supposed to get paid for doing a job that uh they took eight hours to do, and then they look it up and they find out that the labor time guy says it should be done in two hours, and so they just got fucked out of six hours. How often is how often are you gonna let that happen to you? Yeah, not fucking often. All right. Number three here is the answer to that question. And here was the question again: what are some of the things that should be taught in an automotive technician school that are not? Yeah. Number three, communication, documentation, and the digital inspection. The technician doesn't just fix cars anymore. They have to justify the fix to an advisor who then has to sell it to a customer. We would like to eliminate the advisor from that equation because they're not doing the job uh up to any standards that I'm aware of. Uh, here's what it says the missing piece, writing professional, objective, and clear technician notes. Well, yeah, okay. I'm actually, I would like, I would like to take a moment to pat myself on the back. I write a lot of stuff about what's going on because I want to be understood. I mean, maybe if you listen to this, you might think, well, you talk too much, Uncle Jimmy. And I would agree with you. But in order to be understood, you have to make yourself clear. And sometimes to make yourself clear, you have to repeat yourself because sometimes people aren't listening. So fire it off again. Why not? Give them the double barrage, give them the uh the Tommy Two tones, you know. Hey, I'm out to I'm gonna go out and get the papers, get the papers. It's like you gotta tell them writing professional, objective, and clear technician notes, gotta write, gotta write what you what you found and how to repair it. You gotta be clear. I don't know, you know, I would think that in tech school they would teach you something along those lines. I don't recall learning anything like that. But I went to tech school was several years ago, obviously, because I'm an old bastard. But I don't recall them teaching me how to write a job story. I don't recall them uh critiquing any job story that I might have written. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. I who wasn't paying attention. Who would be surprised by that, right? Real world skill, mastering the art of the digital vehicle inspection. Uh it's a digital multi-point, it's a service walk around video. We haven't decided what we want to call it yet. Uh says technicians need to be taught how to take clear, focused photos and videos of failures and how to write concise descriptions that explain the cause, correction, and consequence of a broken part without using confusing shop jargon. I don't think I don't think that's a problem for new guys. Uh, they might not be familiar with shop jargon themselves. Maybe they are. Some of that stuff, you just have to call it what it is. And if the customer doesn't understand it, oh well. You know, so I don't know how important that that part is. I mean, we know what a ball joint is, we know what it looks like. On some cars, it doesn't look anything like a ball joint, but it's still called that. If a customer doesn't understand that, I'm I'm not sure what help I can give them. You know, if I show them in a video, this is a ball joint and this is bad, and you shake the wheel and it's obviously sloppy, and you go, Yeah, you need a new one. Otherwise, your car's gonna drive like it's a marble. And then if they don't get it, well, then I I yeah, I don't know what to tell you from there, okay? Now, it goes on to here to talk about electricity. Uh, they're talking about regular automotive 12-volt systems here. They're not even talking about EVs here. It says almost every school teaches Ohm's Law. I think some of you had trouble with that. It was actually pretty simple if you broke it down and you knew anything about math, but that's the thing. A lot of us, uh, a lot of us obviously don't. I mean, just because of the not because of the field we chose so much, but just because of the education that we got for ourselves when we were in high school. We're not really very good with math in some cases. And Ohm's law is math. And it it works if you learn how to use it. It says you're sitting at a desk calculating resistance in a world away from tracking down an intermittent parasitic draw and a luxury SUV with 40 control modules. Yeah, it's a different, it's a different world. It's the same fucking formula, and you're looking for the same thing, but it can't teach you how to find it. The missing piece, deep dive, hands-on training on voltage drop testing under load rather than just checking static resistance with a digital multimeter. Yeah, you, I gotta be honest with you. Let me just let me just shoot you straight from the hip here. Uh, when I do voltage drop testing, I'm always confused by I'm confused by the results. I'm not even sure how you can measure a voltage drop while something's using all the voltage, and then you go back and you read what it's trying to tell you, and you're like, okay, I get it. But it doesn't, that does not come naturally to your Uncle Jimmy at all. If I throw uh my test light, which has a a meter in it, tells me voltage, and then I run the circuit and I see that it goes to nearly zero, I know I'm good. That's about it. If it's got some extra voltage, and I'm like, fuck, what now? What am I looking for? And then I have to try to find where I've got some kind of draw. Uh yeah, it can be very effective, but for me, it doesn't compute in my head how it works. It doesn't, I don't, I don't see how you can watch a circuit in a dynamic circuit with a meter or with a test light with a meter in it and see the voltage that it's not using and go, yeah, it's a problem. It's like, well, it seems to be working, you know. Anyway, voltage drop testing is uh uh something that a lot of people point to as something that we don't do out in the field very much, and they're right. Uh, but uh typically we get the job done using whatever uh instruments we have and whatever knowledge we have. But uh and voltage drop testing is is really good. It's great for people who can understand it and wrap their mind around it. I just have a little trouble, trouble myself personally, wrapping my mind completely around it. If I look, actually, if I look at it in a textbook, it makes sense to me. When I'm doing it in the real world, it doesn't make it just doesn't make any fucking sense to me. But I know that it works. It's it's one of those things. All right. Uh next up on this here is a real world skill finding hidden corrosion, understanding how low voltage affects electronic control modules, safety testing, high voltage, hybrid and EV systems under realistic shop conditions. Yeah, man, you are not gonna get that training. That EV stuff and the hybrid stuff, you're not gonna get that at tech school, more than likely. You might be able to get that at a brand specific training center, but you're gonna have to demonstrate some serious uh diagnostic skills and have some experience, and you're gonna have to be somebody who's gonna be around, quite frankly. I'm not gonna send you to school on day two after getting out of tech school for uh high voltage systems, because uh they have to they have to figure out what you're up to, uh how long you're gonna be there, what's your attitude like, and how smart you are, really. Because sending a uh a really send I want to I want to be careful how I word this, but uh sending an idiot to uh EV training could be could be fatal. I mean, if they're an idiot, then you know you gotta kind of well let's keep them away from some stuff, okay? Uh here's uh the next step here. It says here tool management and financial literacy. Uh here's again this again, again. This is why I love AI because here's what it says here. I love this. Tool trucks are the financial trap of the automotive industry. Yeah, yeah, monkey, they sure are. Eager graduates often walk out of school and immediately sign up for thousands of dollars in high interest tool truck credit. Uh, been there, done that, seen it done. Uh, and as I've recommended over the last few podcasts, start out with basic stuff. You can figure out what you need as you go. Uh, you also too want to want to figure out what kind of commitment you want to make before you spend anywhere between $10,000 and $50,000 on tools, and then you end up two years later making donuts in a donut shop. You know, you don't want to have to have the snap-on guy stop by every Friday and get $50 or $100 from you for the next 25 years. You just don't want that. You might want the tools and you might want to keep them and you might want to work on shit at home, but do you really need $50,000 worth of tools? Eh, I'd say the answer is probably no, not so much. Real-world skill, discerning the difference between a tool that makes you money versus a tool that just looks good. Uh, and it says here the uh the example is a $10,000 toolbox, which kind of hurts my feelings because I spent $9,000 on mine and it's in my garage at home rusting. Uh, students should be taught how to build a starter kit smartly, budget their earnings during seasonal slow periods, and understand the tax write-off available for tool purchase. If you're using them for work, you can certainly write them off. Uh, lots of cases the deduction is not worth itemizing, especially if you're just making that starting wage of $15 an hour or whatever they're fucking gonna start you off at. Uh, and that's a that's another part of the problem, but we're gonna be talking about that, I'm sure. Ergonomics and career longevity. Now, here's what it says here automotive repair is incredibly brutal on the human body. Gotta love AI. Doesn't even have a human body, but knows that it's brutal on it. Schools focus heavily on safety glasses and jack stands, but rarely mention how a technician should take care of themselves in the long term. And it says here the missing piece, proper lifting techniques in tight spaces, joint preservation, and hearing protection. Yeah, buddy. I could have used that, uh, I could have used a training class on hearing protection. Of course, I've uh gone miles out of my way to destroy my hearing and have almost completely succeeded, by the way. Uh, real world skill, learning how to properly position a vehicle on a lift to avoid bending over at awkward angles all day, using the right leverage instead of brute force and managing physical stamina to ensure a 30-year career instead of a five-year burnout. Um, I've talked about all of that quite a bit. You have to take care of yourself. That's basically what I'm trying to say. I can't even spit it out. You are gonna have you were gonna have to live. I'm just calling you all out right now, okay? I want you to all live for I want all of you to live forever. I want all of you to live forever. I don't want to hear of any of you getting killed by a car falling off a lift. I don't want to hear any of you being uh paralyzed because you tried to pick something up that was too heavy, or that you you were uh injuring yourself by bending over at awkward angles all day or or standing on uh you're not wearing the proper shoes and things got crushed and bent and mangled on your body. I don't want to hear about that stuff. So learn how to take care of yourself. That is something you're gonna have to look into yourself as a person and as a technician and take care of yourself. Unfortunately, your automotive tech school is not really probably gonna help you with that. They'll tell you for sure, oh yeah, well, you know, it's a physical job that requires stamina and tenacity. Yeah, and that tech that guy used to be a technician and he got the fuck out of the business to go to a tech school to teach you. So he knows what he's talking about, he's just not gonna be able to help you with it. So it asked me a question after this because that was the first part here. It says, Is there a specific area like the shift towards EVs or the business side of the shop that you think is hurting green technicians the most right now? And I wrote, Yes, there is a specific area. I think it's the poor work ethic that a lot of these kids seem to have. Now, work ethic is it's learned behavior, and it comes from the people that you grow up with, it comes from the people who have tried to raise you, it comes from the people in in your high school who have tried to push you to succeed. Some people, like myself, have uh tried to eschew all of these efforts by these people. I wanted to be lazy, I wanted to do nothing. Uh, I could remember very clearly being told that I was gonna have to repeat my senior year if I didn't get my shit together and get a passing grade in English, which I was completely uninterested in. So I got my ass in gear and I got a passing grade in that class. It wasn't a great passing grade because by the time they told me this, I was halfway through a fucking F. And I was gonna have to come back to school again in the fall after I graduated from high school, which, oh, by the way, I wouldn't have if I didn't pass that one class. Believe me, I made sure I passed it, okay? Work ethic is a funny thing, and uh it it's not something that somebody can teach you. You have to almost see it and decide that you're gonna put the effort in. Nobody can tell you to do it. They can only chastise you if they're not seeing it, or they can compliment you if they are seeing it. So this is something that you have to decide in your own fucking head if you're gonna have the good work ethic. And this is what AI had to say to that. Again, gotta love AI. It says that is a massive complaint from shop owners and foremen across the country right now, and it's an incredibly frustrating dynamic to deal with when you're trying to run a productive bay. There is widespread perception that the newer generation of tech school grads lack hustle and struggles with punctuality or expects top-tier flat rate master tech money while only putting in entry-level effort. Well, I will agree with you that I have seen all three of those. I have not really seen anyone who has all three of those in one person. Now, obviously, everybody would like to get as much money as they possibly can. If a shop does the right thing, and I I've said this before and I'm going to reiterate it, if a shop treats their employees correctly and pays them, I I want to say generously, but but adequately would probably be the better word. And they they do a good job interviewing people and find kids, people, boys, girls, men, women, who have a good attitude. They're not going to have any trouble with this, okay? The people out there who have a technician shortage are people who have no fucking idea how to take care of and appreciate a technician. And so they leave and they leave in droves. They they hire a bus, the magic bus, to put all their toolboxes on and crease the wheels and get the fuck out of there. They they have a revolving door on the shop where technicians come and go and they're always looking for help. The ones who have figured it out, the ones who have figured out how to keep technicians happy and working and making money and doing the job right, and they treat them with respect and kindness and care, they're the ones who don't have a technician shortage. And there are shops out there that don't have a technician shortage. I mean, if I've got 10 bays and I've got 10 guys cranking out, you know, multiple hours worth of work every day on 10 bays and they're killing it, I don't have a technician shortage. But if I have 10 bays and I have three guys and I have piles of work stacked up and I'm a dick about it, and I'm a micromanager and I'm an asshole and I'm screaming and hollering, guess what? I have a wicked technician shortage. And my attitude is not going to solve it, and neither is anybody else's attitude gonna solve it. Because if I constantly ride the three guys I got on the 10 bays we have, I'm not gonna get maximum production from them. I'm not gonna get efficiency from them. And if I try to hire kids who don't know shit because I don't pay shit, and I put them in those other bays and they have to ask all the other three guys who know what they're up to what to do, that ain't gonna work either. You gotta have I'm telling you, and and I've heard many people say this when they go to hire kids. They'll hire a kid that has a good attitude over a kid who knows everything first. Because the kid with the good attitude can learn and will learn and is willing to learn. The guy who thinks he knows everything, you can't tell that guy shit. And you don't fucking need that, especially if you're trying to run a shop. You got a guy who thinks they know everything, man. That's the worst fucking shit in the world, man. That guy has answers to everything, even if he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, even if he's talking out of his ass, he doesn't know, but he thinks he does. You want a kid with you want a kid with a good attitude. That's what you want. And you know what? The kids that come in the door have a eh, they have a fairly lackadaisical attitude, as far as I can see. And maybe they'll be okay, and maybe they won't be. And you know what? When I look at that shit from where I'm in in the shop, from where I am, what can I do about it? I can't do shit about that. Because you know what? I'm the old guy. And nobody, and I'll tell you what, man, wait till you get old, you motherfuckers out there. You motherfuckers out there are gonna find out that when you're old, nobody's gonna give a fuck what you say, what you know, what you've done, what how things work. Nobody's gonna ask you shit. They're gonna figure that you're just a stupid old man. And I laugh. I laugh because sometimes I see people struggling with shit and they won't talk to me, they won't ask me something that's like something I struggled with 10 years ago. And I'm like, oh, I know what to do, but yeah, unless you ask, fuck them. Let them learn the hard way. Like I I did. Here's what they said about that. They said, here's why uh here's what uh wait a minute, where did I leave off here? Okay. However, if we look beneath the surface of this poor work ethic, is often less about laziness and more about a severe culture and training disconnect. And that's the the chasm between the end of tech school and the chaos of day one when you roll into a shop and the manager somehow thinks you know everything you need to know to go at it and start tearing it up. And that's not going to happen, right? Between low, between how the cultural and training disconnect between how these kids are raised and how a traditional auto shop operates. That's another thing, too, you know. And and as far as a lack of hustle, maybe they'll get into that if they see other people hustling, they can learn that. Uh, that's part of the work ethic. Punctuality is a weird one these days because I think, you know, where a lot of shops are, it's gonna be in a large metro area where there's a lot of fucking people. Because if you build a really super nice dealership uh with Chrome and Glass Showroom and a lot full of brand new cars and it's in the middle of fucking nowhere, guess what? It's gonna be empty in about two years. You want to be where there's people, where there's people, there's traffic, where there's traffic, there's traffic jams, there's accidents. A lot of times being punctual is not even something that anybody could do unless they were riding a drone to work. I mean, it's literally, you know, where I'm at now, there's always accidents, there's always traffic, and you just it's just something you have to deal with, honestly. I think struggles with punctuality, uh being on time at work, I think you need to brush that uh problem aside and just say, look, I need nine hours. You get here at 8.15, I'm not gonna break your pulse, but I'm gonna need you, I'm gonna need nine hours of productivity from here, or whatever it is, eight hours, whatever. It's nine hours in our shop. And it's fine. That's fine. And I but I think you can also push that envelope a little too far, you know, you give them an inch and they take a mile kind of deal. You know, as far as punctuality goes, if they show up and they're there and they do the job, you might just have to bite the bullet on that one. And as far as uh expecting top-tier flat rate master tech money, uh got to start somewhere. And maybe you need to start a little higher if you've got a lot of turnover, and maybe you need to get it up higher if they're turning over after they've been there for a couple of years, and then you need to maybe turn it up just to be the top shop in the in the area for technicians. You know, it's like I used to talk about all the time, and I haven't talked about in a while, is is the uh the wage where a technician makes a hundred dollars an hour. And I talked about that quite a bit for a while. But if you worked at a shop where they came out one day and they said, well, instead of making, you know, whatever you're making, and the the median is like $44 an hour or something, which is just it's fucking ridiculous. That's just that's not the kind of money you can make to uh have a house or a car or a wife or kids or anything like that. That's just money that the dealership looks at, well, that's that's plenty of money. No, it's not. No, it's not. Sorry, that's that's that's just bullshit. Okay, that wouldn't be plenty of money for you, whoever's making the decisions. It wouldn't be plenty of money for you. And to have that be the median salary for automotive technicians in the country pisses me off. It pisses me off. And then these are the same fucking people who will scream and cry about the technician shortage and blame it on everybody except themselves. Go fuck yourself with your $44, $44,000 a year average technician salary. It's like that sucks cock, that does. Anyway, as far as the pay goes, you're gonna need to start them out at something not extraordinary, but you need to let them know that there's a ramp to it. And it goes up as you learn more, as you do more, and as your attitude continues to be good, and as your work ethic is good, it goes up. That's why we developed the K-Plan. The K-Plan was all about taking somebody from day one and shooting them into the stratosphere as far as pay and experience and knowledge goes, and then dropping them off on the doorstep of retirement with a healthy retirement. Their body's healthy, they still work, they can fix cars if they want to, but they can retire if they want to. They've worked a lifetime for you, they have done everything you've asked them to. You've paid them, you've given them raises when they got more training, you've given them raises when they did better, and then you just gave them cost of living raises and for inflation. I mean, that's what it's all about. And and if you're not doing that, if you're just trying to keep all the money and be a greedy, Scrooge McDuck motherfucker, and then you're gonna scream about the technology uh the technician shortage, I think really what you ought to do is just shut the fuck up. You shut the fuck up, you greedy cock sucker. All right. I mean, it makes me angry. I mean, the people who are complaining about it are the ones who have the shortage and they're causing the shortage and don't understand why they're causing the shortage or how they're causing the shortage. And there's people out there who have solved the problem, but uh, you know, their fixes are ignored by those of those out there that are not willing to dig a crowbar into their wallet and cough up. Okay. Here's one of the things it says that is a shock to students. It says in tech school, everything is structured. A student is given a single vehicle with a known stage bug, they have two hours to fix it, they get a grade, and then they go home. Sound familiar? Yeah, it probably does. The reality is on a real shop floor, chaos rules. And that's gonna be a folks. Um I actually I got let me just take a second because I want to write that down because we're working on a line of apparel, and they're gonna have things written on them. Uh this is no shit, folks. They're gonna have they're gonna have things written on them on the back of the shirts. Wait till you see these fucking things, you're gonna lose your mind. And one of them is gonna be what I just read. Where is it here? Chaos rules. It's gonna be spelled with a K. It's not gonna be spelled with a fucking. You know, we all fucking know. Chaos is the fucking order of the day. Sometimes it's light, sometimes it's heavy. And when it's heavy, you want to fucking shoot yourself in the fucking head, and when it's light, you're wondering why it's light. What the fuck happened that day? Why am I not getting fist fucked in the ass by everything that's going on all at once? Especially lunchtime. What the fuck, right? Uh here's what it says. I'm gonna start over again. The reality shock on a real shop floor, chaos rules. A green tech might be halfway through an oil change when they're told to drop it, pull a car off the alignment rack, help push a dead vehicle into bay four, and then grab parts from the front counter. Now I'm gonna add my own non-AI uh take on this. If you're in the middle of an oil change and you stop to go do something else, what are the chances of fucking up that oil change? Yeah, pretty good. And it's it's hard uh honestly to follow through with stuff sometimes if somebody's pulling you off to do something else. But you sometimes have to say, no, I gotta finish this particular part of this job. Because if you get halfway through an oil change and then you have to do something else, and you come back, you're not gonna remember where you were because you do it every day and you're gonna be like, well, maybe I already put the oil in, or maybe I already put the filter in, or maybe I already drained the oil, maybe I didn't drain the oil. Who knows? You're you have a better chance of fucking shit up. We've all done it. I've done it. Somebody we you know the the what we came up with was that somebody must have distracted me at one point in time, and I left the drain plug loose, apparently. Okay, now I don't really, I honestly don't believe that 100%. I mean, yeah, it's possible, it could happen, and it did happen, but I worked in that car, took it outside, put it through the wash, then they bought brakes, I brought it back in, wasn't leaking, and then they brought it back in one more time to have it in state inspected, and it wasn't leaking, and then all of a sudden the customer drives it for a month, suddenly all the oil leaked out. The drain plug just was sitting there, and they looked at the crush washer and go, Oh, the crush washer wasn't crushed. I'm like, Well, it doesn't sound right at all, okay? I mean, that's just me. But uh, so allegedly that was my fault that that the and the customer, of course, of course, because this is what customers do, they just drive the fucking thing until it stops running, which is obviously not good. It's like I needed an engine, and apparently it was my fault. And okay, I'll own up and say, Yeah, I could have done it, but I doubt it. And I don't know what happened. I'm never gonna know what happened, and nobody is really gonna help me figure out what happened because they're just gonna write it all off and call it done and not worry about blaming somebody. But uh, I didn't really appreciate that too much, but yeah, you know, that's the way it goes sometimes. You know, you want to make anomaly, you gotta crack some fucking eggs. And you want to make anomaly, sometimes you gotta blow up some mentions. The disconnect here, this is what it says. The disconnect. When young techs get overwhelmed by this chaos, they tend to freeze up, sit on their toolbox, or look at their phones. Yeah, seen it. To an older tech or a manager, that looks like lack of work ethic. In reality, it's often analysis paralysis. Oh, that might have to be a t-shirt, too. Let me just write that down too. See, this is why I love AI. It comes up with shit that I wouldn't have thought of, and then and then I might have thought this up myself at one point in time, but it would have taken a while. Anyway, it says here often it's often analysis paralysis. They literally don't know what to do next because nobody taught them how to prioritize tasks in a high pressure environment. Uh, here's number two on this, on this question, and the question was again, uh, was what I put in. Also, poor work ethic, they seem to have uh talking about new guys here. Phone dependency versus resourcefulness, older generations of technicians grew up having to figure out things by talking to peers, reading manuals, or just trying until they got it right. Absolutely. The vehicles were a little more simple in the past. There wasn't a whole lot of stuff you had to try to get it right. Nowadays, man, you could be there for days just throwing parts of the car and still not fix it. It's really easy to do. Uh, here's what they go on to say here the tech school bubble. Students are taught in environments where the answer is always a click away, or an instructor is standing right there to bail them out. The shop reality is when a green tech hits a wall on a stubborn bolt or a weird electrical issue, their immediate instinct is to pull out their phones, to look up a YouTube video, or text a friend. To a shop foreman seeing a kid standing over a torn-down engine looking at an iPhone looks like slacking off. Uh agreed. Uh, but honestly, ladies and gentlemen, I'm just gonna tell you right now that if you have a tech standing there looking at his phone when he's supposed to be working on a car, he's looking at fucking memes. He's not looking at something that's gonna help him do his job, okay? He's looking at memes, you know. Uh that's it. Okay, 100% of the time. Not looking, he's not looking up information he needs to do an oil change or how to do brakes. He already knows how. He's just looking at memes on his phone. Schools fail to teach independent resourcefulness. That right there is a mouthful. Independent resourcefulness. Can't tell you how many times I've I've come across the uh a tech who's looking at a problem and can't figure out what's going on with it or what tools to use or or anything at all. And this is over my career, and I just maybe say something like, Well, why don't you try doing this? Because honestly, in my head, in the trouble tree I have in my head with what I've seen so far that's wrong with what you've got, you need to do this. And then they go, Oh, yeah, okay. And then they figure out what's going on. I'll give you a really quick example. We had a guy one time, uh, power windows wouldn't work in the vehicle, and he said it was a switch block. We put a switch block in it, and it still didn't work. And then I asked him, Did you check the fuse? And he said, Well, yeah, I checked the one side of the fuse. I had a ratchet in my hand, I threw it on the ground. I went, You checked one side of the fuse. Did it not occur to you to check the other side of the fuse? And he said, No, it didn't. And this was not some idiot. This was a guy who'd been doing it about a year. So when we went in and checked the fuse on both sides, we found that the fuse was actually blown. And then we put it in there and and then checked it out to see if we get it to blow again. And it's quite possible, I didn't tell him that, but I told him it was quite possible that the switch block that replaced that we replaced actually was somehow internally shorted and causing an over voltage issue and blowing the fuse, but uh uh you don't find that out backwards typically. Okay. Uh, how to properly use service information. Uh, schools, this is what it said. This is a whole sentence because I'm gonna get through it here. Sales schools fail to teach independent resourcefulness how to properly use information services such as all data, identifix, or mitchell efficiently before throwing your hands up or getting distracted by social media. Uh, it goes on to say here, communication anxiety. There's a distinct generational shift in how younger people communicate. They are incredibly comfortable behind a screen, but often highly anxious when it comes to direct face-to-face verbal communication, especially with authority figures or angry service advisors. Well, I don't tolerate angry service advisors too well. Unfortunately for me, I don't have to. I got a pretty good crew of service advisors. I just wish they would ask for the sale a little more often than they do. Uh, the issue if a green tech breaks a clip, encounters a rusted solid fastener, or realizes they diagnosed something incorrectly, they often tread the confrontation. Uh, you have to you just have to own it. Instead of immediately walking up to the foreman or advisor to own the mistake, they must they might sit on a job, slow down, or try to hide it. Well, I I I can't lie to you. I think we've all done that. Uh we we and and this is I talk about this quite a lot. Sometimes when you have a problem, you fix a symptom, but not the cause. It happens. You have to own up and say, well, this wasn't working, and all of the test plans I did led to this, and I replaced it, and it still doesn't work the way it's supposed to because this part is bad. And in a lot of cases, if you get some experience under your belt, like your Uncle Jimmy has, you will actually cover your own ass in the job story. Say you replace one part, but it could possibly be a whole nother part. And everything you've looked at says it's this one part. So what you do is you go in and you go, all right, we need to replace this, and if the fault returns, then we'll need to replace that. And if it does return, you just say, Well, see, I I kind of pointed that out that we might need to replace that as well. Because sometimes, and this is not bullshit. I mean, it might I mean I mean, yeah, it can be bullshit sometimes, but it's not bullshit every time. Sometimes you have a part that goes bad, it takes out another part. Maybe it overvoltages some circuit for some reason or another, and you have to replace that one to find out that the other thing is still fucked up, and then you replace that. Sometimes it is two parts, sometimes it's even more. I mean, you know, you you got a bad water pump, and the serpentine drive belt doesn't look so good, and the customer says, I don't want the belt, you put in your job story. Well, we replaced the uh water pump, but we did not replace the belt. The belt got soaked with coolant and oil, and it's probably going to fail within pick a time frame, three months. And then when they come in in two and a half months and the belt's shredded and they're complaining because you just did the water pump, you go, Hey, read the job story. I fucking told you you needed a belt. You didn't want the fucking belt. Now you need the fucking belt, and now it's my fault. Wrong answer. Sorry. Next up, the misinterpretation is what it this is what it gets down to here. The misinterpretation. This looks like a poor attitude or laziness, but it's usually driven by fear and a lack of professional communication training. Tech schools completely ignore the interpersonal soft skills required to survive the daily friction of a repair shop. Yeah. I I have seen some new guys just absolutely wilt under the pressure of somebody trying to get them to do something that they don't know how to do or that they can't do. And when they try to communicate with that person or with any person for that matter, that they can't do it or they they're not comfortable with it enough to even attempt it. Sometimes you end up just driving them right out the door with that. You know, you have to realize if you're, you know, if you're working with you guys, there's some stuff you want to give them and there's some stuff you don't want to give them. And if you're gonna give them something that's you know, maybe out of their pay grade, cross your fingers who and hope you get the best. The entitlement gap is the next part of that answer. And let me just go back and put to you, this was in response to a question that I put to AI saying some of the kids don't have a very good work ethic. Uh, the entitlement gap, many proprietary tech schools are businesses first. Yep, it's definitely a business. They're there to make money to justify their massive tuition cost. And you know what, honestly, folks, tuition at an automotive tech school, it ain't like being a doctor or a lawyer or even a regular four-year degree at a regular college. It's usually cheaper. It is also usually uh more uh what's the word I want to use? It's uh it's money well spent, let's just put it that way, okay? To justify their massive tuition. I wouldn't say that my automotive tech school was not massive. The tuition was not massive at all. To justify their massive tuition costs, their marketing departments fill recruits heads with visions of immediately building high-end race cars, tuning performance vehicles, or stepping right into a $100,000 diagnostic role. I was they did that to me. They did that to me. They said you if you go to the right place, you can make $100K a year. It took me 20 years to get to that. 20 years. I probably should have left the business a long time ago because that was bullshit then, and it really still is bullshit. It's difficult to get to 100k. It used to seem impossible, it actually used to be impossible. It's more and more possible every day because we all have to get paid more so that we don't fucking leave our employers high and dry. And they know now that if they don't pay, we will. We will leave them high and dry. And if they don't pay, and the technicians leave them high and dry, you'll hear it. Technicians, there's such a there's a shortage. Oh my god. Here's what they went on to say here the punch in the gut on day on day one at a real shop, they are handed a broom, a stack of oil filters, and 15 used tires to throw away. The result? When reality hits, their motivation plummets. Yeah, no shit. They feel lied to, which translates into a sour attitude and a sluggish work ethic. Schools do a terrible job of setting realistic expectations for the apprentice grind. That's what I call it, baby. It's called paying your dues, and you gotta pay your dues. And if you don't pay your dues and you expect to get paid big money like the rest of us who have paid our dues, guess what? We're gonna try to hold you down in some cases. We may or may not help you. Your attitude is going to dictate whether or not we help you very big time, okay? Here's what it goes on to say. It uh there's no explaining. Let me start over again here with this sentence. Schools do a terrible job of setting realistic expectations for the apprentice grind, and explaining that sweeping floors and doing courtesy inspections is the foundational path to earning the trust for getting bigger and better, well-paying work in the shop. Bridging the gap, ultimately, work ethic isn't just something you're born with, it's a habit that has to be modeled and taught. And until automotive programs introduce mandatory modules on professional accountability, stretch management, which your Uncle Jimmy could use, and shop floor psychology, green technicians will continue to enter the workforce completely unprepared for the mental grind the trade requires. And it went on here to say, when you see this happening on the floor, do you find it's usually an issue of them just wanting to coast? Or do they legitimately seem clueless about how to hustle? Uh, my answer was, yeah, it's a little column A and a little column B. I don't think that anybody who starts working in our building wants to coast. I do, however, feel like they may not know how to hustle. They haven't been asked to hustle. They were uh given plenty of time to do all the tasks that they needed to do throughout high school and maybe even tech school. And I'm telling you, folks, and you're you're you're probably shaking your head sometimes in the shops that we're in, the cars just and it seems to always be lunchtime. Why the fuck is it always lunchtime? They fucking line up three, four, five, six, seven waiters at a time. These are all people who want their car back in half hour, 45 minutes, and you're halfway through an oil change already, and you just want to go get a sandwich, and you're like, what the fuck? There's been many times in the last shop I worked in where I would take responsibility for the waiters because nobody else would, and I wouldn't go to lunch at all. I'd have I had at one point I had three bays going, and I would always have like some job that I sold on one of them, but then the other two banging out waiters was not unheard of for me to work on 10 and 12 cars a day. You know, waiters here, waiter there, waiter here, waiter there. I used to watch, I used to watch my fellow employees walk past waiters to go to lunch, not even look at them, just be like, yeah, whatever. Didn't give a fuck. And if you're a new guy or if you're on a maintenance team and you're a new guy, or you're you know, you're maybe you're in your second year, or maybe you're still in your first year and you see this and people are looking at you going, hey, what's going on here? Let's get these things done. Guy, chop, chop, chop, chop, job. You're like, whoa, you know, I gotta take my time doing my job. No, you don't get it done faster. Not good, not a good thing, really, to push somebody who's not sure what they're doing to work faster. You're asking for trouble. Now I wanted to get past that. I wanted to kind of uh put management on blast a little bit here. AI asked me this question. When you see this, uh here we go. Here we here's the preamble. Until shop owners stop expecting senior guys to do the job of a tech school instructor for free, this cycle is going to keep repeating. The green techs will stay clueless about how to hustle because nobody is showing them the ropes, and the old guys will keep complaining about the kids these days. When you see this happening, do you feel like management is genuinely blind to the financial penalty they're putting on their senior techs, or do they just not care as long as the cars move? And I wrote in here because it's a question for me. Management in many cases seems to think new guys are plug and play. Not always, but sometimes. And they should be ready to go with little help. And then AI went on to say plug and play is the absolute perfect description of how tone-deaf management can be. There is a bizarre assumption among a lot of shop owners and service managers that an automotive tech school operates like a factory, that it spits out a finished, uniform product that you can just drop into a bay, hand them a repair order, and watch turn hours. They treat a new tech like a replacement part rather than a human being entered into a highly complex, mentally demanding trade. The plug-and-play delusion usually stems from a few specific blind spots in management. This is this is how your shop treats the new guy. I've seen I've seen everywhere from they assign you a technician who's supposed to help you figure out what you're doing and basically honestly your training, your replacement. That's never a good deal, especially if you don't compensate that technician whatsoever. Then there's other times where they just drop you in and say, you know, there's there's your bay, put your tools in that toolbox, uh, start pulling in cars and changing the oil or whatever it says on the RO, have fun. And then they disappear. Here's uh here's here's the the answers that AI gave. The tuition equals experience fallacy. Management looks at a green tech who just spent $30,000 to $50,000 on a trade school degree and thinks, well, they spent two years studying this. They should know how to do a break job on a 2022 F-150 without asking questions. The reality is they completely ignore the difference between doing a brake job on a clean, rust-free training mock-up on a lift in a well-lit school laboratory versus doing it on a rotted-out salt belt daily driver where the caliper bracket bolster sees solid and the electronic parking brake needs a scan tool command just to retract. Man, AI knows what is going on, man. That's why I look and love it. I mean, I I mean, maybe you might be pissed at me for kind of slacking off and using AI, but man, they they fucking nail it better than I could. Number two here, it says disconnect from the tooling and tech. A lot of service managers haven't turned a wrench in 15 or 20 years or worse ever. And they're usually pure numbers guys who come from inside the industry. They remember a time when a car was mechanical and fixing it was mostly a matter of common sense and manual labor. The reality is that they just don't grasp that a modern entry-level tech isn't just fighting mechanical components. They are fighting software, expecting a green guy to let me try that again, expecting a green guy to navigate five different aftermarket scan tools, OEM software subscriptions, and digital vehicle inspection platforms on day one without a guide, it's just setting them up to fail. Treating labor like a commodity, it actually is a commodity, by the way. In a manager's spreadsheet, a technician is often just a sell that represents X capacity of labor hours. Now, yes, uh, I have said it many times that labor is a commodity, it's a commodity that we create out of the thin air. However, they think if you lose a 20-year master tech and hire two tech school grads, they've replaced the capacity. Eh, wrong answer. The reality, they quickly find out that two green guys turning 15 hours a week combined do not equal one seasoned tech who can clear 60 hours a week by himself while solving the problems nobody else can touch. But instead of realizing their onboarding failed, management blames the new hires work ethic. So what you got there is you got somebody who thinks we're all plug and play. And we're not. And there's a cost of the delusion, is what it says here. When management refuses to accept that new techs require a ramp up period, the shop enters a destructive cycle. Number one, the new tech is left to drown. Number two, they make a costly mistake or take too long on a job. Number three, management gets frustrated and chews them out. Number four, the flat rate guy gets annoyed because the kid is dragging down shop efficiency or asking them for free help. And number five, the kid quits, and manager throws management throws their hands up and says, nobody wants to work anymore. Uh, this has played out in a lot of shops, people. You expect too much from the new guys, you expect them to be able to jump right in where you had a guy who had five to ten years worth of experience. Wake the fuck up, dickhead. Until management treats a new hire like an apprentice who needs to be developed rather than an appliance that just needs to be plugged into the wall. The industry's retention problem is only going to get worse. The problem is only going to get worse. Management doesn't have the answers. They do not have the answers. If they had the answers, we wouldn't, I wouldn't be doing a podcast about it. You wouldn't be hearing about it. And actually, you're probably really not hearing about it very much because it doesn't work for them to let us know that there's a shortage because it empowers us. It makes us worth a lot more than they are, that's for sure. I mean, just ask anybody who puts ads out in the internet. If you put an ad out for a service manager for a shop or an ad out for a technician in a shop, which one are you going to get more replies to? You're going to get more replies to the service manager's job because it's easier and pays more. You're going to get replies to the technician? Probably fucking not. Because you're paying jack shit. And yet you're going to want all the all this training, you're going to want ASCs, you're going to want all this stuff, and then you're paying a shit wage. What do you expect? The problem is you. Get a mirror. You'll see it. Uh all right. Uh let me let me kind of wrap this up for you. I'm gonna see how long I've been going here. Oh, an hour 20. I got a long way to go here. See, this is why I I gotta tell you, I I like the AI because it just thinks of stuff that I would have thought of after the podcast was over, which used to be a problem for me. All right, let me just read the question off here. When you see guys who do survive that brutal first year, what do you think sets them apart? Is it pure stubbornness, or did they happen to find a mentor who actually gave them a shot? And I wrote that the answer is they usually have a very good attitude and understand that it's not them, it's the business. And also they have to have uh a helpful mentor type. But that mentor, and this is part of the problem, and it's a management problem, the mentor is rarely, if ever, compensated for his time. And then I just added on the back of that big fucking problem. And then AI says here, you hit the nail on the head, that is the exact focal point where the entire system breaks down. When the guys who do survive make it through because of a helpful mentor type, it means the shop is relying on the pure charity and good nature of its senior staff to sustain its business model. In other words, they've built a fucking house of cards, and all you have to do is blow on it and it'll go away. That is a recipe for disaster. Expecting a veteran tech to essentially donate their own hard-earned money to train management's new hire is unfair, unsustainable, and a massive blind spot for shop owners and shop managers. Because flat rate is a zero-sum game, every minute spent explaining a multimeter reading or showing a kid how to route a tricky break line is time that the senior tech isn't booking hours. I have that going on in the very shop I'm in now. I have a technician who is he wants to move up, they want to enjoy advancement. When I've, you know, I I keep my I bite my tongue when they talk about it. They want to be a team leader, they want to be a foreman, they want to be, you know, they want advancement, which it's just really not technically available. But he spends a lot of time helping the kids on his team try to get through the day. And so his hours suffer massively, and nobody's paying any attention to it. And it's gonna come to a head and explode, and it's gonna rip that guy right out of the building, probably. It's not good. He deserves to be there, he's a very good technician, and he's barely scraping by because he has to spend so much time helping some of the some of his team members. And I'll tell you right now, his team members are worth helping. They're gonna be good, they just aren't there yet, you know, and they need probably just a they need a little bit more help than they probably should, but eventually they will need less and less help, but they're not there yet. They're not there yet. And so really he should just simply be compensated somehow or another for providing professional input and providing a mentorship to these kids, and it's just not happening, and and they're not they're not seeing it, they're not looking for it. Uh, here is why relying on uncompensated mentorship is destroying shop culture from the inside out. Uh, number one, it says here, and this is a good one, good nature has an expiration date. Even the most patient, natural born teachers on the shop floor have a breaking point. The financial strain. When a senior tech looks at their paycheck at the end of a bi-weekly cycle and realizes they turn 10 or 15 or possibly even more hours less than they should because they were constantly stopped and trying to pull a green tech out of a ditch, the frustration sets in. That's a real thing that's happening. The burnout. Eventually, that helpful mentor has to make a choice between being a nice guy and feeding their own family. They start saying, I can't help you right now, I'm on the clock, and the door slam shut on the new tech's development. Do you see where I'm going with that? It also gets poisonous, is what it says here. Number two, it breeds poisonous resentment. Uncompensated mentorship creates a toxic three-way tension in the bay. The senior tech resents management for treating them like a free training facility and resents the kid for being an anchor on their efficiency. Yeah, boy. Uh the new tech feels the tension, internalizes the guilt of slowing the senior guy down, and stops asking questions entirely. They go back to hiding in their bay or staring at their phone. And then management looks out from a glass office, sees production dropping, or the new guy standing still, and blames a poor work ethic or bad attitudes, and is completely blind to the financial friction that they have created. And number three, it says it drives the best mentors out of the shop. The technicians who are naturally good mentors are usually the most emotionally intelligent, communicative, and skilled people in the building. They are exactly the kind of leader the industry desperately needs to retain when they realize their skills and willingness to help are being exploited by management to save some money on onboarding, they get the fuck out. They go to fleet jobs, municipal positions, or leave the field entirely for an industry where leadership and training are actually line items on a paycheck. All right. I'd like to put an end to the podcast right here because, like I said, I've been going on for a long time. But look, if you're a new guy, let me just kind of summarize this all for you. Tech school's not going to not gonna train you, not even close to what it's like to work in a shop. You have to be ready to get smacked in the face, beaten about the head and neck area, kicked in the dick, if you have one, and or the knee, or both, and then treated like shit. That way, if you show up to a place that doesn't do any of that stuff to you, it'll be a pleasant surprise. But here's a uh heads up, folks. That's usually what it is like. And as for the rest of the technicians in the shop, and this is really good for myself too, it's you gotta help them out a little bit. Can't figure everything out for them, and certainly don't let them Tom Sawyer shit on you. I've had people do that where they're like, oh, how does this, how do you fix this? And then you do it for them. That's no good. Not gonna learn that way. Tell them how to find the answer. Tell them what to look at to diagnose something. Maybe explain to them how it works in a manner which makes it easy for you to understand how it works, and maybe they'll get it. Maybe they'll get it too. But then when it comes to your management, you have to tell them. Say, listen, I am not an instructor at a tech school. That kid doesn't know something, and he starts asking me a shitload of questions. I'm gonna come up to you and I'm gonna start asking you a shitload of questions. Why am I not getting paid to mentor this apprentice through the shop? Why are you fucking dumping this shit on my head? Why are you such a dipshit? Why the fuck are you pissing me off? Why would you do this? This is a problem that you and your management buddies and your and your owner buddies and your auto group buddies have all fucking fostered through your corporate greed. Nobody wants to do this job. Do you want me to leave? Keep it up. Just keep it up. That's all you gotta do. Keep it up. Eventually all of us will leave, and you're gonna be left with alpha with uh with millennials and Gen Z's and Gen Alphas and whatever fucking generation comes after that. And all I'm gonna say is good luck. I know how to fix my car. You're just gonna leave an entire population of a country fucking scratching it to ground looking for somebody who can fix their shit. And there'll be solutions that'll come along that will help them fix their shit, and it won't be at your shop if you're running it in that manner, if you're running it in a poor manner. Okay. All right. That's enough of your Uncle Jimmy. Sorry about the vacation time. I needed it. I did a lot of sleeping. Holy shit. Man, and that's something that you guys should think about too if you're getting just three, four, five hours a night, man. You got to kind of step it up and get a few more hours, a few more winks in before you go to work because it helps clear your mind and make everything work right. And uh, it's good for you. Okay. So uh I'm gonna go to sleep now, and before I do that, I'm just gonna say it.