What It's Like To Be...
Curious what it would be like to walk in someone else’s (work) shoes? Join New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath as he explores the world of work, one profession at a time, and interviews people who love what they do.
What It's Like To Be...
A Car Mechanic
Cracking automotive mysteries one diagnostic code at a time, mastering the art of quoting complicated repairs, and playing the "what kind of noise is it?" guessing game with Justin Snodgrass, a car mechanic who owns his own shop. Why should $19.99 oil changes make you suspicious? And why might your local car mechanic decline to work on new cars?
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Justin Snodgrass owns an auto repair shop in Castle Rock, Colorado. Earlier in his career, he worked as a technician at a car dealership. And one day a woman came in with a Cadillac that had a weird issue.
Justin:The complaint was, "Passenger seat will recline by itself." I went, "That's kind of strange. I've never seen that before, but okay."
Dan:Justin said he loves these kinds of mysteries. So he took the car out with a colleague, but they couldn't trigger the problem. This is not uncommon in the car repair business.
Justin:I have to trust the customer that they're not lying to me. I mean, that seems pretty extreme. You wouldn't waste your time dropping a car off when something doesn't really happen.
Dan:So they went back to the woman to get more information. They were trying to figure out when does this happen exactly.
Justin:And so the wife said, well, it's when my husband's in the seat and he's a fairly large guy. So I'm like, okay. So I took that information, went back to the seat, sat there. I was trying to figure out how to replicate being larger. So I ended up putting my hands against the roof of the car and pushing really hard. And so I pushed on the bottom of the seat and sure enough, all of a sudden it started reclining.
Dan:Oh, wow.
Justin:And I'm like, what is going on? So I got underneath the seat, and underneath the seat, there's cushion and stuff and the cover and everything. And then there's wires that hold everything up, right? Like pretty thick baling wire type stuff, right? And it had pushed down and cut into the harness and grounded out one wire that was the signal wire for the recline signal. And so it just shorted out the one wire, which happened to do that. It could have shorted out any one of the 20, 30 wires under there, but it shorted that one. So that was pretty fun to find.
Dan:This kind of detective work is the heart of what it means to be a car mechanic. And sometimes it can lead to disturbing places. Like the story that's coming up about a customer who came in with the following problem. Every time they turned on the heater, out dropped a bunch of maggots. I'm Dan Heath and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. A welder, an NBA referee, a hospice nurse. We want to know what they do all day at work. Today we'll ask Justin Snodgrass what it's like to be a car mechanic. We'll talk about why those $19.99 oil change specials should make you suspicious, why he tries to avoid telling people he's a car mechanic, and how the design and placement of a diagnostic port reshaped the industry. Stay with us. Justin has been a car mechanic for more than 30 years. He got his start when he was a teenager.
Justin:I always liked taking things apart and trying to fix things. Like, my brother threw a little car vacuum away and I'm like, "I'm going to figure out how to fix it." And, I just tore it apart. I still didn't fix it. But, I liked taking things apart, trying to figure out how it worked and put it back together. And I didn't want to work fast food or something. And, my Dad's like, "Hey, go ask our family mechanic." I'm like, "I don't know anything about cars." He's like, "Well, you like to tear things apart." So, I'm like, "Okay". So, that was just kind of how it started.
Dan:After that, he worked at a few dealerships and eventually opened his own shop. His wife helps him run the place. I asked him something I'd been curious about. Why do some repair shops run oil change specials that they can't possibly make money on?
Justin:They call it a loss leader, although I don't use it as a loss leader. Other chain stores will use it as a loss leader so then they can upsell. I just do it as a courtesy. But those we don't make a lot of money off of. Brakes are decent money and spark plugs and timing belts... Those are the more money makers there, I'd say, because you could get them done kind of fast.
Dan:I didn't realize that oil changes had that reputation of being a loss leader. It's almost like, you know, you hear of grocery stores pricing milk at cost or even below in some cases just to get people in the door. Is that the idea?
Justin:For most of the chain places, that's their premise. Yeah, to get you in. Like all those ads to say $19.99 oil change. Well, you know, the filter is about five bucks and oil is eight to ten dollars a quart. So if the car takes five quarts, yeah, they're just giving it away at that point, right?
Dan:But that should make us suspicious, yeah? Because at that point, they're depending on their ability to upsell you on something else.
Justin:Exactly. And I've worked for dealerships and stuff where they tell you, okay, every RO has to be an X number. What's RO? Oh, repair order. So each repair order has to have an average amount. So like every car has to be at least $350 billed out.
Dan:What?
Justin:Yeah. And that was like 20 years ago. I don't know what it is now. It's probably way higher. Yeah. So they have it all built-in. I'm like, I so don't agree with that because I don't have to make up work. I have so much work. I don't have to pretend like, Ooh, now you need this, this and that service.
Dan:So folks, it sounds like our conspiracy theories about auto repair shops were right. They do make up problems to boost revenue. Well, I guess some of them do, just like anything else. Some are honest and some aren't. For an honest mechanic like Justin, when a customer comes in with a problem, the first step is to hook the car up to a scanner.
Justin:So there's lots of different manufacturers of scanners. Obviously, the absolute best one is the manufacturer, like Ford, Chevy, they all have their own scanner. That would be the best scanner to use.
Dan:Oh, so do you have like half dozen or a dozen different scanners in your shop?
Justin:We have a couple, but they're all basically the same. I use a Snap-On scanner, which is kind of the most universal one. You can communicate with almost everything. The most optimal would be like if I had a Chevy and I used it on a Chevy. But like my Snap-On scanner, one of them costs $10,000.
Dan:Whoa.
Justin:So I'm not going to spend $5,000 to $10,000 or more on each make of vehicle. That's just too much to invest.
Dan:That $10,000 scanner looks like a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet. Because it is. And it has a little cable that plugs into a port underneath the dashboard. Now, you wouldn't think that the design or placement of that port for a scanner would matter much. But if you're a mechanic, it's the kind of thing that makes a big difference.
Justin:In all the cars that we work on, I think Tesla might be a little different. But all of them have an OBD2 port that is onboard diagnostic. And it's the second generation of it. In '96, they came out with that generation. So all cars have to have that connector within 18 inches of the dead center of the vehicle and underneath the dash.
Dan:For convenience sake?
Justin:Yeah, because back before that in '95 and earlier, every manufacturer had their own connector and in their own location.
Dan:Oh.
Justin:It was a nightmare. Like Ford would have a two-connector underneath the hood. Mitsubishi would have one underneath the dash somewhere. Chevy was the most consistent one.
Dan:And as of when there's like an industry standard?
Justin:In '96, I think it was a federal mandate that all cars had to have the same connector in the same general location and give the same generic information that was for emissions related data.
Dan:Man, that kind of thing I imagine is huge for a business like yours just to have some basic standards.
Justin:Oh, it was huge. Like that's the one regulation I totally agree with because it made it so much easier. Because you'd open up this box, you'd have to pull out 10, 20 different connectors, figure out which one you needed. And each one would kind of give you different data. They still kind of do, but it's more generalized now.
Dan:But there are situations where the scanner doesn't help much. And in those cases, Justin has to try to reproduce the problem. Kind of like we talked about earlier with the case of the automatically reclining chair.
Justin:Sometimes that's the hardest thing.
Dan:If it's an intermittent problem, it can drive you crazy, I imagine.
Justin:Oh, for sure.
Dan:I used to have this Ford Ranger pickup that I loved, but it had a few quirks. And one of them was just once every two or three months, I'd be driving. And then out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, the windshield wiper would just turn on at like full hurricane speed and just like, boom, on, zap, zap, zap. And you couldn't turn them off. And I imagine something like that, like you would never believe me because if I brought it in, you could drive it probably 20 times and it wouldn't replicate.
Justin:Oh, for sure. And there's so many times where I'll take a customer out. They'll say, I swear my car's making this noise. I said, okay, you drive it. I'll sit in the passenger seat and you show me it. You show me the noise. And we drive around and they get so upset. They're like, dang it, it won't do it. And I'm like, well, it's up to you if you want to leave it with me, but I could drive it all day and until we can get it consistent... Then I ask them to try and pay attention to when it happens and how they make it happen.
Dan:It's like you're having to teach basic troubleshooting, essentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was curious about the pricing of auto repair work. Justin said that pricing the parts can be pretty straightforward, but pricing the labor involved is a whole different thing.
Justin:So you'll have like rear main seals.
Dan:A rear main seal. What is that?
Justin:So there's a crankshaft that goes down the middle of the vehicle, and then there's a front crank seal and a rear crank seal, rear main seal, and that's on the back of the engine. And they'll sometimes leak oil because there's a lot of oil pressure in there.
Dan:Okay.
Justin:And in order to get to that seal, you have to remove everything that's in the way. Well, the transmission's in the way. In order to get transmission out, you've got to pull the axles. In order to get the axle out, you've got to pull some of the suspension. You've got to pull the subframe. They're 10, 12 hours.
Dan:Whoa.
Justin:Dig into it. And then you have to suspend the motor up so it doesn't fall down because you've removed most of the mounts. So you have to have a brace over it to hold it up so it doesn't fall.
Dan:And what does that part itself cost, the rear main seal?
Justin:Anywhere from $20, $50, maybe a few bucks more than that on some cars.
Dan:And you've had to do 11 or 12 hours of labor to get to it.
Justin:Yeah, yeah.
Dan:So if Justin quotes a repair, how does he know how many hours it's going to take? Well, there's a product for that. They're called shop manuals. They used to be thick books that might line a whole wall. Now you can get a digital subscription service offered by companies such as All Data that will spit out an estimate of how long a particular repair will take. So if you've got to replace the spark plugs, let's say, so you've got to look at, okay, what part do we need? What does it cost? Okay, let's add a little bit of margin to that. And then let's go and look up how long it's going to take to replace. okay, four and a half hours at such and such cost per hour. And then you kind of roll that up into a quote. Is that the way it works?
Justin:Correct. So my wife helps me out at the shop. She runs the office for me and stuff, and she's getting better at doing quotes, but there's some stuff that she doesn't know. Like on most spark plug jobs, if you look up the procedure, you'll find that you have to take the upper intake off to even get to three of the spark plugs. So that's another gasket you have to replace. So now you have to account for another part that you weren't expecting. It's not just spark plugs. Now you have to look at gaskets or other things that might be in the way that aren't reusable.
Dan:Have you gotten better at quoting over the years?
Justin:Oh, yeah, for sure. I'd say I'm pretty decent at it. Once in a while, I get bit. I got bit really bad years ago when I quoted a timing belt on a PT Cruiser. I had a timing belt book that would tell me exactly how to do it, the procedures, and it gave me labor time. So I'm like, great. So I quoted her for the three hours that it said. And after I was three hours into it, I wasn't even at the belt yet. And then I looked up a different location, like in All Data or whatever. It's six and a half hours. I'm like, oh my goodness, this is horrible. And I couldn't justify calling the customer and saying, hey, you know what? I messed up. It's really gonna be twice what I told you. Right. So I just ate it and moved on.
Dan:Yeah. But the fact that you remember a years old story with, you know, three or four hours difference, that suggests you're pretty good at this.
Justin:I guess.
Dan:Why do situations happen where you get two repair shops that are quoting radically different amounts?
Justin:Experience. It's really hard to find technicians right now. And so there's a bunch of really young new techs that don't have the experience. And some of these shops are desperate to hire anybody. So they'll hire some of these younger ones. And some things, yeah, they sound horrible like that. It sounded like the engine was coming apart. But if you had not heard that before, you wouldn't realize it was just that tensioner. So it kind of comes down to experience.
Dan:It seems like this would be a really hard trade to teach in a way, because so much of what you're saying is you're just kind of learning one mistake at a time, really. You know, I mean, obviously, there's a lot that you can learn about how engines function and how the parts interrelate. But a lot of this is also just dealing with a thousand weird situations and remembering, you know, what the telltale signs were.
Justin:Yeah, for sure. And there'll be some situations where you go, OK, that was a weird issue I just resolved. I hope I can remember that because that was probably I'll never see it again. And I probably should have written all those down, but I haven't, so...
Dan:It's kind of like the show House. It's like you just get these incredibly weird medical anomalies. And it's like you've got your own mental database of those for automobiles.
Justin:Yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, we all do oil changes, brakes and stuff like that. But you'll get some weird complaints on repair orders. Like this one time I had one. It was an H2 Hummer. It had, I think it was like 6,000 miles on it. So it's like brand new at the time. And the repair order said complaint was, "When the customer turns the heater on maggots fall on the passenger floorboard." And for some reason, I got deemed the rodent guy because I'd already dealt with some other dead rodents in some other vehicles. So I'll just give it to him.
Dan:So you had a specialty in that. Yeah.
Justin:Just because I don't I didn't like it. So I'm like, this is weird. This doesn't make any sense. I've never heard this one before. So I hop in the car, pull it in the bay. I look down. Everything's clean. The car's really clean. I turn on the fan. Sure enough, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, little maggots are falling on the floorboard. I'm like, this is crazy. And the other crazy thing is it didn't stink. Like I was expecting a dead animal to be rotting in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I get in the blower motor and I find a whole bunch of maggots are in there. And they're being slung into what's called the EVAP core, which is where the AC, it's like a little mini radiator in there.
Dan:Okay.
Justin:That's where the air conditioner freon goes through. Anyways, they're embedded in that and slung and splattered all inside there, which is gross. So then I look up and you can see straight up to where the air inlet is, where the fresh air from the outside comes into the vehicle. And I see a whole pile of acorns. I'm like, well, that's weird. So I open the hood.
Dan:What is happening here?
Justin:Yeah, I opened the hood and there's like a nest in one corner under the hood. And then all these acorns on the air inlet and then some other rodent debris, you know, here and there. So this rodent, it made a bed, stored its food, and then did whatever. So I'm like, where are the maggots coming from? So I started looking at the acorns. I find that there's little pinholes and then a bigger hole. So there's some insect that puts its larva in the acorn. It eats the acorn out. Then they had nowhere to go but to fall through the screen into the blower motor and then fall on the floorboard when she turned the fan on. Like, what a comedy of errors. I'd never seen that before. So I had to bring an acorn home because we homeschool our kids. So I brought one home to show them. My wife wasn't happy, but I brought the acorn home. We crack it open and sure enough, there's a little maggot in there. A little larva.
Dan:I'm going to venture to say that, yeah, you're never going to hit the maggots blowing on the floorboard problem again. Hey, folks. Dan here. If you're interested in more professions like this one that involve a heavy dose of diagnostics figuring out what's wrong in a situation we've got plenty of other episodes for you check out the software engineer and the veterinarian and the couples therapist and the forensic accountant. So here's a clip from that forensic accountant episode where my guest, Chris Ekimoff, he's called into a situation where he's been asked to investigate a discrepancy. So the payroll budget at this company was $3 million.
Chris:And the actual spend that year was $4.5 million. That's a 50% increase over budget, which you don't have to be an accountant to know. That's massive. And so the CFO, when questioned about it by the CEO, didn't make up a story. He said, you know, I've been stealing from the company for three years.
Dan:To find out what happened next, check out the forensic accountant episode. And, for now, let's get back to the car mechanic. What are the dumbest things that you see, you know, normal civilians do with their cars? I mean, the classic is like never getting your oil changed or waiting too long. Like what else is on the list?
Justin:Never checking their oil level. So we have come to the conclusion that every car that comes in, we have a standard just CYA checklist. Every car, we check the engine oil. We check warning lights and check the oil level, check coolant level, tire pressure and lights. And I cannot tell you how many cars come in with no oil on the dipstick. And it's like the worst thing you can do. I mean, as long as you have oil and coolant, your car will probably last forever almost, as long as it doesn't overheat some other way. So I had one lady, a girl had come in. She had called, said, my car's making a noise. I said, well, swing by. I'll go road test it and see what it's doing. So she came by. I hopped in the car. And I went and drove it. And this is where kind of this whole plan came into effect. I drove it. I got about a mile away. And I started to hear the rattling noise. But then there was no noise. And then all of a sudden, the car died. And I went, this is weird. So I go to start it again. And it wouldn't crank. you know, the normal sound, it just clicked. That was it. And I went, oh no. So I popped the hood, no oil in the engine. It seized on my road test.
Dan:Wow.
Justin:And I'm like, hmm, how do I tell this customer? A, I need to get a ride back to the shop. And B, then I get to walk in and tell her, hey, by the way, your car's around the corner,
Dan:dead and needs an engine.
Justin:Because you ruined it. Yeah. And I'm like, I hope they don't think that I did it. Like it was my fault. I should have checked the oil level before I drove it, But it was going to happen regardless. Thankfully, she said, oh, my gosh. She's like, my boyfriend, every time he's changed my oil, he said it's been empty. And I'm like, yeah, you need to check your oil more often.
Dan:And get a new boyfriend.
Justin:How often do friends and family ask you for free car help? Since most of my family is not local, not too often. But I'll tell you, my first boss, he said to me, the first thing you have to learn about being a mechanic is don't tell anyone you're a mechanic. And it's totally true because I'll go to church and in the morning, some people just walk up to me and there won't be a, "Hi." It'll be, "You know, my car is doing this." I'm like, "Let's start over. Hi, how are you?"
Dan:We talked to a couples therapist on the show and she said she will never tell people what she does like on a plane or something. Because as soon as she uncorks that, she knows like the next two hours are going to be spent doing armchair diagnostics on their relationship.
Justin:Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Dan:How long did it take you to feel like you had kind of a holistic understanding of a car?
Justin:That's a good question. So I'd say about eight to 10 years, maybe.
Dan:Wow. That's a lot of time.
Justin:Yeah, I think that's when I really felt confident. I mean, in the beginning, I kind of felt like I was cursed because I started in '92. So we had cars from the 80s and cars just starting to have computers. And we worked on '65 Mustangs all up to a 1980-something Cadillac. And so I'm like, I have to learn carburetor cars, distributors, and then computer-controlled cars. I'm like, this is horrible. But now I look back and go it was a blessing because I got to learn all the different variety.
Dan:What is an auto repair shop going to be like 10 years from now as software gets more and more embedded in the operations? Is there a world where you sort of get disintermediated because the auto manufacturers are just piping in updates directly via some kind of subscription?
Justin:Well, it would be nice if they would update cars without us having to do it because if they did over-the-air updates on cars, it would be awesome. I mean, granted, I know Tesla and them do it, but like with our regular gas cars, it would be nice because then we wouldn't have to charge a customer, you know, 300 bucks to reflash the computer. But I kind of don't envy the young people coming into the, that end up being mechanics because there is going to be so many computers and so many random things that could happen in conjunction with communication, everything. I had a service manager one time tell me when I was at the dealership right before I left. He said, "You know, you guys are going to be like just regular parts changers and you're not going to be worth anything pretty soon." And I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "We have OnStar, we have all these different systems that are going to scan the car, pull the code, the system will order the part that it needs, and then ship it to the dealership, call the customer and tell them, hey, your part is in, we can schedule your appointment, fix your car, boom, boom, boom." And then us technicians would just be parts changers. I walked away going, I don't really think that's going to be true, because the computer, OnStar, everybody can't diagnose if a rodent chewed one wire going to the throttle body. it can't know that... Yeah, it'll have a code saying there's a fault in the throttle body which is the butterfly that allows the air going into the engine and it could say "Oh, there's code it needs a new throttle body." Well, no it just needed one wire. Because i had one car that wouldn't start and it was literally one wire chewed out of the throttle body. So they can't pick up on that.
Dan:I wonder if the effect of the computerization will be almost to bifurcate the work in the sense that maybe a lot of the, you know, updating software and stuff that you're doing can be done remotely, automatically, or on-demand as needed. And then, you know, some of the more obscure problems that require detective work, like you're saying, it's going to require like a really high level of understanding. So in other words, like maybe it's like the 20th percentile mechanic who really gets pinched by this, because in the future world, they're either going to be replaced by the automation or you're going to need like a hot shot.
Justin:Yeah, no, I could see that.
Dan:I just made that up. So you tell me what you really think about it.
Justin:That sounds pretty legit. Now I've been thinking about this a little bit. So my shop, we've decided to not work on anything older than '96 because that's when the OBD2 came out and my old scanner has died and those connectors don't work with my new scanner. and to be honest if you have a car that old it's probably on its way out unless it's a classic right? It's kind of lived its life if you're talking a 1985 or '92. And most shops have decided the same thing they're not working on anything older than '96 and i foresee there's going to be a point at which shops are probably going to say, "You know what? I'm not going to work on anything newer than 2028 because it's going to take a whole nother realm of computer diagnostic equipment I have to buy.
Dan:Oh, that's so interesting.
Justin:I'm just not going to invest in all that. That what I foresee is going to, I could be wrong, but that's what I'm thinking.
Dan:Because you're saying you're just going to need a totally different set of skills and even set of equipment to service cars like that.
Justin:Yeah. I mean, the cars that have all the radar and all the lane detection, all the sensors, that is a whole nother realm that I personally don't want to deal with. Dan: cars like that. Yeah. I mean, the cars that have all the radar and all the lane detection, all the sensors, that is a whole nother realm that I personally don't want to deal with. It's a system called ADOS. I can't remember the abbreviation, what it stands for, but it's all about the lane detection, all the radars and everything. And you have to have a special room to even dial everything in.
Dan:Whoa.
Justin:It's a whole nother realm. Yeah.
Dan:Gosh, I didn't even know there was going to be like another lane for auto shops. I mean, like a kind of different animal needed to service those cars.
Justin:Yeah. I've heard some of the body shops have to have a clean room where it's all painted white And then they pull the car and there's no obstructions so they can program all the sensors.
Dan:So, Justin, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Let me fire away here. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know? And what does it mean?
Justin:Rack it.
Dan:Rack it.
Justin:So we put cars on lifts, but we say, "Go rack it. Rack that car. Rack it and lift it in the air." So when anytime we go, "Well, can you pull the car in and rack it for me? Cause I want to look underneath it." So it's lifting the car.
Dan:What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a car mechanic?
Justin:When a customer calls and says, you just worked on my car and there's a pause. And first thought is, "Oh no, we did something wrong or something happened or they perceive something went wrong." But I'll tell you what, most of the time when I get that call and it still sinks my heart every time I hear it. But then they say, you did such a good job. I have another car for you to work on. And I'm like, why did you phrase it?"You just worked on my car and..." I'm like, "Oh, no".
Dan:What is a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?
Justin:Air guns, air compressor kicking in. Nowadays, there's not as much air guns. a lot of people use electric guns so that's the... I call them "guns", but those are the tools that take the wheels off.
Dan:Okay, yeah. Yeah, I can imagine that that's a really common thing you hear like even when you're taking your car in right?
Justin:Yeah, like, I mean, especially if you go by a tire place you're going to hear that a ton because that's all they do is take wheels on and off.
Dan:Did you ever listen to Car Talk on NPR?
Justin:No, I listened to some other ones. I don't think I heard that one.
Dan:It was these two brothers who just knew anything and everything about cars and just had really hilarious personalities. But what made me think of it was it seemed like just an incredible amount of the time they could diagnose what was wrong with someone's car, Like over the airwave, just by hearing about the noises the car was making. Does that resonate? Like how much can you learn about a car from the sounds it's making?
Justin:There are some sounds that, yeah, you can go, okay, that's definitely X, Y, and Z. But some stuff you have to hear it in person. So you know what part of the vehicle you're hearing the noise from, even what corner of the engine you're hearing it from. Now, obviously, when somebody comes in, they say, hey, my car's making a kind of noise. And we ask them what kind of noise. Then you play the sound game and you go, is it, you know, a click, click, click or learning how to make all sorts of noises. It's pretty funny. And my wife will say, do that again. Like, yeah, really? Thanks.
Dan:Is there a noise that's so distinctive? Like if you hear them impersonate it, you know, immediately what it is.
Justin:Yeah. I mean, like break tattletales, which is like the wear sensor on some brake pads. And that would just be like, like while they're driving. Okay. It's like nails on a chalkboard.
Dan:Uh-huh.
Justin:Other things would be like a dead battery. Like if they turn the key and the starter just goes click, click, click, click, click, click, like almost a machine gun fire. It's like, well, that's probably a dead battery.
Dan:What is an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?
Justin:I would say solving strange diagnostic issues that they may frustrate me in the beginning and twist my brain. But when I finally get it resolved, it's such a relief. And it's just a great feeling to go, I successfully diagnosed that. And I like to say, we're not so much automotive technicians as we are reverse engineers.
Dan:Hmm. Say more about that.
Justin:Because all we're doing is trying to figure out, okay, how did the manufacturer come up with, how does this system work? And now why did it break? And then reverse engineer, how did it break? How does it get put back together? Like, that's what I think we are. Professional reverse engineers.
Dan:You know, what's so interesting is we talked to a software engineer who had almost exactly the same answer. He was saying that, you know, it is so satisfying, like something goes wrong with someone's app or whatever, and you have to try to replicate it. And then you have to go through all of the, you know, systemic plumbing to figure out what went wrong. And once you finally figure it out, it's like, boom, that was a puzzle worth solving.
Justin:Oh, for sure. Yeah, it's quite the feeling to know you fixed it. The worst thing for me is to give up on a car and say, you need to take it somewhere else. I can't figure it out. Like that just kills me.
Dan:How often does that happen?
Justin:Pretty rare. I've got one that I'm fighting right now, but I think I've got it resolved. But yeah, it's pretty rare. Maybe I've done it once in the last several years.
Dan:Justin Snodgrass is a car mechanic. He owns Snodgrass Auto Repair in Castle Rock, Colorado. Justin understands cars so well, he can immediately recognize, okay, if the car makes this noise, it's this problem. Or if this is the symptom, then the cause has either got to be X or Y. But notice that even after decades of work, there's still mysteries, still surprises. Why does this chair recline automatically? Why are maggots spewing onto the passenger floorboard? And I think those mysteries keep jobs interesting. You know, the veterinarian figures out the dog is feeling bad because it ate a bunch of rocks. The turnaround consultant discovers that one of the company's leaders is just taking naps during the day. Both real examples from the show, by the way. To be an expert is to understand the system you work on, whether that system is cars or pets or businesses, to understand those systems backwards and forwards, but also to relish the quirks and the exceptions. It's systemic knowledge plus shoe leather experience. Hooking up the scanner to the OBD port, scoping the parts and labor needed to make a repair, trying to replicate annoying intermittent issues, and enjoying the thrill of tracing a problem to its roots. Folks, that's what it's like to be a car mechanic. A shout out to recent Apple Podcasts reviewers, Fairy Peg, Big Aloysius, Too Many Miles, and BugSquisher1295. Thanks to you all. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.
