Need to talk about my car again.
So it was on Tuesday where the mechanic My Father trusts told me that he thought the transmission on my car was slipping. This was in reaction to me asking him about the chronic lack of acceleration in my car. I wanted to get a second opinion, and I had time, so I picked up my car in the afternoon, went home, plopped into my bed, saw that X-Men Days Of Future Past (what a long title for a sequel) was playing in 20 minutes, decided to forget this day with a movie (which was OK, I guess -- I don't know why I disagree with so many others, but the story was too sprawling for me), came home and decided I still had time to bring the car in to the mechanic just past The Mechanic Around The Corner. I think I touched on my paranoia over the transmission in my last blog post, but I'm fleshing out the chronology here.
I wanted to check the last time I had my transmission fluid flushed. I swore it was some time last year, but in case this new mechanic wanted to ask me questions about it, I had to have the right date. So I went into my desk drawer to look through my records.
As I've said before, I don't have a record of when the transmission was flushed. These records, coming from The Mechanic Around The Corner, do have a little box indicating the next time each of several maintenance services should be done, however, and there is a line for transmission fluid flushing that gives a date of 2016. Looking through past receipts that box says "Never Serviced," and that line changed some time inbetween records I do have from 2013. Bottom line: The tranny has been flushed, and recently.
But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. I was desperate to find the record of that flush, and while I was combing through all of my records thinking that it just got misplaced somewhere, I came across another record, this one from January 2013, the time when I took my car to the mechanic My Father trusts. I remember this time I had the shocks and struts, front and rear, finally replaced.
What I had forgotten, however, was that, at least according to this particular receipt, I had some other things done to my car as well. Among them were the gasket leaks that the mechanic saw upon replacing the shocks and struts and moving things around the bottom of the car. Unbeknownst to me now, they apparently had replaced the intake manifold and the valve cover gaskets.
That's when the blood started to drain from my head. I immediately harkened back to the time I was rushing to my night test scoring job. The Mechanic Around The Corner told me both the intake manifold and valve cover gaskets were leaking and should be fixed. And in my panic I okayed the intake manifold gasket.
Now, for all I know the intake manifold gasket could be leaking. I trust the mechanic My Father trusts far more than The Mechanic Around The Corner now, yet I don't trust him that much. It is possible he fucked this up. Hey, I can't tell how my engine looks from the bottom. It's also possible that the mechanic My Father trusts didn't do a good job of cleaning up the gasket after he replaced it. Maybe it is fixed, but there is so much leftover oil from when it was leaking that The Mechanic Around The Corner thought it was still leaking. Or The Mechanic Around The Corner flat-out lied to me; I think that's also possible.
Bottom line is I had the same expensive repair done twice in 14 months when it probably wasn't necessary. The total cost of the intake manifold gasket replacement: About $230, I believe.
My goodness, that may be the biggest waste of money I have ever spent. And all because I forgot that when I had the struts and shocks I replaced I had some other things done to my car, and I didn't have the foresight to make absolutely sure I already had it done before I said yes to having it done, probably unnecessarily, again.
I need to make up for this, but how? Probably cutting back on strippers. That'll be difficult for me to wean myself away from that, however, and it would have been so much easier if I was smart enough to just look through my repair records. God, I am an idiot.
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