Quote:
Originally Posted by jrr63
When I moved to NM quite a few years ago I bought a 67 Chevy pickup (in Northern NM in those days a pickup, ideally with a gun rack on the back of the cab was de rigueur), and I worked on it myself quite a bit - it was a pretty simple straight 6 engine layout and fairly easy to see what's what when you opened the hood. Any car I've had in the last ten years is very different - open the hood and it's hard to find the receptacles for adding oil or windshield washer (or tell the difference between them) .
Plus as surf doc says - from an opportunity cost perspective it does not make sense to do the work yourself if you will take you 5 hours to do something that someone can do in one hour for much less hourly than you make in your real job (either poker or real world) - for me it's the same for a lot of things I could conceivably do myself - it makes more sense to me to hire someone who knows what they are doing.
Of course in this case it's not clear they knew what they were doing (or maybe were not paying attention when they reconnected the hoses).
I have never taken any shop class, auto class, or anything mechanical whatsoever so saying something is a simple straight 6 is pretty lol for me. I would not get anything done in any amount of hours working on a car other than to make things way worse. In general when I pick up my car from a repair I just look them in the eye and nod a lot the way you would if pretending to understand someone speaking chinese. They might was well be.
The only time they didn't know what they were doing was when they tried to explain that 2 things were unrelated when the chance of them being unrelated was roughly .001%
The idea of paying someone 1/4 of your earned hourly to do something for you is a concept my wife and I still can't come to grips with. She is a high income earner and I see her in the laundry room for 30 minutes when I want to watch Sons of Anarchy. There are a bunch of other things that could be delegated out as well but I seem to have lost this battle. I don't get the distinction how the deep cleaning like showers and toilets is worth hiring help for, but me doing grocery shopping, cooking, or kid related driving 2-4 hours a week isn't.