One Trick Pony

Some say that an automotive technician needs to know all kind of things in order to fix the modern automobile. Being proficient in things mechanical and knowing how to turn a wrench is not enough anymore. An effective automotive technician must have skills in the worlds of electricity, electronics and computer control systems with network communications, hydraulics, refrigeration, chemistry and the laws of thermodynamics, and all sorts of other things. The problem here is that even the best automotive technician never becomes an expert in any of these things. You could say however, that the auto tech doesn’t know everything about anything, but knows something about everything.

I have been an automotive technician officially for about the last 12 years, but I have been working on cars my whole life. In recent years I have been working as an instructor of automotive technology at a small community college. Sometimes I think that working on or around cars is the only thing that I have ever done. I am a one trick pony. I am the automotive technician who knows a few things about a lot of things but I don’t know everything about anything. Most of the time I act like I know everything about everything, maybe because I’m a normal guy, or maybe because I’m a bit of a jerk. In reality I know enough to start a conversation and then develop it to the point where I can fully, and with great force, stick my foot into my mouth.

I really enjoy everything about the automobile. I also like just about every kind of car or truck that there is. Many of them I would never choose to own because while I may like just about all of them for one reason or another, I know which ones are more likely to cause me problems. This area can be controversial and I know that I have more than once made a comment about some ‘piece of junk car’ that just happened to be owned by a friend who heard what I had to say about it. While it’s easy to say which cars are the best, fastest, or most reliable, when you start to pick which cars are the worst of all time, the topic can be a bit heated. Nevertheless, I can’t totally hate even the cars that I determine to be junk because the fact of the matter is, these substandard cars have helped me support my family over the years.

I like cars that are old. I like cars that are new. I like cars that use the latest technology. I like cars that have nothing in them even close to the latest technology. I like cars that are fast and get horrible gas mileage. I like cars that are slow but get 70 miles per gallon. I like cars that are big, and I like cars that are small. I love a car that is very practical but I can also throw practicality out the window for no good reason. Every car ever built was built to fill a need somewhere and there are very few that have no purpose at all. I can usually think of something to say about nearly every car on the road.

The purpose of this blog is to give me a place where I can talk about things that I know something about or at least give me a place to talk about things that I pretend to know something about. I will mix in some facts and figures, but there may also be a fair amount of opinion found among the various things that are posted. I will primarily talk about things that interest me but I may also discuss things that relate to current events in the automotive world. Regardless of what I write about, I know that at least my mom will log on once in awhile, and if I’m really lucky then my wife may read a few posts now and then as well.

The auto rules.