Sharing a bond with an automobile can be a beautiful thing, but it’s not all jellybean raindrops and unicorn farts. Sometimes it straight up sucks to be the person that takes an interest in cars. My question to you is, what’s the worst thing about being car-obsessed?
Me? I’m a decent amateur mechanic, but I’m not God. (I don’t think so, anyway.) While I like helping my friends with their car trouble, people’s expectations can be a little higher than I’m equipped to deal with. I’ve gotten calls from friends-of-friends that wanted me to identify a weird noise that their 2005 Nissan Altima was making, and would urge me to not only diagnose it over the phone, but ask me to speak to their mechanic to see if I could get the real price of whatever their wallet-destroying repairs would be.
I’ll help if I can, but asking someone like me, a person that still routinely screws up maintenance procedures, to take the place of a studied professional isn’t the smartest thing in the world. I’m not a soothsayer, and I probably can’t diagnose a slightly unbalanced alternator pulley over a speakerphone when you’re driving down the highway at 60 miles per hour.
While things like this can get under my skin personally, I’m sure that you lot will have worse examples of when your car enthusiasm came to bite you in the ass. Let’s hear it.