I try and buy most of my gifts online. The wife does as well. This makes shopping a much easier process. It’s much worth my time to spend an extra 20-50 dollars in shipping over the course of the holiday season than to try and venture out amongst all the people doing mass-pandemonium shopping.
If you don’t care a bit about programming, then skip this.
I used to love changing the oil in my car (and, after getting married, my wife’s car). It was a lazy Sunday afternoon task and it gave me a chance to do something different.
But anymore, it’s just so much easier to take it to the oil change place. In fact, the one nearby work advertises $18.99 oil change special. Recently, I visited and attempted to purchase this oil change.
First, realize that this only applies to their house brand 10W-30 oil (TropArtic brand, which as best as I can tell stands for “made in North Korea”). Now, my car is a little picky in specifying that it should have 5W-30. The only difference is the low end temperature viscosity, with 5W being able to handle lower temperatures. Not wanting to tempt fate, I told him to use the 5W-30.
So, the whole thing proceeds. I told him not to bother washing the windows, since I would do it anyway (a lie, but they do such a terrible job at these things that I didn’t want my windows to end up dirtier than they already were).
About 8 minutes later, I get the bill. $39 and change. Here’s how it played out.
Apparently the 5W30 house blend oil is $26.99, not $18.99 like the 10W30. So, for a slightly different viscosity grade I get an $8 surcharge. As best as I can remember, they’re the exact same price at the auto parts store.
Then there was a $5 fee for removing the skid plate on the bottom of my car that covers the oil pan. They had never charged me for this before, so I didn’t realize it would be applicable.
Also, there was a $2 disposal fee.
And, since my car has a large displacement V8, there was a few extra dollars charged for going over 5 quarts of oil.
All in all, $39+. That’s over double what the sign was advertising.
Crikey!
So I read that Microsoft is now the supplier to Formula 1 for engine control units.
Am I the only one who thinks this is a bad idea? There’s two possibilities here:
* they put Windows in the thing, it crashes, and someone dies
* they DON’T put Windows on the thing, which means that they’re admitting Windows isn’t good enough to run your car.
Interesting scenario playing out:
We have a couple of very expensive pieces of equipment that we use in our engine testing. We have two main suppliers for them, A and B. When we bought our first one, we bought from A. At some point, we found some used ones from B and picked them up for cheap. Since then, we’ve decided to standardize the rest of our purchases on A. So, we now have 3 As and 3 Bs, and will be acquiring another A in the near future.
We have two main reps that support us in these endeavors RepA and RepB. I’m not sure why RepB helps us, since we’ve never bought anything from him directly. I think he’s hoping we might send future sales his way. But we told him no, we’d be buying from RepA instead.
Well, our latest product A purchase had some flaws and wasn’t sent to us 100% correct. We’ve spent a lot time working on making it right. Interestingly enough, the part that we were sent to provide a fix actually from from Company B. That is, Company A uses some of Company B’s parts inside their products.
Well, we couldn’t make this part work right. We ended up sending it back to the manufacturer and they tested us and told us it worked just fine. So now we’re in a quandry because we need to get it installed.
Since it’s made by company B, I talked to RepB about it, since I figured he’d be most knowledgeable. He’s going to come down next week and help me install it. He owes us a favor, because we let him tour our facility with some potential customers he had in order to show off some of his products in action.
However, RepA also wants to be here because he wants to make sure we get this thing up and running - especially since we have future orders in line with him.
So, this means that both RepA and RepB will be here at the same time working with me to install RepB’s product inside of RepA’s machine.
This should be good.