The Diagnostic Mindset: Embracing the Challenge in Auto Repairs With Lee Forget Part I

So what I found with the gloves thing, and this really, I can remember probably five or six years ago, they used to say, Oh, we have to provide them for you. Okay. That's fine. We're only going to provide a certain amount per day. Cause what they would get really mad about is a guy would literally like put them on. He'd have them on for three minutes and he'd take them off to do a smoke, a cigarette or something like that. And

you go get another box or another set of gloves. And they're like. Holy crap. He's going through two boxes a month versus the other guy that's going through. And at the end of it, it shouldn't really matter. Right. I mean, it's, it's PPE, right. It's, it's to be provided. It's important, but I just, it was always like, Oh, these gloves. And then you probably saw a COVID right. As soon as I can

remember buying boxes of gloves for $78 for a box. Yeah. And now you look at the ones that princess auto, that grease monkey brand, that's not a terrible glove. They're 18, $19 a box. Yeah. Right. And that's, I think is, so my last employer. He, we ended up getting like these food grade restaurant, just junk, you know, and we're like, like five mil or something like that. Like you could look through them and they wouldn't, they weren't doing anything. I was like, well,

why can't we get like the gloves that we used to have? Oh, they're up to $21 a box, like from worth. Right. And I'm like, yeah, but they're good gloves. Like you can actually wear them several hours and they don't rip off. Whereas these other ones I'd go to pull them on and they'd rip and tear. So. Cheap shop owners, cheap management. Um, I don't know. I could have a skin disease because of, uh, arseholes like you. So anyway, kind of just start the conversation off tonight. I'm, uh, it's

beginning to get a real Canadian flair here on the JD mechanic podcast. And I'm talking to, it's last night. I talked to BJ from BJ motorsports on Tik TOK. And, um, which that's the second time recording with him. And, you know, there's been a few Canadians, I'm speaking with Lee Forget tonight and, Yeah. Uh, yeah, I'm Lee Forget, um, automotive technician by trade. Uh, but I've left automotive for mining. Um, yeah. So like what, first

And you're up near where exactly? Uh, Gogama. So I live in Sudbury, uh, but the mine is in, uh, Gogama, which is Yep. Uh, Timmins. So for, for the Americans that, you know, you're like, well, where the hell is Timmins? Well, I've never been there, but Shania Twain, which the whole world loves, she's famous for being from Timmins. And I actually had a good friend when I was very young that was from

Porcupine. And nobody knew, I can remember when he moved down here, he's like, I'm like, where the hell is Porcupine? And who calls a town that? But he used to tell me stories about Timmins and Porcupine. The farthest I've ever been up that way is I was up to Sudbury when I was in high school for a wrestling tournament. Oh yeah. Um, I'll be 1991, 92, something like that. And I can remember like driving into the city and I'm like, nothing's growing here. Like,

So it's actually changed a lot. They, they put a lot of lime down to neutralize the, um, the ground and, and now there's, there's trees everywhere. Uh, but we still have the, Like Sudbury was made from a, a meteor hit the area. So it's, uh, I mean, you can't see it if you're just looking around, but it's a crater. Uh, but there's lots of hills and, and now that they've, they've

fixed all of the ground, there's just trees everywhere. It's, it's really great if you're into snowmobiling and quadding and Yeah. So what, um, how does, what was the transition like to go from working? Like Yeah. So I actually, I started, uh, in the independent world and, uh, I had a lot of bosses that really wanted me to do subpar work. Uh, like for example, one, I think it was a Dakota or something had a leaking a fuel neck. OK, and I told him this thing needs a fuel neck like it's sleek and

it's no good. Oh, just put some gasket maker on there. I'm like, what are you talking about, man? Like gas will just eat right through that. And now you got gasket maker in your gas tank. Oh, just do it. I'm your boss. All right. So I splooged it full of gasket maker and let it sit overnight in the shop. Next day, he brings it over to the gas station across the street. Gas everywhere, all over the ground. Didn't even make it one fill up. Right. So just,

uh, that's just an example. And, uh, yeah, I just, I kept bouncing shop to shop because they kept wanting me to do these So why, why do you think some, cause we all have been through stories like that, or at least if we didn't have to go through it ourselves, you know, we all talk to other people in groups and

sessions and training nights and stuff like that. And they tell stories like that. Why do you think so many shops like, like what makes them do that I feel like they're doing it with maybe not the customer's best interest, but, um, just trying to get it the cheapest for the customer. So like the cheapest repair is gas maker, but it's not in their best interest because it's not going to fix it. And it's not even technically a repair. Yeah. To call it a Band-Aid would be excessive. Like it's, it's

really, it's nothing. And yeah, it didn't do anything. It's just waste work and it's wasted time. And let's say it, it did work that time. Well, then you release the vehicle to the customer. He burns a tank, goes to put fuel in it. He's oh man, this thing's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It always, it always frustrated me for stuff like that. And I never understood why, except that what I always felt was like going on is that they were like, well, the customer wants

it done as cheap as possible, which okay. Lots of customers do. I mean, I don't want to pay more for something than I absolutely have to. Yeah. There really is only one right repair in that situation. Right. And in a lot more situations and probably in this industry, we want to admit there really is only one

right repair. Yep. But it's when we, when we, you know, kind of widen out the standards, I guess a little bit, what might be the polite way of saying it, you know, you can get into people going, well, there's more than one way to skin a cat, or there's more one way to, you know, fix a car. You know, that kind of thing is like, you, if you were driving the truck yourself, you'd probably wouldn't. If you owned it as a shop owner, you probably wouldn't bother

with that. Right. You would just order the part. So if you've got a customer that won't. Why do you give them the liability of being able to say they couldn't fix it for me by allowing them to dictate such a, Yeah. I mean, you just, you got to educate the customer, tell them what's going on, why this repair is the right repair. And then ultimately it's up to them to make that decision. Either you go ahead with it or you Yeah. Yeah, probably. Oh, geez. I

don't know. Four or five shops. Wow. Uh, same story over and over. Are there a small stint at Canadian Tire, just like any other Canadian technician? I haven't I have not yet. I joke that when I retire, I might work the parts counter just because I can I could go in and like, you're not going to need that. Get the hell away from me. Like I could do that. And I can start there every January and, uh, I'd probably get fired by May and I could fish until November.

And then I get hired at another one and the cycle would continue. Right. Yeah. That's good plan. Do you think Sudbury, it was kind of, was it the area that was why the shops were like that? Or is it just Subway has a very widespread income where there's a lot of people that have very low income and a lot of people that have high income, not a lot in the middle. And I think those people at the bottom just happened to go to

the shops that I worked at. I do know there are some good shops for sure here, but like I got friends that work at them. I just I didn't get that experience. And I'd like to like I'd like to start this out with. I love the automotive industry. Man, I've So what was Canadian Tire like? Because I mean, I've never worked it. I've worked with a couple of guys that have worked in the past. Some

tell me different things. Some have said they were able to make some money there, but it was a constant fight with the service advisors or the service manager, because they weren't always the most experienced in the industry, right? And then I've had other people that have just said it was the worst tenure they ever So yeah. So in my, in my experience, the guy who broke the most stuff made the most money. Wow. Uh, Yeah. Did they just Yeah, I don't know. He just, uh, Canadian

Tire takes no responsibility for anything that gets broken. Uh, so they just say, Oh, it's broken. So you got to pay to fix it. Uh, at least at this branch, when I was there, blah, blah, all that stuff. Right. Yeah. Um, there were some great texts there and they, they moved on to do great stuff. Uh, but yeah, mostly I think it was older getting ready to retire tax that, um, I don't know that they broke a lot of

stuff, man. And then they would just end up getting the customer to So like breaking like a panel when they're trying to pull a door panel off to do a window reg or something like that, or yeah, I mean like anything like, or say you're pulling a vacuum line off and the, the nipple breaks off. Oh, well customer buys a new, uh, a new, intake tube or,

or whatever, right? Anything, anything, uh, say they don't say they're doing, uh, they're pulling apart some drum breaks and they don't back off the adjuster and they rip the whole break assembly part, uh, needs breaks. Needs all, it needs a kit, needs the shoes, needs everything, needs drums. Even if they're like, obviously not brand new, cause there was a rust ridge, but like in really good condition, uh,

Yeah. It's getting all new. Yeah. Customer Do you think that's the way they were getting paid was pushing Yeah. It was a straight time plus bonus pay structure. So that There's a Midas in town here that pays like that. And actually, so my friend that had worked at a Canadian tire, he now works there and for him, he really likes it because now there's straight time. Our wage is sucks.

It's in the toilet. It's low, but everybody will tell you, well, like I get X amount percentage of parts and they get X amount percentage of, of service sold like hours at the end of the month. So I do really good. And I'm like, well, is everybody doing really good? They're like, Uh, well that guy's not, but I mean, you know, he doesn't hustle the way I do. Okay. You know, cause I mean me, I'm not a hustler. Like I'm not a guy that's just going to go in and try

and knock out 20 hours. Right. Like I'm, I've got a comfortable, consistent pace and older hurt a lot. So, you know, I don't want to go in and do 10 sets of tires by lunch. Right. Just to. You know, try and, and, and make some upsells. Like I, I can't work like that anymore. Body just won't do Yeah. I feel you there. Uh, like in my younger days I could, I could hustle pretty good, but as I get older, uh, I just, it sucks because you hold yourself to

that level. Uh, and then you feel Uh, but yeah, especially if financially, like if, you know, I don't know how some of these texts do, cause it's like, as every time I've moved jobs, I've always managed to make more an hour. Right. And the last little bit has always been straight time. I mean, I haven't been in a dealer in quite a while. probably four or five years now. And, um, I mean, I was in the dealer and I wasn't doing good because

none of us were doing good. There was too many texts and not enough work. There was too many, too many texts and advisors that couldn't sell. We had a complete customer base that had been based on the idea that everything on the car was covered. It was oil changes for life. You know, your maintenance was free is what the, in their brain. Yeah. So we could, there was no, they didn't want to buy anything. You couldn't sell them a brake service. You

couldn't sell them a brake flush. You couldn't sell them a cabin air filter, right? Like it was a real tough thing. So, and then when you've got that many techs and they're fighting and warranty becomes what you're all after, you know, it, it doesn't, it's not long before nobody's making 40 hours a week. And

you know, everybody that says in the industry, flat rate is the answer. Well, flat rates, the answer, if you've got more than enough work, But when you don't, and then you go or you upset the apple cart and you bring one more tech in and you divide all the hours that are coming in by one more. And watch everybody's average go down. That's not a fix because you Yeah. And it can't just be the work. You got to have the right service advisors. You got to have the right in service manager. You got

to have the right parts team. It, everything has When you're at Canadian Tire, I always wanted to ask that, how does the parts thing work? Like, do you guys have to look, did you have to look it up or did you just kind of go to the advisor and go, it needs, you know, front rotors, front pads, two front calipers. And It was a while ago, but I think I would go to like the parts wicket and then I'd tell them what it needs, the year, make and model. And then we

would go through it together and. Um, like if there are different grades, I would say, yeah, choose whatever white box rotors, but ceramic pads, blah, blah, blah, And why put that on the tech to decide which grade a part was going on? Like, was that a situation of, did you, you guys didn't talk to the customer to know kind of their feeling for budget or what they wanted to do, right? Or did you just Yeah. So after that would happen, I'd have the quote

and I'd go to the front and then I'd say, Hey, this is what it is. This is why I chose these parts. And then service advisor would get ahold of the customer. And then, uh, the customer said, could you do it cheaper? Then he'd come back to me and I'd say, yeah, okay. Maybe, maybe get cheaper for this or whatnot, or, uh, no, really that's as cheap as you can get and still have a quality repair. Right. And, uh, and then at that point, it's up to the customer and

what they wanted to do. And actually that. The service advisors at Canadian Tire actually never fought back on that, which was pretty good. I haven't had a lot of good experience with service advisors. Have I've had, so one I can say was really, really responsible for my success at the one dealers because he understood that I would like, I

would get to the bottom of what the problem was in the car. If the car had been in three, four times and there was obviously by then, there was probably something legitimately wrong, but nobody else would, he would come to me and say, Hey, I've got a customer, you know, and they've been in three or four times. It's made its rounds around the shop. Nobody can seem to figure it out. Can you, can you take a look at it? And

he'd tell me flat out. And I would tell him, he'd say, they're a really good customer. They've got three other cars. They bought three, they'll spend money at the dealer. And I would be like, sure. And I would find the problem, look over the car. And for the most intense, most of the time after that, that became my customer. That customer came in and asked for me to work on their car. So we kind of built up our own client base with that

customer with, with, excuse me, with that advisor. And he was, he was fair. Like, I mean, if I made a diet call and it was wrong, he knew I wasn't going to come to him and try and throw a bunch of parts at it to try and fix it. It was, I was going to be there that night until eight, nine, 10 o'clock at night, trying to find where the wire was broken or whatever and fix it. I didn't whine to him. Cause

it was, it was like, it was our customer. Yeah. I've also, I had, I had an advisor that like funny Canadian tire, they quoted a rear exhaust manifold on a caravan and, um, the customer took it there. They gave him the quote. I think Canadian tire to try to add extra time, not faulted him for it because every bolt on the manifold was rotten rounded right off. Yeah. It wasn't a 3.5 hour re-enry anymore. It was like six. My, the other advisor, he just booked the van in the part

was already there. I did the manifold job. I clocked out when it was done, paid three and a half. I had six in it. And I said to him, I said, that's the last time you're ever going to do that to me. Because if you do it to me again, I'm going to reach into your pocket and I'm going to get the money out.

And he knew I was serious. He knew because we, I'd had a situation where an advisor, I tell the story, um, wrote it up for customers saying signal light flashes really fast on one side we all know what that is and he said to me he said if it's a bulb they're not going to replace the bulb they'll do the bulb themselves i'm like but you want to know what's wrong yeah he's like yeah they need to know what's wrong cool so i open up the you know i go back to the tail lamp pull the two tail lamps

off the back side of the caravan swap them plug it in you know because you could do that in three minutes and it's It's a dead bulb, obviously it's flashing. And, uh, so I put the back in, drive it around, close the thing off. He doesn't pay me anything. Zeroed out. And I went, what's going on there? And he's like, well, I told you, if it's just the bulb, they're not going to pay to put the bulb in. I said, that's fine. We didn't put a $15 bulb or whatever it would be charged for

them. But I said, I've got half an hour or quarter of an hour clocked. You got to pay me my quarter of an hour. And he didn't want to do it. And I, I pitched a stink until he reached into his own wallet, took out like 12 bucks or something and paid me any, any bitch to moan about that. But you know what, if you want to do that for your customer, as an advisor, go ahead and do it. How many times a day would you do it though? Not too long before it wouldn't

even be worth doing it, right? It wouldn't even be worth having a customer here. And people look at that and go, that's a shit attitude. It's not a shit attitude. If the customer can't put the bulb in, can't diagnose the bulb, they bring it to us. They want us to diagnose their problem. They want us to tell them what's wrong. You know how it is. The macho man says, oh, if it's the wife, I'll get my husband to put a bulb in. I just want to know why this thing is flashing. Cool.

contracted us to tell them what's wrong with the car. We gave them an estimate. We gave them a diag. We proved what it needs. Somebody is going to get charged for that. Somebody has to pay for it. If you want to unapply that on billet, whatever, that's cool. But the tech doesn't donate the time for that. Not Not ever. And that's where a management has to come in and say, okay, well, Give them a quarter hour

out of training or out of goodwill or something. And the dealerships or the shop still needs to pay that Yeah. And see, I had one manager, he would back us on that. He was very good about, like, if the tech spent the time, the tech came up with the solution, you pay the technician. You charge the customer, you pay the technician. Now, some of the advisors hated to any kind of pushback, any kind of conflict, if it was like, oh, it's so simple, I can't charge them for that. It's not so simple

or else they would have done it their damn self. So we got to stop in this industry thinking everything is so frigging simple. When you see the next generation rolling down the road that's motorists, it isn't that simple. And even if it is, they're not interested in doing it themselves. They want it done for them. Charge them to do it. You know, it's not rocket science. It's not, it's nothing personal. It's not ethics. It's not morals, right? If

you get, yeah, aggressive with what you're charging. I mean, I'm not saying we should But how many times Lee you've done it too, or, you know, you write it up. License plate light doesn't work. And the service advisor says, oh, it's probably just a bulb. So you get your ticket handed back to you and it's 0.4 for a Bulbary in rear or whatever you go in there and it's like, The ball was not dead. You know, there's a broken wire somewhere, not feeding the ball. Now, what do you

do? We're back together. So we could, in this industry, we could start to say, Hey, every complaint should be treated as an hour, whether it's a headlight bulb, tail lamp bulb, you know, whatever. But everybody goes, loses their mind and go, you can't charge that. Why Well, if you only got two hours, uh, booked into it and he got four lines, so that's four hours. I mean, you can, that's where you gotta kind of be fair with the customer. You say, okay, it only took me two hours to get

it all figured out. Sure. I'll only charge you two, but when that, when those keys come across that desk and go into your hand, there's gotta be an understanding that you're going to get paid for

So I don't always fault the advisor. I mean, you know, I faulted, I faulted the advisor when the manager had set up, set a process and a standard down and they were trying to tweak that to make it easier with their, with their interaction with their customer or tweak it to try and sell more work at my expense, because I'm not the marketing department, right? You don't, you don't get to market your service department off of my charity. That's not how this works. So

he was pretty good. Like, and that's, I felt bad because him and I were, we had a good relationship, but I did it on principle. You know, that quarter of an hour is worth 10 bucks. I'm going to need that 10 bucks. And, and, you know, it kept our relationship because he didn't do it again after that. You know, I think he just, he knew at that point with me or with a customer that didn't want to pay for a bulb that he probably said, it's probably just a bulb. I

have to charge you to check it. You don't want to be charged to check it. We're just going to pretend that you don't have a problem with your signal light then. Cause you don't want us to check it out.

And I don't know why shops can't grasp that concept. I mean, I know that they do sometimes, but it's always like they see that and they think, I don't know if they think, well, what's the customer going to say, or if they think, and the customer, I guess, could go out of there and say, and tell everybody we're so expensive, you know, That we're ripping them off, ripping

them off is when you do something and it doesn't fix the car. I'm not of the, if I give a customer $50 to a mundane task that they don't want to do for themselves, and they decide that 50 bucks is ripping them off. Who cares what their opinion is. They're not willing to do it themselves. So they're an Yeah. If, I mean, if they wanted to get free work done, maybe they should have went to a part source or an app or whatever

and ask them to, to do it. And they, they probably would have did it for free for something that's pretty easy to get to. I mean, skilled labor costs money. Yeah. I can remember way back by, again, my, my advisor friend, Mike used to tell me they used to do advisors all day long. Somebody would walk up to the parts counter. at Canadian Tire by, you know, the first snowfall of the season by a

new set of wipers. Can you go put them on for me? Yeah. Said every year we would go and then somebody would lean over the windshield, pull the window arm or something like that, crack the windshield. And he said, so we got to where we were buying so many windshields for customers for free, uh,

wiper installs. So that's where the sign had to go above the parts counter at the Canadian Tires now that say all wipers come with a 15 or $20 now install fee, not because that guy's making any money on putting them on, but it's covering those kinds of incidentals that happen. You know, I, I wish we could all go back to, you know, where you could just help people out and they'd appreciate it. But the reality is I, I'm

the jaded one for saying it. Most people don't appreciate, they don't, there's no loyalty anymore, you know, um, You might put this set of wiper blades on for them now and put it on for free. And the next time they need a wiper blade, they might roll into Mr. Lou because Mr. Lou will put two free ones on when they do their oil change for them. That could be part of the promo. Like you may never see that customer back, right? On

some of the customers that are in the market today. And that's the thing we, we don't talk about is everybody goes, well, my customer, my customer on my customer. There's a lot of us that operate in this industry that our customers, sometimes it's a one-time customer. You may never see that customer again. And it isn't because we did anything wrong. They just might be like, you know, they put four, you know, brakes at every corner and four tires on it and a set of struts. And the next time, if

the muffler falls off, they get a new car. You know what I mean? Like they don't come back to you to fix it. They're done. So what, I've had a lot of okay advisors, but like they all came from different industries and they didn't understand cars at all. And even if you spent 20 minutes kind of describing something, uh, they would have a really hard time relaying that to the customer. And sometimes they would say like the exact opposite of what you just told

them. Like you're, you're standing there and they're talking to the customer and they're saying the exact opposite of what you said. And then they still need this part. Uh, yeah, I don't know. It, it's tough because a lot of mechanics don't have the skills to sell work and a lot of service advisors don't have the knowledge to really advise properly. Uh, so what do you do? Um, I don't know. I've heard some shops where they were each tech sells their

own work. So the technician and I bet that works great in that shop, but it's probably a small shop and they don't have a lot of customers or a lot of texts and they were able to teach those texts how to, how to sell. Uh, but

Not even close, not even close. I mean, when I, my tenure at the dealers, there have been times I've had been on the phone with the customer because I'm trying to get more information about when does the car act up or You know, if the customer's just got too many questions and I'm standing there next to the advisor waiting to get the okay for the job, which is not

maybe the best scenario, but it happened. And they say, well, let me talk to the, you know, they'll say, well, let me let you talk to my tech here for a minute. He can explain it better than me. I never had a problem with that if the customer was respectful, but I've always been like the type that if you're disrespectful, I mean, and sometimes, you know what that's like. You can just tell by the condescending tone that they talk to you in, that it's, okay, two things can happen here.

I'm going to get disrespectful back, or I'm going to bow out of the conversation because the person that's going to be getting disrespected will be the advisor, not me. Because it's in their job description, unfortunately, to deal with customers, not really so much in mine, right? There should be better at it than me. And, you know, I've seen, I saw, I saw a technician and a service advisor at

the dealership next door to us that we owned it. It's a Mazda dealer. And there had been an ongoing dispute going on back and forth between an advisor and a tech. And, um, it came to fisticuffs out in the parking lot. Um, and the technician certainly got the better of that advisor. Now they both lost their job, but I mean, that technician had another job before. you know, without too long and the advisor, I'm not sure because it was a situation of,

and it was a toxic thing. Like it was always like he was whining about not enough time or, you know, unrealistic shave time. I don't know the whole story. And it just, they kept, they kept picking back and forth at one another and management didn't step in and say, okay, he doesn't do your work orders, right. Or whatever might've been the solution. I

don't know. I'm not an HR person. But that was the worst I'd ever seen go down between an advisor and I think the thing I hated most about being a tech, especially on flat rate was me having to come up with a time for each job. Like just. To me, just look it up in the book, whatever the book says, that's what it is. If, if there's something like, like that, that, uh, rear manifold job, you're talking about where all the nuts were all rotten. Well, yeah, then of course that's going to be over and

over and above. Uh, but like, especially working at a dealership, like everything's not that old and usually you're not dealing with something, uh, like that. So just charge whatever the book says. Why do I have to, why should I have a different time than the guy next to me to the guy next to him, to the guy next to him? It's not fair to the customer. And I don't want to be the jerk that's charging 150%. to what the guy, a few, a few days downward. And

Yeah. We'd, we'd see that a lot with like, um, you know, four different texts to do the same steering rack in a caravan. And you know, there was a book time of whatever we could, we all could hit the book time, but it, it just mysteriously seemed to get rounded up every time somebody else got to it to where, so what should have been a 4.8 wound up being some guy's bay. you know, five, four, even six, right. Depending on how good the wrath was. And you're like, how does that happen with that?

Right. And so, and they, they were pretty good about keeping that stuff in check. You know, if the book is 4.8, you can all do it within 4.8. There's no need to round this up. Rounding up became a situation of where like that manifold job, when it was pretty rusty. There was, if we had to do a dash pole, for instance, and you got in there and found that had an aftermarket remote start system in it, we normally added extra time because the way you would traditionally pull

that dash or go in there and pull that harness. You had a bunch of things right in your way, right? All kinds of stuff that, and that, you know, you had to make sure that when you put it back together, that thing worked after the fact. So you had to give yourself some more time. That manifold job was, was the one time that was like, and it was. So I want to say that was probably around 2008 and it was

probably like a 98 3, 3 or 3, 8 caravan. So it was not a, and it was, so it was an already really rusted, really old 10 year old turd. If it had been five, six years old, it wouldn't have been a problem, but it was just sold. And, and what, what irked me is that obviously it will, whoever had looked at it before. knew that it was going to require more time. And that's why the customer had not accepted that as an answer. And they had called and we booked it right over

the phone without even inspecting it, without even doing it. And then sacrifice the tech, the right thing to do should have been service And, you know, um, yeah, or whenever it got in and you seen how bad it was, uh, just kind of pump the brakes and go, all right, like this thing's kind of That's a slippery slope though, eh though Lee? Because I mean, we've all probably been in situations like that where you go out and you say, uh, I'm

going to need more time for this. And how many times did you get pushbacks saying all you guys always want more time or all you guys, you've Yeah, for sure. Uh, and so typically I would, I would take pictures or videos or whatever, so I could show and prove like, Hey man, look like this is. This

is not going to be done in the amount of time that that book says it would. If those, those fasteners were the size they were supposed to be, but now I got to go three sizes down and hammer it on and hope, hope it grabs. And if it doesn't grab and cutting it off and now I'm extracting a head stud and Yeah. There's always one shop. Like there's always one tech in every shop though, that everybody says. Well, he can get it done in that timeframe. So obviously it can be

done that way. And I want to think that maybe more of them were like the guy that you had that broke the most stuff, right? Yeah. He's the guy that could get it done already. So how I don't remember what shop I was working at, but there was an opening at the local Honda dealer and, oh, right. I was working at a, at a tranny shop. And we had lost our main contract with, um, with the used car dealer. And, uh, and then we got a, a contract at CN rail for working on their rail trucks. And

I was like, yeah, that is not something I want to do. Uh, so there was an opening at the local Honda dealer and, uh, I, And, uh, yeah, so I applied and I, I got in basically right away. Uh, and. I tried out the dealership life, uh, there, so there it was, uh, it was flat rate with guarantee and the guarantee was 40 hours. So basically it's straight time plus bonus, kind of the same thing. Right. And it, it worked out good there. But it was kind of boring. Uh, so at Honda's it's

like, it's all maintenance. Nothing really breaks. Uh, so it was an alright job, kind of boring. Uh, from there I'd, I'd moved to Markham, uh, and I worked at a Honda dealer there and I was doing on the side, uh, something called chump car racing. Okay. So it's, uh, you get a $500 car. And you put 10 grand worth of safety into it and you go endurance racing. Right. Yeah. Uh, so super cool. A lot of fun living out that way. Like I'd go to like Bowmanville and, and, and stuff. Right. And

that was fun. My, my, the service manager there also raced in jump car. So we got, we got along together really well. I did. Uh, all the regular maintenance stuff there, but I also did a lot of the electrical diag and I did anything aftermarket. Nobody else wanted to touch anything aftermarket and I, and I was really good at aftermarket stuff. So I got all that. Um, and that worked out well after market upgrades or yeah, like a supercharger or

coil overs or whatever turbos. Um, so they didn't really offer that until I, I went there, but once I was there, they, they offered it. And, um, yeah, so I got to do some fun stuff along with all the boring maintenance stuff. And I, again, Honda's don't really break. So there wasn't, wasn't a whole lot of big work. Um, Yeah. So then from there I'd moved back to Sudbury, uh, and I got in a Volkswagen Audi dealership. Oh, uh, yeah. So, and they break. Yeah. Yeah.

And there, you know what, after about six months and I got comfortable, I could really figure them out. Uh, like it was, it wasn't. I don't know, like every other, every independent shop in Sudbury, we'll just not touch them. They'll just say, go to the dealer. Uh, and then, so after like six months, I got comfortable. I found all the pattern failures and I did, uh, I did all of the 2015 TDI updates on, on every car in Northern Ontario and part of Quebec. except for about five or six. Wow.

So that shop was understaffed. But they didn't want to be understaffed, but the problem was they didn't physically have enough room to add more base. But they probably could have. I think we had six techs, including myself. We probably could have went to 20 and still been busy. Wow. So how, how, how did all those cars come So it's the only Audi dealer in Northern Ontario and the only Volkswagen dealer. Yeah. So yeah, that job paid, I

think it was nine hours. And the first one I did the first one, two other guys did took 12 hours. Hmm. One of them just said, screw this, I'm not doing these. The other one tried one more time, lost his ass again. No, I'm not doing it. So after my fourth or fifth one, I got it down to four hours at So what, what was involved in that upgrade? Because like, I'm not familiar too well with the TDI thing. I know when the whole diesel gate So it was a, it was a reprogram. You change the DPF. You add

a second knock sensor. And there's a whole bunch of different brackets and stuff that had to be changed. Most of the update though was software. Uh, but in order to change the DPF, uh, like you got dropped a subframe and like, it's a, it's a fairly involved job, but like I said, I got it down to, uh, basically I would just throw everything in a bucket in a five gallon bucket and everything would come back out of the bucket. And I would just, I knew exactly what

sockets I like some of my sockets I modified, right. Just, just like in any other job. where, uh, where you do it more than once, sir. And yeah, it was, uh, I was perfectly fine doing that. If, if that was my job for, for four or five months, then that I would have been okay with that. It was, it was good. I, I was, I got it down to a pace where I could still go around the shop and help out other guys with whatever they were doing. And, uh,

Um, So they just started feeding them all to you. You had the other guys said, no way, don't give me that. And you Yep. Yep, exactly. They, they had no interest in doing it. They lost their ass on it a couple of times and called Did you find you were starting to make more hours than them or if I'm really analytical, but I, I have a way of blocking it out. So when it came to my hours, I didn't look at it at all. I

just, I just said, whatever I get paid is what I get paid. Otherwise I'm going to spend more time looking at my hours than what it will that it gets, it gets fixed. And I'll get real angry. So I, I just, I didn't look at my time and I just, whatever I got paid, I got paid. Uh, I didn't want to. No. Um, you just found a way to make it like you, you learn to Yeah. Yeah. I just, yeah. Cause I, I felt like I would fight. for my time more than the time's worth. And the, the

anger I would feel was not worth it. Uh, You didn't want to be me. It's like I, for me, it's about principle. You know what I mean? It's just about principle. It's, it's a situation of, you know, you got a guy over there that can, can, can do. X, Y, and Z, but we can't sell X, Y, and Z if the car won't run. So we might be able to get X, Y, and Z sold if we can get this car out in the parking lot to start. So who do we have in this shop

that can get it started? Okay, we got one guy. We got six guys that can do X, Y, and Z. Okay, so you can set the shop up two ways. That one guy that can do to get it started, he only does no starts. But if he, what do we do when there's no, no starts and he can still do X, Y, and Z just as well as the other guy. Do you punish him? Do you make him sit there and wait for what he's good at? And see, I was never about that. I was just like, whatever you want

those guys to be able to do what I can do. I'll try and help them. You know what I mean? Like they just did, they were like, they threw their hands up, said, I don't want any part of that. Don't want to do it. I can't do that. I can't. And you know, there's things like that with me. Don't ask me to take a transmission apart and put it back together. Don't ask me to, I, I'm not your guy for that. I have zero interest. You could tell me it paid, you know, 30 hours. It's

just not my thing. Could I do it? Probably. Yeah. If I did enough of them, but I just have zero interest, right. I have to be interested. So when I would see those guys and you know, they would, they would do X, Y, and Z all the time. And I didn't get to do that. And they, they just slaughter me for hours at the end of the week because I got handed one nightmare diag after another and I got through them, but they'd hit 60 and I'd be hitting 40, you

know? And they're like, well, 40 is, you know, 100% efficiency. 40 is good. Now I normally had to be there Monday to Saturday to get 40. You know, and Saturday was normally my best day because I didn't maybe have a diag. So I could go be in just a regular mechanic on Saturday and, you know, make some hours, try and round that paycheck up. So that's where it, I wasn't like you because I kept looking at it and going, I'm

just as smart as them. Why are they getting paid more than me? You might even argue I'm smarter than them. Why are they getting paid more than that's where my principles kind of got me the reputation that it got, you know? So I understand it though. I understand like if I was wired where I could do what you did, I probably would have, I'd still be at some jobs, you Yeah. Uh, I, I really felt that way at, at

the Ford dealer. I was at, um, at the last shop where I was just getting back to back to back electrical diag and the advisors. had a hard time selling the time on it, but I, I had to fix it. Like, this is just the way my brain is wired. I've got a problem in front of me. I got to fix it. And I fixed it. I fixed all of them. Yeah. But, uh, the guy, a couple of days down where all he does is bang out breaks and ball joints and wheel bearings all day. He's getting paid 50% more

than I am. So why is the guy doing basic work getting paid more than the guy that's doing Maybe not hard on your body work, but hard on your mind work. Yeah. Stressful. Yeah. Yeah. He's going, you're going home with the kind of jobs that keep you awake in the middle of the night. You wake up and you know, you grab the, I was just talking to a friend the other night there and we're like, did you ever fix a car in the middle of the night? And I'm like, oh, I fixed hundreds of cars in the middle of

the night. You know, I'd wake up, I'd reach over on the nightstand and grab the wiring diagram, flick the light on. You know, and you, all of a sudden you'd stare at it and it'd come to you and it's like, Oh, you jackass, you didn't check that. Did you? Oh, there it is. Right. And you'd go back to work the next day and more often than not. You had the epiphany and you fixed the car. Whereas the guy that's just doing ball joints or breaks all day, he goes home, sleeps on a big mattress of

money. He don't stress about nothing. It's two different animals. It really is. It's like an industry within the industry. At Ford, were you, were you fighting the warranty thing a lot? Like Yeah. Ford warranty is really bad. I've never seen. So if you want to see people who hate the brand they work for, look at some Ford Facebook groups, Ford technician, Facebook groups, man, do they hate the brand? And the problem isn't the vehicles. I

mean, some people might have other opinions, but. Uh, the, the problem is the way they pay for, um, for warranty is just so bad. Uh, like you, That's not accepted. Yeah. Not doing that. And I see some of the guys like on, on social media, YouTube and Tik TOK that are, that are Ford techs and they don't, sometimes they talk about, there was a guy that just. Oh, I think it's, what the heck was his name? A-Rod or something like that. Power Strokes with A-Rod or something. And he just quit

the dealer after like 24 years. Just got terminated from the dealership and left going out on his own. And I'm, I saw his video, he posted about it and it wasn't so much like, you always see them and when they're making their content, they're not running the brand down. But you can just, they're not also talking about like how bad they're getting screwed on some of these jobs. Like I understand after you do enough of the phasers and the water pumps and whatnot, and

you know, some of them, you get the cab off in 45 minutes. Right. And then you're just laughing because you're banging that job out in a ton of time, but then next month they'll shave the time down because they figured out that you're pulling the cabs on them and you're doing it faster. And

Yeah. Yeah. Ford is really bad for that. The first time I heard that actually was, uh, was not when it was before I started working at Honda, but it was, it was at Honda where for the phasers on the, um, two liters and 2.4 liters, they were paying you to pull the full, uh, timing cover off. And it was like a, I don't know, eight hour job, 10 hour job, whatever. And then an aftermarket company called

skunk two was putting out camshafts for these engines. And they said, oh, you just got to put a bungee cord on the timing chain, run it to the hood, zap the old zap, the phaser off, blah, blah, bing, bang. You're done. You don't have to take the cover off. Suddenly Honda drops it from whatever it was eight or 12 hours down to two hours. Yeah. Is that, is that fair? I guess in this case you Yeah. Were you guys already before the aftermarket released that lovely bit of

It sucks doesn't it? Yeah. Like in that case, I guess it is fair that they dropped it, but like say a Volkswagen was really fair, like for doing those TDI updates. They, they knew I was only putting four hours into it, but they, they never changed the time on it. At least not while I was there and they never, uh, charged me back. Uh, but I had like a pile of sockets that were all custom length and Yeah. I, I mean, for me, Chrysler, I never saw, like I saw dash jobs

eventually get cut in time. because they figured out that you didn't have to take all those panels off, right? You undid the brackets on the side, you pulled it back, you ran the bungee cord around it, tied it to the steering wheel, snuck your heater box at the passenger side, did your evaporator core and put it back in. But I mean, like I wasn't doing a ton of those jobs. Like I didn't, that wasn't my, they didn't give those to me. Um, I was always in the middle of

something else. So, but I did remember like the old LH cars, you know, it used to be 12 hours or something like that to do an EVAP and guys got them down to where they're doing them in two hours. And then of course, you know, guys go to training back when training wasn't, it wasn't, wasn't, you know, remote, it was done in the classroom. And they'd all sit around and talk and say,

Hey, well, this is how I do this. And this is how I do that. And sure enough, the guy listening to the class, he goes back to headquarters and tells them what they're doing, you know, and then all of a sudden you'd see So everyone wants to look like the hero with the best time save. But unfortunately, when you're giving it away at No, I mean, and it's one thing to sit there and talk shop at those training

events. Cause I mean, that's half, some of the time, that's the only good part about going to them is, and especially on the OE side is, is talking to different guys from that are on the product, but in different parts of the province and hearing what they're seeing a bunch of, you know, I can remember, I went to a training class in Toronto for Chrysler on Sprinter vans. And we hardly had any sprinters where I was in Kingston. We might've had five bands in the whole

city. They had like 5,000 by then in Toronto. So they literally had these texts that that's all they did was work on sprinters. So they were seeing stuff, um, faster than even like headquarters was knowing it was going to break down. They're like, Oh yeah, we're doing a pile of this and a pile of that. And it was like, that was great. You'd come away, but he'd tell you, Oh yeah. Like I do, I do glow plugs in them in 45 minutes. And I'm thinking, Good

God, man. Like, you know, I watched the guy do all day and it, cause you know, they would break off and they were seized in there. He's like, Nope, this is how you do it. Bang, bang, bang. So I just, you know, if you're, if you're going to training and you, you've got secrets, you know, wait to go on lunch and share your secrets, guys. Don't, don't share them from the teacher. They'll rat you out. What, um, how did the

Yeah. So. I, I grew up in a very poor family, which kind of set me off, um, kind of behind everyone. And for most of my career, I wasn't able to get away to, uh, to training, to do the schooling, to get my red seal. Uh, when I was with Honda, I went through the Honda program and, uh, it was all paid. So it was, it was a little easier, but I had to. Uh, still go

to Markham. So I had to find somewhere to live and whatnot. And when I got back to Sudbury and I was working at Volkswagen and I got licensed, um, I didn't feel any kind of like pride. It's like, okay, I'm, I'm the same guy I was yesterday, but now I'm worth more. Like why am I worth twice as much now than I was yesterday? I was doing all the same work at the same quality I've been doing for the last 15 years. Uh, and

I just, I didn't feel any pride about it. I could, I could feel the damage it was doing my body, my hands specifically where I would lose. Like I didn't have the strength I used to have in my hands. So my buddy worked at, at a mine called Detour Gold and he was in the, in the warehouse on the parts department and we're looking at our paychecks and they're close. He didn't quite make the same, but they were close. And I said, well, I heard with Tormont, like there's a lot of room to move up. So

maybe, maybe this is my avenue. I'll get in, in the warehouse and see what happens. So it was a two-week rotation. So you do two weeks there and two weeks home. I would do two weeks in the parts department warehouse at Detour Gold, come home, have a few days off. I'd work a week at Volkswagen, few days off and then go back up to the mine. Cause

Volkswagen didn't want to let me go. So they would actually, the stuff that was like a hard electrical die Yeah, two, three weeks until I got back and then, uh, and But like the customers didn't have a choice cause nobody else wanted to work on it anywhere in sight, uh, in town. And, uh, So what are they going to do? So they would just leave it there until I That's pressure on you though. Right? Because I mean, it's like, you got to look at that and go, well, I'm only here for a week maybe.

And then I'm gone back to the mine. So I've got to figure out this car. Plus I'm sure as soon as Monday rolls up, you walk in, they're like, Oh, Lee, thank God you're here. We got this, we got this, we got this, we got this. How's it going at the mine? And you're like, well, you know. I'm making more money at the mine than I am here. So when you went to the mine, you just worked in

No, uh, it was just in the warehouse doing parts. And then, uh, where I, where I could, I showed additional skills, uh, with computer stuff. And, um, I would write scripts to get jobs done quicker for like, Uh, same machine was in for, for maintenance. Uh, there'd be a whole pile of stuff in the, in the warehouse marked for that unit. But often all that stuff didn't end up out in the shop and then a lot of work got

missed. So I wrote a script that went through the database, pulled everything that's stored for, for that unit. Gave, gave you the whole list and then you, okay. Yeah, it needs, it needs all this stuff. And then work started getting done on time when it was supposed to happen. Um, so like just different things like that. And, uh, there was a product support manager there that, that took notice. And, uh, he talked to his old boss and got me into a fleet analyst position, uh, for Tormod at,

at Baffin land iron mines. Uh, so Baffin land is so far North. But you don't see the Northern lights. Wow. So you would fly out of Montreal, six hours. Uh, you would land in Iqaluit and then fly another two hours. Uh, uh, North. Yeah. So that place is really beautiful in the summer. Yeah. I can imagine. Really, really cold in the winter. The I mean, I've never been up that far up. So, I mean, and, and I can say this, like if I was leaving the mine and flying back

into Montreal, I probably wouldn't leave Montreal. I'd probably just stay. Cause I mean, I've spent, I've spent enough time in Montreal. I loved Montreal, loved it. It's a fantastic city and it'd be hard to press in the summertime. If I landed in Montreal to want to go anywhere, but in Montreal in the summertime, it's a beautiful place. So when you get that far up there. Like we hear, we hear talk, you know, the Canadians, they talk all the time about

like going to the Mac, right. And what it's like to be out in the Mac and, you know, Fort McMurray and you know, you're, you're way out. Yeah. Yeah. It's a camp. Actually the camp up there is pretty decent. Um, but you're really limited for what you can get up there, obviously, like Uh, not only are you that far North, but you're on an Island. So I actually had figured it out once where if I stole a fuel truck and

it were the middle of winter. So the ocean was frozen. I still couldn't make it back to, to civilization with the amount of fuel I had to drive on the ice. You couldn't make it. The coldest I seen there was minus 76 Celsius, which is minus 105 Fahrenheit. Yeah, I, I learned a lot there. Uh, so as a fleet analyst, you go over all kinds of things from, uh, work efficiency to, uh, pattern

failures and finding corrections for it. Um, to what basically you fix problems wherever the problems exist and, And that climate gives a completely different. set Yeah. So like one of the most common, uh, haul trucks for Caterpillar, uh, when you get to the ultra classes, the seven 93 and, um, as of, I don't know what year it was, maybe let's say seven years ago, they went to what they call tier four. So it's got deaf and

it's got all that stuff. And at Baffin land, uh, the temperature that the fittings would get at would create them the crack because they would, uh, shrink at different rates and, uh, from different. So they ended up updating the deaf lines and these, uh, adapter fittings on every truck, uh, That's pretty cool. When you think about it, right. Like it's kind of like the, the, the most extreme test that you put on the machine, you come up with a solution for it, or you're part

of a team that, that does. And then it just becomes standardized parts across the whole world. That's, that's pretty cool, man. That's really neat. I, I'd love to go up there just to just experience that, like, just to think about that, that cold minus 104. Yeah. Like my friends in North Carolina that, you know, Lucas, Yeah. You get snow because you're on a mountain, dude. Like you're, you get a little bit of, you know, it's, it never stops wind blowing there. So

then, you know, the temperature comes down a bit and you get some snow. It's pretty Christmas snow. 104 below. There's, Yeah. So. Like, even when it's really cold at home, you walk outside, like it takes you a couple of minutes to feel cold. Right. At that temperature, it's immediate. You immediately feel cold. It was, but yeah, like I'd, I'd recommend to anyone who could get out that way, definitely go once in the winter and once in So when you're, when you're in camp like that, um, What's

Well, you're working 12 to 14 hour days. Uh, so basically like in the morning you get up, if you go to the gym, you go to the gym, eat breakfast, you go to work, you get home, you eat. If the internet's good enough that night to send a message to your wife or kids, you do that and then you just pass out. Yeah. Um, if. If you work an easier job, then, uh, like maybe you bring up some videos on your laptop and you watch a little bit of movies, but

they, they got, they got a pretty decent gym up there. They got, uh, they got a pool room where they got a bunch of pool tables and they got some guitars and stuff. And so like, there's some stuff for, for people to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Pay is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, during COVID it went from two week rotations up to four week rotations at Baffin land and like four weeks at Baffin land is a long time.

That's a, that's a, that's gets to be a, uh, an experiment on social, you know, kind of like the Lord of the flies type shit, right. Where people start to spend too much time together and you start to look at the weak links within the group. Yeah. Pray on them. Wow. Uh, that'd be too, I, I don't think I could be up there a month. Yeah. And then you're home for a month and now, now you got to convince yourself, okay, I gotta go back. I gotta go back to this

place. Uh, yeah, not easy. Um, so after a while, it dialed back to three weeks and then it didn't look like it was ever going back to two weeks. And I didn't, I didn't sign up for three weeks at Baffin land. Uh, so that's when I got the job at Ford. Uh, and I, when I quit Tormont at that time, I wasn't quitting Tormont. I was quitting working at Baffin land. So the plan was always to get back into Tormont and I knew this other mine, uh, I am gold, uh, at Kota gold and go gamma was

opening up. And, um, I knew they were having autonomous trucks there and people don't understand like these trucks are like three story houses, fully autonomous driving themselves. It's wild. So, uh, the mind did end up opening up and then I got hired on as the guy to, to fix these autonomous systems on these trucks. Wow. Yeah. Very cool. So what was, what, that's a lot of laptop programming. Yeah. Electrical Exactly. It's all electrical and, and, and programming, uh,

calibrations, stuff like that. Uh, ADAS on a whole other level. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's, it's really cool. And you know what, the feeling never gets old when you're sitting in the truck and it's driving itself and like, it gets going pretty fast, like, like on, It's like over 60 K an hour with 212 ton of Yeah. It's literally like a house going down the street. Yeah.

Like, so when those things are being working in the mine, is there somebody in the seat, but essentially it's not, it's completely empty. No one in it. So the loader loads it and it drives itself over to the pile or wherever it's got to go down the road. Right. Dump the load So there's, uh, so there's someone, uh, their, their job is called the controller. So they tell the trucks where they're getting loaded and where they're dumping. And then assuming

that job never changes for the entire day. Like they're done obvious. Like the job does change throughout the day, but, um, yeah. So they say, so the, the trucks will queue up at the loader. The loader will hit a button. The truck will back in next to them. Loader fills it up. Loader hits another button and tells it to go on its merry way to the, to the dumping location, goes there, dumps Yeah. The, I did, I did a

very short tenure when I graduated. Um, I graduated from Sanford Fleming in heavy equipment in 95, I think it was 26. And, um, I worked at a Tormach cat and Stony Creek Hamilton. So which was Stelco steel and everything. And I wasn't ready for that. But I remember the first day I pulled in a

cat to drop my toolbox off. It was like a Saturday and there's a picture somewhere of my, my stepfather's Ford truck parked in the bucket of one of these big trucks that they had, which they're not even as big at Stelco at the steel as what like you guys see up on the mine sites, right? Those haul trucks. But it was still like, we could park the whole truck right in the bucket of this loader. And people had no idea. I don't know. I think it was like a 793 or something at the time. It was

one of their biggest loaders that they made. And of course, then, and I was amazed at the size of the machinery in that shop. And then Stoney Creek was cool because it had a whole section of the shop, which was stucco work, right? Like those kinds of graders and all that kind of stuff. And then they had a whole other truck shop. So there was all these different rigs in every night and they were resealing, you

know, they were resealing the front cover on a cat nonstop. I mean, they leaked constantly. It seems that that's all they were doing was front cover reseal, front cover reseal, front cover reseal. And those guys would do like one a night, you know, no problem. And, and then it would The next night they'd be doing another one and the next night they'd be doing another one. And then once in a while, they'd

be do something different, but it was nonstop. Like, and, and so I wasn't, I wasn't, I didn't have enough experience on the job to, to last at Stelco or sorry, Cat, but it was pretty cool to see. They're a pretty cool company. I can remember walking into the parts department. And the guy literally saying, I don't know, whatever it was, their little, like little loader, like the size of like a case five 80. Right. And he's like, we have every part number in the catalog for

this machine. We could build a machine. without a VIN number or anything like with every part in here we had, you know, but he said like, it was incredible. You know, I've never seen anything like that. They're an amazing company. So I've never been to the mine thing. I went to, went to Stelco a couple of times on some field service jobs with the guys. And that was pretty, That

Yeah. With these, with these bigger pieces of gear, they'll, uh, they'll tear it down to a bare frame, do a full inspection, repair it and rebuild the whole truck with all brand new parts. Uh, yeah, basically all you're keeping is the, is the VIN number, the serial plate. And, uh, yeah, like there's some, uh, there's some haul trucks in Timmins. I got. Like a million hours on them. It's insane. That's like, that's like 5 million kilometers on a car and still You know what I mean? Like what's

it? Um, so how is it, do you miss, like if you're still at the, so when you come home from the mind, do you still take a job? working at the shop or you you're all done Oh, I'm done with that. So when, when I was still in the warehouse and working at Volkswagen, uh, my, my second daughter was born and that's when I, uh, I called the quits of Volkswagen.

Uh, and they were sad to see me go and I was, I was sad to leave, but, uh, I needed that time when I was off to support my family, uh, physically more than, more than monetarily I do like I, I miss working on cars. Um, but I tried, I kind of scratched that itch with, with a Canadian Mac mechanic handout, um, hangout where, um, like people will ask questions and, and

we get to help them out. And sometimes we're spoon feeding some stuff that they could have figured out on their own, but some often there's a lot of stuff that like you've never seen before and you would never think of it. And yeah. Uh, it helps everyone out, uh, because six months down the line, some other guy might be running into the same issue. Uh, it, it creates a And I'm new to that group. Like I've only been in there a little while. Right. You just,

you were nice enough to add me. And, um, I was like, you know, I reached out to you and I said like some of the stuff that these guys, you know, are, are struggling with seems to me, you know, really rudimentary stuff. And then. You're good enough to remind me that a lot of them are in maybe a job like you are, right? Where they're not getting their hands on a Ford truck every day, you know what I mean? Or ever,

and they might be working on something totally different all the time. And then they get stuck with that truck, or they're not stuck with it, but it could be their own, the wife's, mother-in-law's, whatever. And, you know, I just try to help them out because, I mean, me, I love the diagnostics side of the challenge of it is just like, You know, I love it. Like I could stare at that all day long and then try and interpret it.

What's going on. Most of the time I'm not right, you know, but I mean, it's, it's interesting because it's, to me, it's one of the best ways to generate the conversation as to going on, right. Is how each other understands and learns and approaches different things. That's how those great conversations start is it's like, well, look at this data. What do you think is going on? Okay. So why do you think

that's going on based on this? You know, not saying you're right or wrong, just, Hey, you know, help me out here, tell me what you think. And, um, man, that's, I've made a lot of good friends through those kinds of conversations. Right. And I've learned, I've learned as much that way as I ever did staring at it when it Yeah. It's often, it's not about what that final answer is. It's about the journey to get there. Uh, the

different stuff you learn on the way there. And then, um, next time, something maybe not the same, but similar comes up and, and you're in your mind, you're already three quarters of the way through that flow chart. You already got a bunch of it figured out because while it can't be this, because that's good. Yeah. I yeah. Diag is something I love, but in this industry, it's so difficult to It's such a frustrating thing. We were talking about that today. I was talking to Lucas and,

you know, there's so many different ways. Not that there is only really one way, right way to fix a car for the most part of repairs. Really, there's only one right way to do most repairs, but there's certainly so many different processes that guys have and how they approach the diagnostic side of it, right? The troubleshooting, the, The cause guys laugh at me. Cause if you look at how I do it, it looks like I'm running around with a chicken, my head cut off. Like it's just, you

know, or, and I'm, I'm a slow starter. I'll spend an hour just staring at the stupid wiring diagram or the theory operation. And I'll walk over and I'll dig, like, I'll do two tests and then I'll walk back and I'll stare at it for another hour. But you know, I don't, or I walk out to it and I spend 15 minutes and I go, Well, it's going to need that to start. Yeah. And then after that, I just kind of flick a switch and I don't even think about it after

that. You know, it's like, okay, I, I, my brain is shut off now until I have this coil in my hand or this part we had, we had a, with a 2019 Ram with, uh, in the shop this week, got towed in. It's in kind of like a theft mode and the four ways are flashing, the horn goes off. It's push button start, push button start is not doing anything. It's unresponsive. And they have what they call, um, a frequency hub, RF frequency, a radio frequency hub, RFB or RFH. And

it's for all intents and purposes. It's like what the old, when I worked at Chrysler way back in like 20. 2000, 2008. It was essentially the wind module wireless ignition. Now they take it and they stick it on the rear cab wall underneath the power sliding window. So the water that leaks from the third brake light and the power sliding window leaks

on the top of this RF hub. So we get this in and, you know, it's go out to the parking lot and the battery's dead, throw a charge on as soon as the battery gets any life in it, horns going off. It's like, oh, it's one of them. Try to get in, push the button, nothing's happening. Great. So I call up my buddy that I used to work with in Ottawa and I said, you didn't, didn't you have something going on with an RF hub last month? And he's like, yeah. And

he said, remember I had a rotted wire to it. And I'm like, oh yeah, right. I'm like, that's on the back. He's like, yeah, there's this technical bulletin, whatever, check that out. So we pull up the bulletin and the bulletin talks about they're bad for water intrusion or whatnot, but you know, it's a bulletin. It doesn't really tell you break it down all the way as like how it should work, like how it's configured, everything else. So we're like, put the scanner on

it. Of course you can't talk to anything because you can't turn the key on. So then I have to call him back and I'm like, Hey, should I be able to talk to the RF hub with like the key turned off? Let's get into it. He's like, yep. So I said, if I can't talk to it, he's like, then you just check your power and grounds and your can at it. And if that's all good, he says, you're going to need one. That was it for me. I wasn't the one working on

it, but the other guy did those couple of tests. And it's like, you know, I don't even at that point after that, I don't think my brain's not wired where I want to know further how that works. It's If we had a 22 charger and on the lot, completely different car, essentially the same system, those same key, same the whole thing. We go out, put the scan tool on it. Don't have to turn it on. The RF hub talks to the scan tool. I'm like, needs an

RF hub. Just get one. So now we're stuck. We take it over to the dealer because we're not cleared through NASDAQ yet to be able to get the security pin and all that kind of stuff. So. Our customer had told it from the dealer to us for us to do the diag, tow it back to a different dealer in town here to say, Hey, so this is, and there's a story to this. So

you hear me all the time. I stand up for a lot of dealer techs, right? Because like you see them in the group sometimes or any of the groups and they're like, oh, dealer techs are assholes. I can't fix nothing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, we take the truck over there. And first thing in the morning, the advisor calls us and says, um, my tech is going to need an hour extra time because the battery is disconnected. Now we had told them that the battery was disconnected because it

was going into lockout. The battery would have been dead in the morning. We just did that as a courtesy so that you didn't have to, well, he's going to need an hour to hook up the battery. Okay. Whatever you got us on our barrel. Like we need this RF hub. We'd already ordered the part. The part was in. Right. The Diag was done. We just need the part programmed. You don't have to put the seat back

in. You don't have to do nothing. Just plug it in program. Well, so that's like eight in the morning, three o'clock in the afternoon, they call us and they go, okay, it's ready. You can come pick it up. We're like, okay, that's cool. Obviously the Diag was right. And just said, oh yeah, yep. Started right up. Come get it. We come and get it, bring it back into shop. Look, battery cable is not even tight. We had to tighten the battery cable. So they charged us a hundred bucks extra and

they didn't even do whatever the advisor said they had to do. It was worth a hundred bucks. They didn't even do that job. So my boss is like, he's kind of pissed off and I'm sitting there on both sides going, well, maybe they did it this way because. He wasn't getting maybe all the time he thought he should have for that job. Maybe that's the excuse that he was given them. I don't know. Right. But it's a slippery slope because I know techs that work at that dealer. Right.

I don't know who worked on the truck, but I'm just like, it's really hard to stand up for guys, you know, in the industry when they do shenanigans like that, I know where none of us are perfect. But I mean, literally like it showed up and you could have pulled the negative cable off with your hand. You didn't, the bolt wasn't even tight. Like that's just, it's Yeah, that's, that's tough. Like, I

doubt he left it loose on purpose. It was probably by accident, but I mean, uh, like the first thing you teach you when you're an apprentice is if there's something you, you left loose under the hood, oil cap, whatever sticks up in the latch. And whenever you go to slam that hood down, you break the hood. You'll, you'll remember to do whatever it Uh, yeah. And I just felt miffed. Cause I mean, he's, he's essentially getting, I think it was like two, five to put this module in

Yeah. And he still couldn't remember to like tighten the battery cable up. But I mean, I've been the dealer, like I understand how it happens. It's just, yeah. Yeah. Do better, do better. Yeah. So, so Yeah. Yeah, I do. Uh, I mean, if I had my own garage, I'd probably take in some side work, but I, I don't want to be held to a schedule when I'm home. Um,

yeah. All right. Yeah. I just, I love the, the, the exercise of going through diet, but I don't know if I would get that kind of work really, uh, working out of my own garage. Yeah. Unless you marketed yourself and said, Hey, This is what I want to do. And I'm good at it. But even then, like I look at that, cause I entertain that notion too of like, well, I could, I don't want to work, you know, cause my summers, I want to keep free. Right.

I want to fish every time. I don't want a whole customer base of people that are constantly dropping junk piles off of my driveway and hoping that I can fix them after work or, you know, like with my job, it's Monday to Thursday. So I don't want to spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday working for cash to make more money. Right. The money would be nice to have, but how do you tell those people that it's like, okay,

it's June. I'm going to go bass fishing. Now I won't be thinking about fixing cars on weekends until November, whatever you need between now and then, sorry, your SOL. Like, I don't want to be that guy, but I got thinking, well, maybe I could do some diet at home, you know, kind of get my name out there and make some money. And then I started looking at what it would cost, you

know, investment wise. for tooling. And then you think about sometimes the amount of customers that like would look out, would search out somebody doing side work for a cheaper price. And then you're trying to say, hey, I only really want to do Diag. I don't want to put brakes and control arms on your Mazda, you know, cause that's not boring. That's boring. Like I don't want to do it. I'm looking at it. I'm like, nah, Yeah. I think like something really interesting would be like

what Jordan does at AutoAid. Where you go shop to shop and Oh yeah. Yeah. We talk all day, every day, pretty much. We Yeah. He's a super guy. He's so cool. It really is. And smart, man. Like next level smart. Like I'm, I'm okay. But he's like. Yeah. I mean, when that's all you're doing day in and day out is diag, you see a lot of issues and you get to practice those

skills and refine them. Uh, yeah, I would love to do something like that, but I don't think that there's a market And then he'll tell me though, like he went to a Midas, uh, maybe I shouldn't have said the shop name, but he went to a store. that had an express van there that they had held for him because it's like, it had no, no signal lights, no four ways, no signals. And I don't know what the, if they'd done anything or what, but it had sat there, I guess a week because the customer dropped

it off and they're like, okay, we're going to schedule this time. We're going to have a guy come in. And on that one, the fuse panels, one of the fuse boxes underneath the driver's seat. And you know, he gets there and it's like, he's looking at it. Somebody removed the relay. That's all it was a missing relay. Like he's like, I'm like, he's like, oh, it was, it was a relay. And I'm like, cause we're talking, he'll

show up at like lunchtime when I was there doing training. I'm like, so what'd you do this morning? He's like, you tell me. And I'm like, oh yeah. What was that? Like, he's like, well, it was a relay. I'm like, you mean they couldn't diagnose a bad relay? He's like, no, no, they didn't have to diagnose a bad relay. They Yeah. That happens way more often than you It's. Yeah. He tells me and I'm like, how does that happen? Cause you hear stories, Lee,

about guys talking about like auction cars. Yeah. Auction cars that they buy are constantly bugged, right? Guys go to auctions and pull stuff to get it cheaper across the line, right. When they buy it. And then it winds up with some shop and you know, if you've got the process down, you figure it out. But Jordan's like, no, I go to these shops and it's like, they don't even have a rudimentary

approach to how to go to some of this stuff. Right. Yeah. And then you watch him and you're like, wow, that's a process. Like he literally, you know, gets most of the problems figured out within an hour. It's incredible. Yeah. Like in the States, they often refer to their tax as like A, B and C tax. And like a lot of these shops. They, they've only got CTEX and, and maybe like a week B and, uh, they just don't

even bother trying to figure out any DIAG. They just call it Uh, and, but I mean, I look at it and it's like, and I'm sure they're making, he's making good money and I'm, you know, I'm sure the business is doing okay, but I'm just amazed at like, how does the level get to that low? where they don't even let some of the tech, like, and I want to say, are they not letting the techs try? Like, is that maybe the policy in some of those So I think from the stories I've heard is they usually

give it a shot, but they don't waste a lot of time. Uh, they'll, they'll just, they'll call in for some help and, and just Yeah. AutoAid's a fantastic company. Like that was the first time I'd been exposed to them. And, uh, Jordan's telling stories, uh, you know, about he, have you met, what's his name? Alan, the older gentleman. I haven't actually been there. Yeah. Uh, Jordan, they'll go, sometimes I think they, they, they ride together and, and Al, um,

goes out and just rides along with them. And Al is the former. I guess he taught at one of the colleges forever. Okay. Um, you know, uh, automotive and super smart guy himself, like just brilliant and, you know, older, retired from teaching, but wants to stay active. So he rides around Jordan to see those two interact with each other. It's so it's hilarious. Um, but so much knowledge in those two guys. It's incredible.

Like. I would love to ride around with Jordan and him for a day just to watch the banter that would go on back and forth. Yeah. And then actually how they would approach the fixing the stuff, because it would be so cool to witness it. It'd be really neat. So I'm hoping, I'd love to have Jordan on eventually as a guest. Cause I think he'd have some really I'm sure he would do it. I kind of talked to him about Yeah. Yeah. Like I remember I went there and then the second week

he says, Oh, you're the famous guy. He's like me and I'm like, Oh, I said, you've been talking to Leo. I'm not famous. I just, you know, so then everybody else in the room was like, what do you mean? Oh, I just, I have this stupid podcast. You know, and then it's like, oh, okay. So I probably did the class and walked out of there with like, you know, six new listeners or whatever. But I mean, yeah, you're that famous guy. No, I'm not famous. I

I'm not famous. I had said that kind of jokingly. I'm like, oh, Hey, did So Jordan's like, oh, you're the celebrity. Goddammit Lee. No, it was, it's the level of training that they put out is fantastic. Like I can't say enough good things about it. And I mean, I came back from that course. My boss was cool enough to pay for it. Uh, signs up for it and everything else. And then he, he tells us, okay, so, you know, you all pass the course or whatever. That's great. The money for

the provincial grant or something paid for it. So that's all cool. Oh, by the way, I'm going to give you all 50 cent raise too for doing that. And we're like, you didn't have to do that, dude. Like you paid for us to, to, you paid for the course. Well, like it's in Barrie, right? We, we, we live in Kingston area, so it's three hours drive up. Every Thursday night, sit there all day long. We got

five banked days that we got to take off over the Christmas holiday. So I was off from literally like, I think it was the 17th of December. I was off until, I can't even remember what day I came back in January, like the 7th or something like that. Like it was like I had over two weeks off. And a full five days paid plus my holidays, like it was amazing. So for him to go and give us another race, we're just taking that course. We're

Yeah, that's amazing. I never got to go for any kind of training when I was at an independent. The only training I've ever gone for was when I was at the dealer. And some of it was okay, but a lot of it was like, Yeah, I already know all this. Like it was just, uh, just the check mark that, that box on the required training Yeah. And that's, I always found like, uh, people heard me say before in the dealerships, like, okay, we

want you to become certified on the product. So you sit through their online nonsense, and it's Ohm's law and basic series circuits, parallel circuits. It's like, OK, I got 20-some years in. I've got this down. Can I just skip level one? I can get to where the meat and potatoes of actually how your product is different from somebody else's. You learn the nuances, right? Nope. And I'd look at it, and all that time had to be, they wanted you to log in and do it after work at night, unpaid. I'm

like, not doing that. I'm not doing it. I'm not reciting Morum's lost shit theory that I learned 25 years ago for free. I'm not doing it. Not for so that your warranty claims can get paid. Sorry. Yeah, exactly. That's what it boils down to. You know I can fix the car. So it's just a situation. You need me certified to fix the car. Well, I need to get paid to become certified and that's maybe a crappy attitude, but I find that the always are going to have to start catching

up. I mean, training's got to become more and more of Yeah. So when I went for training, actually with any of the dealers I worked at, um, they, they paid me, um, hourly rate for the day and they paid for travel. So. I got pretty lucky there, I guess. Uh, they never, uh, actually at Ford, they did want me to do some, uh, e-training, uh, for free. Um, basically I did it like, say a module was programming

at Ford. I only had one bay. Uh, so if a module was programming, I'd bring out a few, a few e-learning courses while I was waiting for that. Uh, so I got it. I got paid for Um, yeah, not the way you could have, right? Like, I mean, you could have said, okay, I'm going to need two bays and I'll program two cars at once. Right. Instead of like giving something back to them. I understand that, but I mean, I'm just, I'm blessed this job that I've got now is just, is fantastic.

I mean, he treats me so good. He treats all of us great. And it's, it's finally nice to finally see that. What, um. You're How does that work? Uh, so in Concord, there's a, uh, training center, uh, that Tormont runs, but, um, for the autonomy stuff, like everything I take care of, uh, my training was in Arizona. Wow. And, uh, actually my cross shift, uh, he just went for training in Australia. Yeah. So Australia actually is where all the autonomy was kind

of, kind of born. Right. Yeah. So I kind of feel a little hurt. I missed out on Australia and I just went to Arizona, but Arizona was That'd be awesome. Either one would be amazing, but Australia would be pretty cool. I mean, you know, shop owners flex about sending their guys to, you know, North Carolina to Yeah. It's a big expense. So this is the first mine for Tormont, uh, that has anything to do with, uh, autonomy. So we're, we're really paving the roads here and trying to figure out what

training we need, what training we don't need. How do we get the training? Um, so it'll Is it, is it a pretty foolproof system by now? Like, do you have a lot of, like when, when you have a, Yeah. There's a lot of like. The, a lot of the codes are pretty vague and you got to kind of just figure it out based on what is or isn't working in the system. So the, the system consists of like, I don't know, 10 or 12 basically Linux computers. that are all talking to each other and talking

to, uh, different sensors and stuff that's on the truck. And, uh, you can log into them through a web portal and see what they can see and what they can't see and all the PIDs. And you, there's not a lot of diagnostic information available. There's a lot of just figuring it out. Um, Often the trouble tree will be check connections, check power and ground, replace unit with known good unit, right? Like the trouble tree that you hate to see. And that's often what it

is. So there's, and it's evolving a lot and then the documentation isn't evolving with it. So as things go, we're kind of getting a local knowledge base kind of built up so that we can. Uh, so like for the main part, it's just me and the guy opposite me. So one person per shift, uh, that works on this stuff. And then, uh, some of the technicians who have gone for training can work on it if we're busy or if it's night shift. And then, uh,

but obviously they don't get that much exposure to it. So they have a lot harder Yeah. Would you, so you'd recommend it to the Yeah. So like the, if, if you have a lot of computer and networking knowledge and you have some electrical and diagnostic knowledge, uh, man, does that make like a prime person for this position? Cause you really got to understand electrical and you got to understand pressure

sensors and, and, and all that stuff. And. and just how the, how the systems work, but the autonomy system is literally a computer network with a bunch of computers on it. So, so having the knowledge of that and the knowledge of mechanical and electrical really makes

up for the prime person for this job. And there's not, there's not a lot of people, usually people who are strong and in like automotive or heavy duty, they, They're really weak when it comes to computers, or people who are really good with computers are really weak when it comes to mechanical. So I'm lucky that in my younger years, I was really into computers and programming and building robots

like, like remember the show, um, robot wars. So I didn't do that, but I did similar to that on a smaller scale where I built the robot and actually I built like a basic AI for it and they, they battled, I think it was sumo bots or something like that. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Uh, so yeah, so I was really lucky that when I went from that to automotive, Uh, the electrical knowledge went with me and I learned, I was able to be really

good at diagnostics and electrical and drivability. And then when I moved from that to mining, uh, especially in this autonomy role, uh, having those together, uh, really prepared me for this role. Yeah. Sounds like it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing I, I'm not, I, you know, my boss jokes all the time and, you know, like an EV course will pop up for Napa online, like webinar. And I'm like, well, I'm going to skip that one.

I don't want to think about them being so prevalent, like that they become more and more common because it's just the whole what's going on behind the scenes politically and the mandates and all that kind of stuff. I'm kind of against being forced, you know, to

have it come in. But that being said, I forget some of us, I think when we sit here and we think about, Oh, we're just going to be working on Tesla's, but no, really the, the, the theory and the technology that we're going to learn on Prius's and stuff like that is going to take us anywhere we want to go. Just like, you know, just like EFI in the eighties when it hit and everybody panicked, you know, I remember working at shops and guys were like, well, I can remember I worked at a Melro Bobcat

dealer and. There was like three older techs that worked there that it used to be automotive techs. And when EFI came in, just called it. Just called it, went to go work on Bobcats. Cause you know, they'd always kind of worked a little bit on diesel stuff and they, you know, growing up on farms and new tractors really well. So they just went to working on Bobcats. They wanted no part of like OBD1 diagnostics for, you

know, a mixture solenoid and carburetor. They wanted no part of that. They thought it was stupid as hell and they weren't going to mess with it. And it's so funny now. I think, where are they now? I wonder those guys. Right. Yeah. And then I remember that, well, I was like a young punk kid and they were in their forties now. So, I mean, they might not even be still driving, but imagine the technology difference, like how fast it's

Yeah. Like right now in EVs we're in like OBD zero and OBD one for, for EFI, right? So once things get regulated a bit more like OBD two, it's going to be interesting to Yeah. You're starting to scare me. I don't even want to think about that. Well, listen, I won't keep any more of your time on a Saturday night. I, uh, I really appreciate you coming on and, um, I appreciate how much help you've given me support with, with the podcast on

the Canadian technicians hangout group and whatnot. And I mean, Certainly we'll get this one, you know, out there as fast as we can. And then I hope that some of the other guys that are listening that are in that group, if you want to come on and, and, you know, tell me what you've, what you've been through and, you know, like we, we want to push this podcast way more on

the Canadian side, right? Like it's, the industry is already online is so biased towards the Americans and I love my American family, but you know, we, it's, they don't know, they don't know what it's like to. you know, be at 104 below, like, and actually have to fix a machine like they're, they're not built like we are. So, I mean, I want to, I want to, you know, I want to support and celebrate the badasses that we are up here and how we do

it. So I want to thank you for coming on and sharing it. I mean, it's an interesting story because, you know, I think You're, you're, you're a pretty humble dude. Like you don't even, you know, you work on some pretty advanced complicated stuff and you're just all very all shucks about it. You don't want to talk to me. It's Yeah, man. The way I look at it is like anybody could fix it if they put enough effort. Yeah.

Uh, and I can teach anyone, anyone to fix anything as long as they put in The effort, uh, like nothing is really that hard. Right. At least. Yeah. I mean, like, I don't think so. I think pretty much anything could be dumbed down so that anybody could do it. I said to my, my coworker the other day, I said, uh, and he's young apprentices and I said, you got to remember this stuff when it comes, India is already broke. So, you know, it doesn't mean that you just kind of go around clueless

and reckless, but it's already broke. So, you know, kind of spend some time and figure out why and the what, but don't be scared because it's already a broken car. So, you know, we're going to give them a fixed car back. It's already broke. Just keep that in mind. You know, we don't even know the severity of how broke yet. So you might probably not even going to make it worse. You just have to. But yeah, you make a good point about that,

you know, the, the, the diet thing and how nobody wants to pay for it. And I think we're slowly seeing that change and, you know, it's, uh, we'll just keep having those conversations that we're having, you know, with the guys in the group and whatnot about how to, how to value themselves and how to value their business. You know, that's the thing right now is I just, I want to see the techs

value themselves more. You know what I mean? Like if you feel like you're being taken advantage of it, you feel like you're you're really, you know, a pivotal person in that business, then, then, you know, pump your chest out and take pride in what you do. And, and, you know, if you feel like you're not being respected. Go get that respect. You know, you're not necessarily going to get it at the employer that you're at. Somebody out there will respect you. And, uh, life's too short, man.

You know, you gotta, don't stay where you're not happy. Don't stay where At the same time though, you, you gotta, you gotta show what you're worth with your work. You can't, you can't just walk in and say, Hey, I'm worth this much, but you haven't shown that you're worth that much. Yeah. No, I'll let you go. I'll, uh, I

appreciate you. And we'll, we'll, we'll have you on again at some point. Cause I want to keep hearing these stories and, you know, people from the automotive, uh, groups that are listening, you know, you