Garage Monkeys. That is how Pirsig and Crawford describe them. Each writes about a different species: Pirsig about repair techs who lack arete and Crawford about the middle managers who stand between vehicle owners and vehicle repair techs. They are adjacent parts of the modern automotive service-shop organization and both offend something at my core.
So many encounters with garage monkeys leave me in emotional turmoil: first, furious at the casual condescension and badly wanting to put them in their place, then embarrassed about those patriarchal inclinations burping out of me so readily. And this is usually followed by recognition that they are just doing the jobs they have been given to do – which leads to curmudgeoning about why they don’t take pride in their work…
It is a lot of emotional energy.
And no good comes of it.
So I generally avoid these encounters.
I do understand why service shops employ someone other than a mechanic to deal with the damn customers though. The skills that make a good mechanic, make a terrible customer service agent (and vice versa). From a customer’s standpoint, mechanics tend to be gruff, non-committal, and incomprehensible. But here’s the thing: from a mechanic’s standpoint, customers won’t shut up about all sorts of irrelevant bullshit, ask questions that cannot possibly be answered without first getting your hands dirty, and maintain a level of ignorance about how their vehicle works bordering on moral squalor…
It’s probably best to have a translator between those parties.
And it would be fine if translation is what that species of garage monkey did – with fidelity. But service “advisors” are tasked with doing first-line troubleshooting. And that is a problem. The proper work of a mechanic entails technical work as part of troubleshooting. The two cannot be disentangled. Trouble-shooting = problem-finding. And that is an essence of all craftwork: skill in precisely locating problems.
Mechanical problems often have many possible causes and identifying which is the culprit, for a given case, is a forensic task. Is an oil burning problem confined to one cylinder? That is easy enough to determine: pull the plugs and check for differences in deposits. But then, is it a valve-train issue? Rings? Head gasket? There are only so many potential malfunctions that result in the oil-burning symptom, but some are more likely than others. And some are harder to investigate than others. And likelihood is usually inversely related to accessibility. Crawford explains this well, unpacking the ethics of investigating potential causes buried deep within the inner-workings – which are therefore time-consuming (read: costly) to investigate with no guarantee of payoff. For a professional mechanic, this often entails a choice between a quick (read: inexpensive) fix that corrects whatever symptom led a customer to bring a machine in – but is sure to fail again at some point – or an expensive repair that addresses the root of the problem, but is likely to outlive the rest of the machine. The right approach, when working on behalf of someone else, is never clear-cut.
<aside> The negotiation entailed in fixing your own vehicle is of a very different kind: the decision becomes whether to fix a known problem or keep driving the vehicle until you find time to deal with it properly (which often entails adjusting how you drive it). I think this is why mechanics notoriously have vehicles in constant need of repair. Most problems aren’t really dangerous and once a mechanic locates the problem, it is easy to judge how much time is left before something important fails – and what will happen when it does. So we drive around with vehicles that are not quite right until we have enough time to fix them. I once drove my truck around for several months with the ABS warning light on – the conventional breaks worked just fine, I just had to be more mindful on ice. (Incidentally, I eventually traced the problem to a wire that had been cut when the truck was in a shop – a “professional” mechanic had apparently put a clamp or something heavy on it and damaged the wire.) But the satisfaction of finding a workable, temporary solution pales in comparison to knowing you’ve restored a part of a vehicle to a state equivalent to (or exceeding) brand new. A proper repair is time-consuming – but it is the ultimate goal (it took an afternoon to trace the wiring, find the broken spot, solder it, and protect it from the elements – and other “mechanics” – with electrical tape and conduit) . This is part of the reason I am writing all of this stuff. While it is time-consuming and may not pay-off as diseminable text, I am trying to get at deeply-held ontological/epistemological stuff – rather than fiddling around on the surface.] Anyway… </aside>
A service “advisor” can do a bit of troubleshooting if the problem is on the surface or routine enough to be recognized in a pattern of behaviors that can be noticed and reported by customers (or with a cursory glance under the hood). And there are plenty of that flavor of problem. In fact, most problems with automobiles are of that kind. The design flaws or defects in particular models of vehicles manifest as a patterns of failures as unique as a thumbprint. So most of the problems that bring vehicles to a repair center can be predicted before the vehicle even enters the door. And they’re easy to spot. But, this reduces the people involved in diagnosing the problem or actually affecting the repair to following algorithmic procedures: which, by definition, precludes proficient, or even competent, performance. No one is doing the work of a mechanic in that situation. When the process is already flow-charted, no person is problem-finding.
Anything beyond the problems characteristic to a particular make and model requires a proper mechanic to diagnose – and in those cases, the service “advisor” is worse than useless. They are actually impediments. And it was just such a situation that prompted the current diatribe.
I rode along to the dealership with a friend whose (nearly new) Subaru (2.5L DOHC) was using oil at a rate of about 1 quart between oil changes. For reference: my truck, which has nearly 1/4-million miles on it, uses approximate 1 quart fewer than that between oil changes. It wasn’t clear where the oil was going. It wasn’t leaking externally (at least, the car was not leaving oil spots on the garage floor), so I mentioned to a service “advisor” that I had occasionally smelled coolant when the engine was hot. On the surface, that may seem irrelevant to engine oil. But here’s the thing: Subaru engines (particularly the 2.5L) are notorious for head-gasket leaks. And head gaskets are meant to seal 3 things in the engine: cylinder pressure, oil, and… coolant. Leaks often involve more than one of those three, but instead of recognizing the coolant smell as potentially relevant troubleshooting data, the service “advisor” responded by mansplaining how pressurized cooling systems work and sending us away.
The gas-lighting proved effective. I started doubting whether I knew what I was talking about. After all, I had spent 2 years failing to correct the the chronic oil and coolant leaks in the 2.5L engine in my old Suby.
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| I like to call this work: Suby 2.5 on Kitchen Floor |
It is interesting how quickly my insecurity resolved into smugness though, when the dealer finally decided the rate of oil usage in my friend’s car exceeded tolerances – and replaced the engine (or, presumably, the long block).
The cost of that repair is thousands of dollars higher than the cost to replace the head gaskets in that engine. But the repair was under warranty and the extra cost is already built into the calculus of shop charges, so it had already been dispersed among all of the customers who are charged a several-hundred percent markup on parts and an order of magnitude more than repair techs are paid for hourly work. That is effectively the compromise that has been made: to protect “normal” people from the discomfort of having to talk to mechanics (and vice versa), we pay a higher price to replace, rather than repair, faulty mechanisms. Okay… that is way too cynical… and conflates outcome with purpose. The logic that underlies the modern service-center organization is Taylorist. And the gospel according to Taylor purposefully segregates headwork from handwork. For sake of efficiency, managers are meant to do all of the thinky stuff and laborers are meant to do all of the worky stuff (Crawford does a great job unpacking this as well). So, more accurately, the compromise here is (purportedly) in the spirit of efficiency. And maybe the increased cost to customers, on a per-visit basis, really does have an overall benefit (maybe even greater equity too) in the long run.
Okay now I am a bit uncomfortable, because I feel I have presented a fairly negative view of auto repair technicians here. I want to make it clear that it is the structure of the contemporary auto-repair enterprise of which I am critical – not the people employed in that system (well, maybe some of the people…). I strongly suspect that most people in those roles started out with mechanicing predilections – and are probably competent mechanics on their own time. It is the nature of the modern auto repair system that segregates the people charged with making repairs from the intellectual work of troubleshooting. In that sense, the organizational structure violates the integrity of the mechanic’s craft by separating the head from the hand. And while my curmudgeoning about the financial cost of the modern repair shop structure may well be unmerited, it is really the epistemological cost with which I am more concerned here:
“When the head and the hand are separated, the result is mental impairment.” (Richard Sennett)