Lots of STUPID.
Weapons Grade Stupid even.
It was nice here today so I went out and started in raking leaves and cleaning up the back yard, it’s a disaster.
Raking and hauling it in the wheelbarrow and making a pile so I can haul it off.
I got maybe and hour, hour and a half into it.
Pretty soon The Wifely Unit tells me that I need to go look at The Kid’s car.
Now fucking what?
Oh yeah, he strikes again.
Long time readers may recall a couple of years ago when he hit something in The Wifely Unit’s rig late at night, blew BOTH passenger side tires and bent both of the rims about a mile from the house.
And then proceeded to drive it home like that.
It was a major fucking fiasco, took me two days to find another spare tire to fit the fucker and wound up having to order two steel wheels from a wrecking yard at $75 apiece because nobody had any locally.
Then two new tires and an alignment, that whole deal wound up costing me $500.
Pissed off?
I’m STILL pissed off about that, every time I remember it.
She tells me that he hit something again last night in his own car.
So I go take a look and what do I find?
Again.
Here we fucking go.
After I listened to the bullshit, I whipped out my phone, looked up the nearest U Pull It wrecking yard and texted him the number.
What’s this I get back. The wrecking yard. Call them, tell them what make, model and tire size and see if they have one.
The Wifely Unit tries jumping my shit for not doing it for him and I lit right into her ass.
He needs to grow the fuck up and he needs to deal with this shit on his own, he will be 24 years old in two weeks.
But no.
He calls, they tell him Honda wheels will fit and they have some.
So guess who got to drag his ass down to the U Pull It yard and give him a lesson on how this shit works?
An hour and a half, no tires the same size and he has no spare, no jack and no lug wrench either.
We wound up finding two wheels and tires that were one size taller, 185 instead of 175 and I found a spare.
Thank God they had a sale going and we rolled out of there for $75.
I paid, of course.
Got home, I drug out the jack and the tools and showed him how they work, again.
He pulls the destroyed rim off, puts one of the junkyard wheels on and it fits.
Gotta change both because Front Wheel Drive.
The other one doesn’t fit even though they look exactly the same just looking at them. So The Boy gets to do a Tire and Wheel Rodeo.
Winds up swapping and moving all 4 wheels to get matching sets in the front and one odd ball in the back.
Turns out the other front wheel was bent also and had been for a year.
I watched him and gave him pointers but I made him do all the work.
One dose of Stupid down.
While all this was going on, UPS showed up and dropped two identical boxes off on the front porch.
I stuck them in the garage until the Tire Rodeo was over,
After the tools got put away I went and looked at the boxes.
Harbor Freight.
Did I finally get the 30 piece Mini Lathe tool set I ordered clear back in fucking October?
The one it took 3 1/2 months and FOUR FUCKING PHONE CALLS to get shipped out?
So I open both boxes and instantly got a Double Face Palm moment.
The short answer is yes, I finally got the 30 piece Mini Lathe Tool kit I ordered clear back in fucking October.
The long answer is,
I also got THREE MORE!
STUPID COCKSUCKERS!
ARE YA FUCKING KIDDING ME?!
Bigger than fucking shit.
The dumb bastards sent me FOUR of them!
One for each phone call I guess.
I’m sorry, I can only deal with so much stupid at one time.
I am going to have to deal with this later…..
It’s 4:00 on a Saturday afternoon.
I have leaves to rake.
Take away his driver’s license, he obviously doesn’t know how to drive and is a hazard to navigation and others.
Reason numero uno why I refuse to help kids now a days, they are gonna have to learn remedial hard fucking knocks on how to do the simplest shit that they should know.
While he was down on the ground wrestling a tire he started bitching.
I asked him what the fuck he was going to do when I am gone?
He says he would just go bug someone else.
I says, REALLY?
So you think everyone has a garage full of tools and equipment?
Do you have any friends that know how to do all this shit?
No answer to that.
Momma’s Boy is going to have a hard life after I check out.
Does he purposely drive over curbs at 60 mph to bang them up like that? Didn’t he learn from his mothers car about wheels do not like curbs and logs in the road? I have been driving for over 50 years and have never dented a wheel, and had very few flats in my life.
No, he didn’t, because there was no ’cause and effect’ forced on him.
He’s never had, till now, had to actually get dirty and do the damned job he should have been doing all along.
Next time our noble host changes any fluids or does any raking or other outdoor dirty work, he needs to get the idjit over there and do the hand work while our noble host sits and supervises, loudly, forcefully, with great passion, so it finally sinks into the idjit’s head.
Or even better, next time boy comes over for free food, go out and pull all four wheels off, remove the radiator, the unibelt, the windshield wipers, and anything else easily removed, and pile it all in a jumbled heap with a Chilton’s on top.
You are truly evil Beans…
But then, he would be stuck there, and still Phil’s problem, not somewhere else.
Does it have to be the right Chilton’s? Just asking.
Are you gonna send back the other three 30 piece mini lathe sets? Did you get charged for them? If not, spoils of war…
That’s what I was thinking. If the extra’s aren’t on the credit card, I’d keep’em.
You spelled “put an ad on craigslist and sell them” wrong.
I got tired of being that uncle that will fix your car, fix your boat, replace the leaking water heater,come get you out of jail & on & on & on. Moved down here near the wife’s family & have a new bunch of kids that tear up everything they have been given. Key word GIVEN, little shits don’t pay for anything. But ask the 18yr old to cut a postage stamp size yard………..
It’s a hard knock life. After us older generation of men are gone, the crew coming up may some have some very harsh wakeup calls.
you gots my email, gimme a shout if you wanna get rid of a set…
Adam
Damn.
I feel your pain. I’ve been teaching adult students in aircraft maintenance for 30 years and the vein of stupid runs deep
What’ll you take for one of those lathes?
It’s just a cheap Chinesium accessory tooling kit. There are only a couple of pieces in it I actually wanted in it in the first place, most of it is junk.
Stop coddling that 24-year-old leach and boil on the butt of life.
Make him pay for the repairs. Standard shop rates. Make it as painful as possible, he’ll either buy a clue or do something terminally stoopid. And, nobody can fix stoopid – as we Old Farts know well.
If you tell me he has a man-bun, my head will explode.
No Man Bun.
Mulching blades on the mower and raking leaves becomes a minimalist journey across the acerage.
Rock and gravel everywhere.
After letting this tale of WTF(?!!) marinate, I realize that I’m actually most disgusted that The Kid apparently expected your help, but didn’t ask you himself.
If Harbor Freight didn’t charge you 4x you should just keep the other sets as partial compensation for the time you had to spend dealing with their incompetence.
Sell them on Fleabay or Craigslist.
Or give one of them to the boy and say you’ll give him $100.00 if he can give you proof that he knows what each one of those things does.
I ordered a bird bath from wayfair, big box shows up with three boxed birdfbaths Shipped from the sweatshop in India three to a carton to wayfair and they’re too incompetent to open it up and send me just one. Kinda defeats the whole convenience of mail order shopping online to have to shelp down to the post office to return the two and try to get them to reimburse me for shipping. My kids are getting birdbaths for Christmas next year.
sure hope he’s NOT still on your auto insurance policy.
“He needs to grow the fuck up and he needs to deal with this shit on his own, he will be 24 years old in two weeks.”
Good Lord Yes. Our Dad had us dealing with that shit ourselves at 10 years old. It was tearing down and rebuilding our Schwinn bikes but by the time we got cars we weren’t asking anyone questions to get stuff like that done. Maybe borrow a couple bucks for some new retreads (you could get retreads in those days)
What the hell do you hit to do that kind of damage ?
Guaranteed a phone was involved
Shit, by time I was 24, I had already built half a dozen dirt race cars and a pile of engines.
I weep for the future….
Leigh
Whitehall, NY
I would never have bothered my old man if it were my car. If it were his, I’d have busted a gut to fix it before he noticed. He once gave me an ‘atta-boy’ as he noticed I was under the car fixing the exhaust. The exhaust I’d ripped off the night before riding on train tracks.
My son must have done that 4-5 times to my car when he was a teenager. Each time his mother taxed him for the repairs. He didn’t drive until it was fixed and he paid up. I can’t tell you how many struts, shafts, steering knuckles I’ve replaced.
He knows now how to do it too. It’s funny, he changed his oil at his place he told me “wow, it’s so much easier to do that here where you have all the tools” No shit I do. I started collecting tools when I was a grade schooler, to fix my bike. I’m like Clint Eastwood in Grand Torino. I have 50 years of tools, as well as my dad’s, and some old geezer friends that have passed.
Last time he got in an accident with my car, it was just up the road, so I posted and took pictures – told him to do that every time. Then I handed him the towing service card and said “Keep $100 in your account. Next time this happens, call them, not me, and have it towed back”
That time, he had to get to work, so I lent him my ’83 chevy van (after making sure he could handle it). I told him this ain’t a toyota with a paper mache front end. You hit a curb with this thing and it’s going to bounce off and destroy everything in it’s path.
And FFS, even my daughters know to keep a spare, a jack and lug wrench in good order in their cars, and can change a tire. You’d think some of you would’ve rubbed off through osmosis.
I’d have sized up the car and said, “Wow, that sucks. Whadder’yer gonna do?” followed by go buy rims and a tires.
Hah, all those chinesium bull crap a-hole soul less corporate entities can suck it if they think i’ll ever send something back they sent me by mistake. Walmart screwed up an order of 4 tires. Delivered 2, lost 2, delivered 2, cancelled the order because they couldnt figure out what had happened. Credit back on my card, 4 tires on my truck. Screw them while they screw the country.
Yep hard men created good times that we got to enjoy but the good times created these weak men who won’t know what hit them when we check out and inflation and supply chain have shit the bed. Phil good on ya for teaching the kid this time. Make him rake leaves for payment.