Alenda Lux

My first “real job” was working for my dad. In retrospect, it must have been a really hard time for my mom and dad – my dad had worked at Goodyear for longer than my parents had been married (which is ten years longer than I am old), and in the early late 80’s/early 90’s Goodyear really went through some corporate bullshit. For the longest time, my dad was the service manager at the Goodyear store on LaVista Road in Tucker, and then there was a lot of noise around him being moved to the Perimeter store, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t remember. My dad and I don’t have a thing in common personality wise (ha!) so eventually all the BS and the mistreatment for his years of service got under his skin and he quit. There was practically a revolt in that area, as my dad had been working on older people’s cars in the neighborhood for literally all of my life.

I must have been 13, maybe 14. Within the next year, or less, my dad and his friend had figured out how to buy a Goodyear franchise in Norcross, and they purchased it and set up a business. My dad and his partner had . . . I don’t know, I think pretty disparate views on running the business but my dad got to service manage (which he loved) and his partner got to be front-end manager. During the summers and on long breaks, I would work the front. All of my dad’s customers from Tucker came over to his shop now, and these were literally people who watched me grow up in photos in my dad’s wallet. He also got a bunch of his reliable mechanics from his old stores, and these were all guys I knew. Some of them had awesome nicknames like “Redneckerson.” I am not making this up.
This was kind of awesome and kind of sucktastic. I had to get up ridiculously early – 5am, maybe even 4:30am – to get showered (which I cannot do without in the morning, I am not an evening shower person), get ready, and make the long-ass trek from Dawsonville to Norcross and be there by 7:00am, because my dad felt we needed 30 minutes to open the store before customers started showing up. I slept on the way in while my dad drove; we would do the opposite on the way home once I was 15 and had my learners. I was driving a giant Ford F250. To this day I *can* drive a truck, but I don’t care for it.

The upside was that my dad and I more or less got along really well during this period because he enjoyed me being at the store and helping him. I would check people in – take their information, what was wrong with their car, what kind of car was it, all that stuff. It was on an ancient MS-DOS based system (ancient even then) and I was proficient in it pretty quickly. I would look up tires in the inventory and was basically selling tires. I also got to keep any money from flat repairs paid in cash ($10 a pop) and did pretty awesome on that, since flat tires are basically a dime a dozen. And a lot of people paid in cash. After a while I negotiated that my dad would actually pay me for working there, but it was always in cash, which was great. I would also do parts runs in the company truck, get lunch for people, drive cars around to the bays, whatever I wanted to do or whatever needed doing.

The interesting thing is that I had always been into cars to some degree, and my dad had always let me be around when he was working on cars (like when he tore apart my mom’s ’65 Mustang and refitted it). I knew a decent amount when I got there, and by the time I’d worked just one summer, I knew quite a lot about what was going on under the hood of a lot of cars. He used to joke that he would get me doing oil changes, and really, I could have done, I just had no interest. (This is a recurring theme in my relationship with my dad, by the way, and one of the reasons he and I have fought incessantly over the years.)

There are two stories that really stick out in my mind about the years I worked for my dad. Early one summer, I was reading while a waiting customer watched television, and this guy came in. He had this look that I by then knew very well, which was the look of someone with a chip on his shoulder. He’d never seen me before, but he’d been in the store at an earlier time, and he was angry about something. I don’t even remember what it was, but I do distinctly remember he asked to see “the Manager, and not the short one.” I think dad’s partner wasn’t there for whatever reason, and I stepped out into the shop and yelled for my dad. Like, literally, I said, “DAD! A customer is asking for you!” I came back into the showroom, and after a minute or so, my dad emerges from the parts room or whatever, and the guy gets such a look on his face, like, “Ohhh. Oh. I’ve messed up.” He asked me, “That guy’s your dad?” and I smiled very, very sweetly, and said, “Yes.” Whatever the dispute was, my dad came out on top, because the guy was completely wrong. That’s the crap thing with being in auto repair – everyone assumes you are out to fleece them, and my dad wasn’t. He just wasn’t out to be fleeced, either.

The other story involves another jerk customer, naturally. One thing that will not surprise you is that the auto industry is remarkably sexist, and this extends to the customers. I have never been any taller than five feet, and I’ve always been blonde. This is helpful in that people will sometimes say things to me and around me that they are under the impression I am too stupid to understand, and it’s annoying in that people treat me like a moron. This was especially true during my stint at my dad’s, and people sometimes actually acquired their come-uppance right in front of my face, which was nice. This one guy came in and needed his radiator flushed and filled, I think, and that was one of the services that was listed on the board behind the desk as being whatever price. He also needed an oil change, and with the oil change, we also topped up your fluids. There was no charge for the fluid top-up. So I did the clerical stuff for this guy’s order and then we took his car. I could tell he was a smarmy, old-school jerk, but there were a lot of them so I just ignored it. Later that day, he comes in and is on with me about how I told him we’d fill his radiator for free. I hadn’t done, and I was totally sure of myself that I hadn’t. He was getting very, very irate, and I was like, okay, fine the price is right there behind me and I told you it would be $69.95 (or whatever it was then), but you can see a manager. Naturally the manager was my dad, and my dad proceeded to dress this guy down, in front of god and everyone, for attempting to get something for nothing by accusing me of making this mistake because he thought he could get away with it. I will never forget my dad saying, “Sir, that is my daughter. And she might make some mistakes, but she has never misquoted or misrepresented the price of services, and you are not going to convince me she has.” It helped that he’d signed the work order, which listed the price, but it was nice to hear my dad tell someone to fuck off on my account.

Which reminds me: my tenure at my dad’s store also marked the first time I ever heard my dad drop the f-bomb, and that was an eye-opener into the creative use of the word. I think I get my talent for swearing honestly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 10:47 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.