I hate scheduling. I don’t wish to be overly negative about this, but it’s one of the most psychologically draining activities for me. With friends it can be difficult and involves much texting back and forth, and with businesses and organizations, it can just be terribly annoying and inconvenient. I prefer to structure my life to avoid scheduling.
This past week, I replaced the steering rack in my car. It was an involved process, but it went well, and now I need an alignment. I have a set of “toe plates” that help me align the front wheels so they are parallel to each other, but there’s really no tool short of a shop alignment that allows me to precisely align the front tires relative to the center of the steering rack, so my steering wheel is crooked about 30 degrees to the left while I’m driving. In theory, I could simply adjust the alignment until the steering wheel is roughly centered, but this is tedious work that’s difficult to do for a sedan on the garage floor. And even if I could get it close, it wouldn’t be perfect. The only real solution is to get it aligned at a shop. Laser measurement of all four wheels is way more accurate.
The shop nearest me turned out to be closed temporarily on Sundays. The next nearest shop was booked for the day, and it was too far for me to walk. *Blood pressure rises* (Side note: never buy a “lifetime alignment” through a local shop. It’s a bad idea for several reasons, but the one I had never considered before was vendor lock-in)
I think this is half the reason I do the work on my own car instead of taking it to a shop. Partly, it saves lots of money, partly, it’s way more convenient. No waiting for several days, no delays, no need to schedule anything. Just get your parts, your tools, and get wrenching. A busy shop may take several days to get around to changing your outer tie rods. In your garage, it takes a few hours.
Ever since the pandemic started, I’ve been cutting my own hair. I’ve done it a few times before, back in college, with mixed success, but I’ve found a way to cut it “well enough”. But every time I get one part right, I get another part wrong, and I don’t have that scientific mind that knows how to tweak my methodology; in fact, I often forget how I did it the previous time. So it occurs to me that I should start going back to the barber shop, but the place I’ve been going for over a decade is 20-30 minutes away, and it’s a one-man show. Some days I would go and I’d be the only person there. Other days I’d go and there would be 5 guys in line in front of me. The uncertainty of how many people would be there would drive me nuts, so it’s been glorious just cutting my own hair (except for the results). There’s a barber shop within walking distance from here that I think I may try sometime. If I could eliminate the inconvenience of trying to schedule a trip to the barber shop, I would have no qualm paying $20 for a good haircut.
Now, there are two general approaches to dealing with things you hate: you can either learn to live with them, or you can strategically avoid them. Now, just because you hate something doesn’t mean you should avoid it. For example, perhaps you hate confrontation, but there are times in life when confrontation is necessary and healthy. Running from that is a bad idea. But there are other times when we simply make problems for ourselves that don’t need to exist, and I think that is true for much of the scheduling and errands in the world. You can drive 30 minutes away to save a few bucks on your favorite spaghetti (or whatever), or you can drive 5 minutes way to get everything else on your grocery list, with perhaps a substitute spaghetti that is good enough. When it comes to medical practitioners, this can be a little more complicated, as you want to go to places who do good work, with doctors you like. But have you even tried the closer locations? You might be surprised that they do the same quality, or better.
I’d rather rack up miles on my car driving to the mountains than zooming all over town trying to do things that could otherwise be done in a much smaller area. This also reduces your dependence on driving, so you don’t have to freak out that you can’t get all your errands done if the car does need to be in the shop for a few days (or destiny is calling and you really want to swap that steering rack yourself).
And I still drive all over sometimes, but I think I drive a lot less than I used to, and many people are far better at this than I am. I simply want to recognize the merits of this.
The way that I avoid scheduling tooth cleanings with the dentist is by letting them do this for me. This has worked wonderfully for actually getting me out the door. Mind you, my dentist is quite a drive away, but at least I only go twice a year.
Going back to cars, I actually found a tool that is supposed to allow you to align the front tires while the wheels are still off. It bolts to your hub and hangs slightly below, so you can get two tape measures to go from one side to the other. This is pure genius, and the tie rods can very easily be adjusted with the wheels off. It is new, shiny, and I want it. But it’s designed more for off road vehicles, which have higher clearance. There’s a really good chance that on my car, the bottom of the hub wouldn’t extend far enough beyond the bottom of the car to allow tape measures to be stretched across without interference from the sub-frame or transmission. But if this tool does fit, oh baby, that would make aligning things after a big job so much easier, and I wouldn’t need a shop to make the adjustments I need to get things squared up with the center of the steering rack. Imagine not needing to get alignments! Well, that’s still a fantasy: you can’t beat the laser alignment. But it would mean I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to get an alignment.
Scheduling. Ugh. Not a fan.