A
Really Good Dude - and Then A Typical Lowlife Asshole
I still
didn't get around to fixing up this site, did I?
Meanwhile something happened that I feel like putting on the
site
even though I really want a complete change in the nature of it:
This thing is really a bit of the same old 'complain about
the
bad guys' with a new twist: there's GOOD GUY to mention first.
What I did was blow up the diff. I thought I was blowing up
the
rear wheel bearing. I could hear a grinding sound
for the
longest time. Trouble was it sometimes seemed to go away and for a few
weeks there I figured it must have been dirt in the brake shoes or like
that: causing a scraping sound that stopped as soon as the
dirt
got worn away.
Or maybe the shoes themselves, fitting too
close or intermittently getting too close because of the age of the
springs and whatnot in there - not releasing far enough.
But eventually I figured it was the rear wheel bearing.
Because a
long time ago I had the back end looked at by a mechanic who said he
never wanted anything to do with the car again - but who replaced the
brake shoes on the left rear and told me there was a leak in the wheel
bearing.
So I figured the bearing was going
and I was nervous about doing the job because I've never done it and
the nearest I've been is doing trailer wheel bearings and someone told
me or I gathered the opinion somehow that rear wheel bearings were a
very different kettle of fish, sometimes being very hard to do and
requiring special tools.
So I let it go and let it go.
And then one day it went. Kerlunk, bang, lurch,
scrape,
scrape, knock, knock....
AA came out and said it was
in the diff. I've blown up the diff. But it was
driveable.
Drove it home. It made a knocking sound, a very solid 'clunk'
with every revolution of the tailshaft - so even then I couldn't be
sure it was the diff because I surmised it could have been a rear axle
broken through but still pushed together only now with an 'elbow' in it
that hit the casing once every rev.
Maybe a ludicrous idea but that's amateurs for you, they're
liable to think anything at all.
So
I had to start looking for help and money was even more scarce than
usual and, of course, the wife wouldn't be very happy about money being
spent on the old Ford.
Well I just happened out
at a car yard getting a tow bar for the wife's car when this guy I'd
met once before popped up, grinning. He loves the old cars.
That's how come we met in the first place. I told him the
tale
and how I'd just asked the guys inside if they could look for a diff
for me.
No worries. I'll do it. He said. No worries. He'll
get a diff and he'll put it in and he'll charge for the whole thing
less than, probably, most places would charge for the diff.
Well
- to cut to the chase, he did it. And it stopped being
simple.
It was hard. He had to look long and far to get a
diff and
when he got it home he found he'd got the wrong one. Someone
put
the wrong diff in my car sometime back, I don't know when. So
he
had another search and another trip around on behalf of my car.
It took weeks. A couple of weeks I think and it
wasn't easy
going for him at all.
But he did it smiling with every evidence
of enjoyment and good faith and then at the end - yep - he only asked
what he'd first said.
AND THEN he gave me a few odds and end to
suit the Ford that he had lying around. Including a couple of
the
taillight housings and lenses. Now they're worth money,
they're
hard to get, I've already gotten some in the past and I know the
trouble I had to go to for them.
So he was and is A BEAUTY BOTTLER!! A GOOD GUY!!!
A GENTLEMAN!!
Completely
different to the scoundrels that I have for years been describing on
this site. Completely different. Gives you some
faith in
life, in people, in everything.
SO THEN: I didn't
meet a TOTAL ASSHOLE. I think I nearly met him. I
was
coming back from Woollies pushing the trolley with the kids when I saw
this guy suddenly peeling off from the back of my wagon. I
say
'peeling off' because he sorta turned in a wide arc as he left, turning
away first towards me, coming up towards him and then surprisingly
continuing his arc and heading off 180 degrees away from my car.
I
didn't think much about it... just hassled with the groceries and kids
and it wasn't until days later that I decided it was time to put the
taillight things away in the shed lest the little boy get in the car
and break the lenses playing with them.
And I found one of them was gone!
The
good one. When the good guy was giving them to me I was
saying
they were too much to give and so on and he was saying they weren't so
much 'Look, this one is buggered' he was saying, showing me
where
the lamp socket on the back of one was eaten away by rust. I
remembered that. So I well remember there were the pair of them.
You doubt your memory when something like this happens and
you
look for things to make yourself certain. Well that memory is
what makes me certain.
Some low-life, stinking, rotten, creepy,
crawly, slimy sod of a thief had stolen one of them out of the back of
my wagon right there in broad daylight in a parking lot! In a
small town where you can imagine you're nearly always in view of
someone who knows who you are or where you are from or where you
frequently go... Had the hide to wind down the window and
reach
in... What was he doing when I saw him, if that
guy was
the actual thief? Coming back to see what else he could
get....
The hide. The gall.
So that shows you. Both things
show you. I've kept this site static for years now, since we
moved, it really is years and all that time it has told the story of
the guys who were ratbag enough to destroy my car and charge me money
for doing it - all that time the site has been saying 'Isn't life a
bitch? Aren't people ratbags and thieves and liars?'
A gloomy, pessimistic site indeed.
So
eventually that fact even dawned on me and I felt awkward about it and
decided to change it because life just isn't that bad and people aren't
that bad and iin fact for many people I imagine life is NEVER that bad.
So I moved the front page away. Kept it but moved
it.
And now I can tell a story that proves
1.
Life ain't that bad. People ain't that bad. There's
really
good, sensible, helpful, honest people around who will 'give you a
break'. Life and people are worth smiling about.
2.
There's bad apples. There is also, scattered around, here and
there, a few stinking bad apples. And that's just a fact.
It is not the whole truth of life or of people. But
it is a
part of the truth. On the sunniest days, right out in the
open
under god's blue sky you can find poor twisted creatures shuffling
around in their dark existence poking and prying and furtively thieving
whatever they can. Pity them, the poor sods. Pity
them.
They live in some kind of darkness, some kind of void, some
kind
of awful world where it is better to steal than not to steal........
And on that strange (?) note I'll end this update to the site.
And urge anyone who reads to get a beaut old car like an XY Ford for
instance and live with it and look after it if you can (I can't talk,
I'm a pitiful specimen of looker-aftering) and do the right thing and
be happy.......
Because I am. I'm just ashamed that
the gifts given to me by that good guy were not safe in my hands...
sorry.
Site going through a reworking.