For the past couple of months, one of our cars - a 1999 Honda - has been giving us trouble. It idles rough and struggles to get up to speed. My father-in-law checked it out and changed the spark plugs but the problem remained. Thankfully, we have two other somewhat functional vehicles, so we parked the Honda and asked friends, family and coworkers for advice either on how to fix it or where to take it.
After a couple months of using a gas-guzzling 4WD as the alternate daily driver, I finally made the decision to bite the bullet and pay a professional mechanic to fix the Honda. Keep in mind that doing so required me to drop off the car at the shop after work and get a ride home after my wife got off work. And since the shop was closed by the time I got there, it also required me to sacrifice the next day's lunch break to drop off the key and tell them about the symptoms.
Yesterday I got a call from the shop telling me what they found and how much it would cost to fix. And then I made the mistake of revealing this info to family, coworkers and Facebook friends, etc. Suddenly I had shade tree mechanics falling out of the sky opining on how easy that problem is to fix and how badly I got screwed by the shop. How could it be that in the two months the car sat parked in the driveway - nary a peep from anyone, but I pay someone to fix it and suddenly everybody's an expert?
Needless to say, some of the comments (both in-person and online) made me feel like a certified dumbass. I'm sure most of them weren't trying to make me feel bad, they were simply taking the opportunity to stroke their own ego. And that's okay. If you're the kind of person who knows how to work on your own car and has the time, tools and facilities to do so, more power to you. Far too many of us lack any kind of skill set these days. Just remember that none of us is a master of ALL trades.
After I had a few hours to cool off, it dawned on me that some of the very same people riding my ass about paying too much for an auto repair are the same folks I've seen break down and buy a new TV because they didn't have the motivation to crack the manual and learn how the TV or remote works. People who won't hesitate to spend $500-$1,000 to replace a smartphone, tablet or laptop when the problem could have been corrected by reinstalling the operating system.
There's nothing wrong with having a self-sufficient attitude but we all need to remember that it's physically impossible for any of us to become proficient at using/maintaining/repairing every single tool/device that we use on a daily basis. There's also nothing wrong with a guy who is good at fixing X but horrible at fixing Y to trade his time and labor (sometimes, in the form of money) to another guy who may be great at fixing Y but may be a total idiot when it comes to X. It's called voluntary exchange of goods and services (you may know it by its evil nickname: the free market), and it's absolutely essential to human survival.
