Its true I really love this job ! I am like a kid in a candy shop around this old place . I am the last man standing, I am the only employee, I am the mack daddy, of the appliance parts world ...at least on this part of mobile .heeheehe I worked most of my life doing service work of some sort or other ,and on many occasions I would be in and out of this old shop. In its heyday, it was a hustling bustling, good place to buy appliance parts, In fact it was the only place to get parts for this area, for many years, and this old place has tons of old parts and phone numbers and names of guys and ghosts a plenty . and it keeps reinventing it self because of all these hard to find parts that we have laying around. let me tell you a story : around 1995, after I had just finished a maintenance job I was on, I didnt have much to do, so I went down and hung out with mr fred. mr fred was an old man with tons of knowledge, and I felt like I needed to soak in some of it, and he always told me, Jw, you hang around now, because I aint gonna be here forever, I want you to take over for me, and run this place . and one of his dreams was to one day be able to access the world wide web, if he could only do that, what a broad base of knowledge could be had! mr fred would be sitting around and his nephew jimmy would sell a part, and the customer would be headed out the door, and mr fred would say hey neighbor what ya working on? and he would check out the part and say, naw that aint whats wrong, and he would tell the customer just what to do, and jimmy would have to refund the money . that was mr fred his motto was to have one part for every need and to never sell a part that would not fix the problem. to this day I always check supposed defective parts. well I hung around the old man for a week or two and jimmy asks me, are you working here? well if you are, go sign a w4. that was my hiring! I stayed late on weekends, and we fixed all kinds of things . mr fred could take an ac in that was hit by lightning, and remove the touchpad controls and put in old fashioned mercury bulb and fan switches . that was cool.he never turned down a job large or small . from a coffee pot to a 5 ton ac unit, mr fred was the man. he could wire anything .and he taught me this, above all things, that no matter how tough things might be, or how hard things might seem, or how high the mountains were to climb, them mountains COULD be climbed! I wish I knew 1/6th of the stuff he knew ,He was a very powerful old man with knowledge of the ages in his head.
this place draws me like a magnet everyday ,Its just an old tin building but each day brings challenges with new customers problems and its nice to be able to take each customer on with a a smile and make them happy .I am my own boss most of the time anyway ,Its up to me to make this whole thing rock and roll, It is a challenge that I love most dearly, and when it stops being fun I will quit and get a legit job! lol !
