Once again, I have been slapped in the face with logic regarding auto-repair.
The last time I spent an evening under my vehicle, I spent some time in an ER. A friend convinced me I could save some money by crawling under my car and filing flat the rounded points of contact on my fly-wheel. He was right; it saved me a $400 repair bill. However, it turned out I spent significantly more than that when I found a bit of steel stuck in my eye lens. I didn't use protection. Now, was the lesson to protect my eyes before I work on my car? Or, was the lesson that I had no business working on my own car?
As time went on, I decided to buy newer cars, pay mechanics, and stay out of an engine or away from the undercarriage of a vehicle. Lately, I've been stressed for cash. So, when someone suggested I needed to immediately service my transmission - partially because they don't have a dipstick in the transmission; you have to get underneath it and... well, let's just say it's a "might as well service it" situation when you are in doubt - I opted to buy the needed parts and pull out the old rusty wrenches. In the heat of preparing for this job, I called my father. I was looking for advice on finding appropriate tools in my basement, a place he's more intimately familiar with than me. To make it short on background here, my father and I once spent an entire weekend under a truck before deciding we didn't have what it took to actually repair the transmission. He seldom outsources any job. He's an engineer and he's talented at anything mechanical. When I called for his advice, he said: "I did that once. I won't ever do it again."
Wow! Dad won't do it! If I had your unlimited attention here, I could explain to you how profoundly disheartening this statement was to me. Dad does everything himself. He is the DYI Network. Electric work, plumbing, floors, sheetrock (we did the sheetrock in my basement and it looks pretty good!), HDTV repair (no, seriously... he and my little brother got together to fix a sixty-six inch HDTV that someone threw out - and they got it working), cars, and I'm telling you there's just not much this man won't put his hands to. He sees something he's never done before as an opportunity to add to his tool collection. The man is savvy, cheap, and talented. And, he tells me "I did that once. I won't ever do it again." I decided it was a bad idea to pursue it myself.
The next call I made was the mechanic. After I bought the filter and fluid, the labor: $30!