Automotive Technicians

I walk into the automotive workshop at the Chevrolet dealership. There is a lot happening around me, I pause and take a moment to take in all of the scenes. The floor is gray, smooth concrete; every few yards there are small puddles of a spilled, slippery fluid. The walls are made of concrete bricks, painted white and blue to match the Goodwrench theme which is displayed throughout the service and parts end of the building. I am standing in the center of the shop, facing the parts counter. There are six service bays on each side of me; each bay has a car lift and a technician’s personal toolbox. The lifts are all painted blue, again, sticking to the theme. Some tool boxes are large and shiny, others are smaller and worn out from years in the automotive repair business. As I walk through, I examine each technician’s personal workspace. Some have pictures of their children and wives. Some have calendars with scantily clad women looking over them. Some have funny signs posted on their toolboxes. They all have bottles and jugs of fluids, piles of rags for cleaning up their spills and plenty of shiny tools.

I stand in the center of the shop, close my eyes and take in all of the sounds. Radios are blaring; most of the guys listen to the same station, and the rock and roll channel is drowning out the less popular hip-hop channel. There is a clanging sound coming from one corner of the shop as a technician puts all of his strength into hammering an old, rusted rotor off of the car. In another corner, there is a loud hissing noise accompanied by a horrific burning odor, as another technician uses a torch to extract a stuck universal joint from a driveshaft. On the other side of the shop, there is a loud buzzing noise as another technician uses an air hammer to remove a hub from a vehicle. To my left, there is a pumping noise as an oil company re-fills the bulk oil drum used by all of the technicians. There are squeaking and squealing noises from all over as the ten large bay doors, in need of lubrication, open and close. Overhead, there is a loud, booming voice paging different employees to different areas of the building and paging for phone calls.

The technicians vary in age; some of them very young, just out of technical school, others are older and have been in the business for many years. They are all dressed in the same uniform: black pants, a black and blue collared shirt bearing the Goodwrench logo, and work boots. Most have rough hands, scarred from days of physical labor and burned from hot engines and fluids. Many suffer from physical conditions from the many years spent working on cars. Some have bad backs, others bad shoulders, others have damaged wrists. They all work through the pain; they are strong men and do not let it bring them down.

Every morning, they all drive to the dealership, most in GM vehicles. At ten minutes to eight, they punch in on their time cards and move on to the changing room. When they are changed and ready to start their day, they move to their assigned bays and make sure their tools and supplies are all in order. They head into the service drive where they meet up with the dispatcher who will give them their first assigned vehicle for the day. They review the repair order, grab the keys for the vehicle and get working on it. Sometimes, their job will be to diagnose a problem on a vehicle, other times it will be to perform a maintenance service on the vehicle. Most of the technicians enjoy the maintenance jobs, they are easy to perform and they pay them a good amount. If they are given a vehicle with a problem, they need to use all of their resources to diagnose the issue so that the service advisor can sell the repair to the customer. The technicians go through a lot of factory training, so they have their own knowledge to help them diagnose the problem. They also have on-line assistance and diagrams to follow to diagnose the problems. However they go about doing it, their goal is to find the answer to the problem and make a repair recommendation which the service advisor can then sell to the customer. When the job is sold, they need to perform the repairs and then test the vehicle to verify that it is repaired. Once they know it is fixed properly, they write up what work was performed on the invoice and give the keys to the service advisor. Most technicians will work on multiple vehicles every day.

While everyone is different, there are many similarities between the technicians. They get frustrated with common misconceptions that customers have. Many people believe that there is a computer that diagnoses problems on vehicles; unfortunately, this is not the case. The computer used by the technicians can give them diagnostic codes and they can use the computer to monitor different data in certain systems of the vehicle, but does not give them an answer to the problem. They need to do the actual work, not the computer. They take the codes and data given by the computer and need to run certain tests to actually get a diagnosis for a problem. When a customer comes in with a problem and says, “I don’t understand why you’re charging me to look at my car when all you have to do is throw it on the computer”, it is very frustrating to the technicians because they get no credit for the hard work that they do. They are similar in the way that they get frustrated by how jobs get paid. Technicians are paid on a flat rate system; they get paid by the job. Each job has a specific book time and that is how the technician’s pay is calculated. For example, a brake service pays two hours; if it takes three hours to do, they still only get paid two hours, but if it only takes them one hour to do, they still get paid for two. This system can be beneficial if they have the right kind of work. Sometimes, however, it is a disadvantage for them. When they are working on a vehicle under warranty and they are diagnosing a hard problem, GM warranty may only pay 0.9 hour even if the technician spends multiple hours on the vehicle; that is where it becomes frustrating for them.