Mechanics, the hippocratic oath and indie businesses.

A little over a month ago I took my car in for an oil change at Tuffy Auto Service here in Ames. I didn’t see it at the time but on the sign it read “free brake inspection this weekend.” After an hour or so they called me up with some dire news.

Tuffy Mechanic

Well it looks like you need new brakes. Some wheels are down to about 5%. It’ll be around $400 to $500 but if you don’t replace them now you may do damage to your calipers and then you’d be looking at a whole new set.

I promptly asked him if I could pick up my car and he reluctantly said that it was ready. I went in there, told them that I’d think about it and was met with sour face. On my way out I noticed a rattle pulling onto the road, it seemed to be coming from within my driver side wheel well. All in all an awful day at the mechanic. I went back the next day inquiring about the newly found rattle and what turned up was a rusted-off piece of my driver-side front spring. It wasn’t their fault exactly, but putting it on the lift was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I asked them what it’d cost to replace it, he said somewhere between $300 and $500.

It didn’t totally surprise me, which I guess is the really sick thing about this whole situation. But I was pissed off. Enough so that I decided it was time to do some homework. I looked around to see what a new set of brake pads would cost. Apparently around $25 for an entire set. I gasped when I saw that figure. They were going to charge me $475 for labor on replacing my brake pads. Now I was on a mission. I continued my self-liberation by purchasing a Hayne’s manual for my car to get some further perspective on just how laborious this labor actually is. Changing the brake pads… that’d probably take a few hours at the most for a beginner. The spring that they wanted to replace would take less time and the part was $90 at the most. But I didn’t stop there.

Next, I messaged my friend Jacob who was pretty adept at working on his own cars. He even started his own on-the-side thing charging $30/hr or something for car repair/maintenance. I was still worried about the brake diagnosis over at Tuffy so I asked him to take a look and replace the brakes and whatever needed to be done. Even if the rotors needed replacement the total bill would certainly be way less than it would of been at Tuffy. A trip down to Des Moines and an hour later or so I got a much different call than I did previously from Tuffy.

Jacob

Hey, good news. Nothing needed to be replaced. In fact your pads look like they’re almost new. The car is in great shape. We even checked the rotors and they look great too.

I felt like a fool. These crooks over at Tuffy could have easily taken me for a ride with their “Free Brake Inspection Weekend Extravaganza” bullshit. But that was the clincher with me and Tuffy auto. Sure I don’t have to buy into their false diagnosis, and I didn’t, but why put up with that? Kind of like a woman scorned from a lecherous relationship, I felt like renouncing the whole profession in one broad sweep. Why can’t people just do the right thing? Wouldn’t it ultimately be better for business?

The fact is, perhaps it would be but Tuffy is a huge chain of repair shops that spans all across the country. And then I started thinking about how the reputable guys always seem to be independent owners. Small shops run by a guy for 30 years, building a reputation up locally. Sure, they don’t dominant the market, but they make it and they’re wholly appreciated by those who are in the know. Seems like just about everything in my life is better when it comes from people, not organized corporations.

Though, what about doctors? We don’t like to think about hospitals as businesses, and certainly a mom-n-pop hospital would be cause for concern though their care and services have a great deal to do with personal relations. It’s understood that doctors are there to help us, not necessarily because they make a lot of money [although they do] but because of the Hippocratic Oath. It’s this oath that adds that “i’m not evil” tagline that’s so important to healthcare being a noble profession. It’s pretty obvious to see why they take the oath. They’re dealing with human life, the most sacred thing in our society. The trust must be iron-clad in order for it to operate with any kind of success. Though that trust is soon diluted for some reason when services deal with anything else. Mechanics, restaurants, food merchants, cleaning products, alcohol, farms, electronics, etc. etc. Even though human life is very much at stake with something like food and drugs [looking at you FDA] that business somehow doesn’t take much responsibility for feeding people garbage for profit. We all suffer, though just not immediately.

But recently, and I credit Google with some of this, we’ve had a surge in businesses [primarily tech] that are out there doing there best to “not be evil.” They’ve taken it upon themselves to provide their own unsolicited oath to do the right thing. Now Google is huge, and all its products don’t effect the population’s well-being as much as directly as say Kraft does, but it still means something. If nothing else, they’re setting an example for a world of young entrepreneurs that will see their approach as a model for success and hopefully take some notes on a similar oath.

That’s why this whole experience has reminded me the spirit of “indie” goes beyond games and music and into just about every service/product/organization possible. People have a lot of trouble trying to boil down indie games into some kind of definition but I think that’s mostly because they’re thinking about it too specifically. When you take into account everything that’s “indie” it becomes pretty clear that it has everything to do with intention. Is the intention to grow regardless of consequences or attain a sustainable position? It’s kind of a sanitary way of putting it, but really it has a lot to do with the kind of people that are in the business because they enjoy it. It’s a positive feedback loop. Though the other end, the corporate end, are in business to make as much money as possible. In a lot of ways it seems naive to get into a business for any other reason than making money but I think that’s pretty wrong-headed. We live in a corporate consumerist society and that kind of greed has gone unchecked and look where it’s gotten us. I like to dream that we’re hungry for this kind of personal approach to community again, and hopefully I’m some small part of that.

Support the indies around you. They’re in it for the love of the game… and if they aren’t, well then their food will probably taste like crap. ;)