Month: April 2018

I’m really glad I don’t do car repairs any more. That’s because I just got hooked on the video game ‘Over-Botch’.The aim is to do as badly as possible to become the very best at being bad. I haven’t heard of anyone taking up a career in Over-Botch and also doing the same thing in real life, but I seriously think you’d get burned out really quickly. The game is just that realistic that it’d be a serious brain drain coming home and then doing everything you’ve just been doing, but in reverse.

I’m not doing so badly with this whole virtual mechanic thing, either. Which is to say, uh…I AM doing badly. But I’m GOOD at being bad. Number 42 in all of Australia. I’ve set up a nice little place in virtual Ringwood. Good quality car servicing is my main deal, although I offer a wide range of services from brake replacement to log book servicing.

See, if this was real life Ringwood with real life car servicing, you’d get a name for yourself in the community, people would start recommending you to their friends…and all that stuff is important for a car mechanic. Most people are pretty clueless when it comes to cars, so they look for someone they can trust. Whereas in the magical bizarro world of Over-Botch, people are actually just looking for someone they CAN’T trust, so they can get the worst service possible, after which they go and tell all their friends that this guy can’t be trusted, he does terrible work and you should totally go and get car services from him.

As amusing as it all is, I’m glad things work the way they do in our world. So if I ever find myself looking for good log book servicing near Ringwood, or somewhere a little bit closer to home, I’ll be searching for someone trustworthy. As in, trustworthy to do a GOOD job. Probably don’t need to specify that IRL though.

-Dax

Ma and Pa aren’t too keen on getting folks in to do things for them, so we’ve always been pretty independent up here on the farm. That’s what I’ve been taught since I was too young to toddle: the Jacoby family does things their way. Well, that, and ‘if family calls, you come running no matter what’. That’s why there was a great family emergency when we found out that Cousin Kerleen got a guy in to fix her washing machine. First off, the Jacoby family don’t use washing machines…Ma says that’s what the communal lake is for. And second, Carlene actually got a guy in. And paid him.

And now we have family crisis #2, since Cousin Merv let slip that he’d been and gone to a good quality car service mechanic in Bentleigh, because there was a problem with his Corolla motor that he couldn’t fix himself. Something about the crankshaft pulley…I don’t know. I like to garner knowledge, but cars have just never interested me in that way. So now Merv is in double trouble, because Pa LOVES fixing cars and that means both rules have been broken at once: Merv didn’t fix his own problem, and he didn’t call in the family.

I wouldn’t say it out loud at any of our family gatherings, but I’m on Mervin’s side. Pa likes his automotive repairs, but he’s not that good at them. Mostly he just crosses a few wires, hammers some things back into place, slams down the hood and then blames and problems on overseas factory workers when things go wrong. No, Pa, it couldn’t be the fact that you didn’t fix the problem at all, but instead probably made it worse because you think you know stuff about cars when you don’t.

Doesn’t matter anyway, because you can’t apply logic to the Jacoby family rules. Apparently there’s a total ban on all decent services, which is why I’m secretly funneling a good car air conditioning service in Moorabbin to Merv. It’s far enough away that Pa won’t get word of it, so now he gets to think he’s still the hero. Ah, family politics…

-Forrest Jacoby Jr. Jr.