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Vocation and
avocation
They love what they do and wouldn’t trade it for anything. The Shaws view themselves as doctors whose patients are customers attached to metal bodies that are sick or worn out. The customer’s brain is needed to describe their body’s symptoms. Accurate descriptions of the creaks, the groans and the moans are vital to diagnosing the illness, but half of their customers know absolutely nothing about cars which makes diagnosing problems more difficult.
Sadly, even graduates of high school vocational programs are sometimes not much better. The Shaws have seen students out of neighboring schools who can’t gap a spark plug (check the distance between the electrodes before installation) after three years of training.
“What were they doing for three years?” said James Shaw. Hands-on knowledge is vital. Nowadays mechanics are technicians. They have to know computers, and how to operate increasingly complex diagnostic equipment, but somewhere along the way, book knowledge has overshadowed practical know-how that only comes from getting under the hood.
And getting under the hood nowadays is a painful experience for anyone who worked in an earlier era of car design. Ricky Shaw feels “cars have become so overloaded with capabilities that there is less space to put stuff and everything is getting over-customized.” For Ricky, this has become a big source of job stress— just getting parts. And the right one, shipped with the right information. Obtaining something as simple as an ignition switch from Ford can be frustrating, as the Shaws learned when they received one, only to learn that it wouldn’t work unless it had been pre-programmed.
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