Dealing with It

I mentioned in yesterday's posting the difficulties I had, among other things, of finding professional truck mechanics who knew what they were doing. And my dreams during the night told me that I was being bitter about it, which is an immature, inadequate response.

It isn't that the complaint is not true about the widespread incompetence of the professionals, the experts, the people whom we have believed to know what they are doing. I speak often with mechanics even today and almost all of them say that they themselves would never let another mechanic work on their own vehicles. No, the problem is real.

I was thinking this morning of some incidents of professionals' incompetence that cost me thousands of dollars and countless hours of wasted time. There is such a long list!

One example: I had the Western Star serviced in Wisconsin and the mechanics installed the air filters upside down, which cause the ducting system to collapse and hundreds of hours worth of dirty air to be drawn into the engine, and about a week of expensive downtime, as well as the aggravation.

Another example: The fan belt on the Mack wore out very quickly, and broke often. A good mechanic – they do exist – ultimately found the problem to be that the alternator bearings were seizing, making it extremely difficult to turn and thus wearing out the belts. This particular problem cost me untold hours of downtime, a roadside breakdown in Oklahoma, countless hours of sitting in dingy waiting rooms, car rentals to get me home, hotel overnights, enormous outlays of cash for incompetent mechanics who failed to find the problem.

I've written about the incompetence of the medical profession in a previous post about Lyme Disease. A recent book by Joe and Teresa Graedon, “Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them,” says that there are at least 500,000 US deaths per year caused by medical doctors themselves, “iatrogenic errors.” Those are just the fatal errors, not including the errors from which patients are lucky enough to survive. The cost of all this, especially to people who are most vulnerable, is just incalculable. I myself believe that my chances are greater that I will be harmed by going to a doctor than are my chances of being helped.

Then there are the bankers and financial speculators, who, on top of all the other damage they do, support the soul-destroying meme that somehow the amount of money you have indicates your “worth.” And so many more.

So what's to be done? Being bitter about it obviously is destructive, and particularly self-destructive.

My own thought is that the first step has to be awareness of the problem and not to try to pretend that it doesn't exist, not to hide from it, and not just to “go along with it.” Perhaps the next step is to speak out about it, as possible, without being bitter. I also think that it is possible to achieve a sufficiently deep and wide perspective to be able to see humor in the situation.