Why Being Right is Sometimes the Shittier Position…

It feels good to be right sometimes, confident in your assessment, offering advice or what have you.  Other times it sucks, because you logically know a shitty thing and your hope for it doesn’t change it…  Shitty is shitty, even when you’re correct.

For instance, a while back, my Dad asked me for help with his truck, a black, 1996 GMC, K1500, Z-71 step-side…

It was a cool, damp day and it didn’t start right away and flooded. After assessing the truck and his narrative, we pulled the cap, which SEEMED to be dry, but truthfully may not have been. There could be microcracks in the cap allowing just enough moisture in to be a problem…  The distributor doesn’t need to be visibly saturated to have a moisture issue…  I wiped it all out with a dry rag, then put it back.

It didn’t start for us that day…  But I had run a rag thru and called it a day.  He had it towed to his guy and was told “it had been flooded…” when they looked it over, but why?…

Then I heard it happened again and my Brother-in-law helped him with it. Put his guages on the fuel rail and had a suspicious reading…  Again, I think there had been moisture and temperature swings that cause condensate to form on the components in reaction.  Hmmmm…

After a month of daily driving since Dad died, she got me… Twice…  First on Saturday leaving work… Then, Sunday evening…  In the rain, both times…  Saturday, I waited out the flooding some then used the old floor it, then crank it because OBDII sees 100% throttle on start and shuts off the fuel, because you’re really trying to air that jawn out…  and it started.  Few minutes, minor inconvenience…  Sunday evening, I was headed out to grab vape pods, on the ledge, the precipice, if you will of a full on nicotine fit…  The “Jones” was real…  Nothing, waited, no dice…  Waited well over an hour for…  You guessed it, frustration…

So I went into the house and opened my mind and ultimately went to sleep…

The open mind was good, allowing me to connect the thoughts I hadn’t noticed were there yet with some that just recently made me quite angry…  I started looking for patterns: Weather.  Son of a bitch! A damp day with big temp swings across the dew point…  That’s the God-damned cap and rotor getting wet… All fucking day!  But, why doesn’t anyone see it?

WMDs and “W’s” war in Iraq. Wait, what?!

Yeah, that’s right, I listened to a podcast series from Goalhanger, called “And The Rest is Classified” about the intelligence side of why and how that war came to be…  One of the concepts that was discussed was how believing what you suspect to be true changes how you perceive evidence and can erroneously point you the wrong way… Confirmation Bias.  Breathing your own farts until your body accepts it as fresh air…

Dad’s mechanic was told that I pulled the cap, thought it was dry, Dad was with me, backs up my story…  Sooooo, The wrench started looking at other stuff, like an unknown fuel delivery issue..

Our region has been on the edge of drought for a bit and any rain, especially several days of steady, pissing rain, and a big temp swing past the dew point is a big deal…

So Dad and I were right, but what we knew poisoned the mechanic’s diagnoses.

I think I’m only upset about being right because this could have been dealt with months ago and the additional irritation and expense would have been avoided…

So, “Fuck!  I was right!”