Men
I am about to tear my hair out!!!! We have decided to go to Washington, DC this weekend as we will be trading in the Isuzu this month and won't have a car big enough to accommodate the load we need to take back from DC (ie. $5000 worth of comic books and action figures that will be sold if we don't come get them soon). So we are going through the pre-trip checklist of what needs to be done to get there safely, and an oil change is on the list. So I ask Ben to go get the oil changed today. Instead, he goes and gets 5 quarts of oil and an oil filter to change the oil himself. He has done this ONE TIME literally TWO YEARS AGO with SOMEONE HELPING HIM. The one time I can count on Ben's normal lack of initiative, he goes out and decides to conquer the damn thing himself. Why? In the name of saving money, which I am ALL about, except that the amount of money we will be saving is FIVE DOLLARS. So at first I'm thinking, "he must remember how to do this otherwise he wouldn't have gone and gotten all this shit," and then he's like, "I can't find the oil drain plug. Will you look in the book and find the diagram?" I do this, but it is completely useless as he has no idea what the diagram is actually of. So I take it in to show my dad, and he's like, "that's the transfer case, not the engine block," which does us absolutely no fucking good because Ben has no idea what a transfer case even is. I get on the internet, and that's no help either. So like an hour and a half after this shit has started Ben has done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING expect decide which bolt he thinks is the oil drain plug (based on what? I have no idea). He hasn't even unscrewed it yet. And when he does, any kind of fluid could come out. Since he had done no actual work, I politely suggested that we return the oil and filter and just take it somewhere to get the oil changed. But this is his "quest" apparently, and there is no convincing him to stop. At this point, I just had to go inside. I don't want to kill this rare streak of ambition, and if I stay out there, copious amounts of cursing and negativity will ensue. So for all I know, I could go out there 4 hours later and the car will be disassembled with all the fluids drained all over the driveway, and not only would be out the money for the oil and filters, the money it would cost to replace everything he's drained, and the labor to put everything back together, it would also cost us $5000 freaking dollars in collectibles. I would say that the risk of losing that much money vs FIVE, that's right ladies and gentlemen, FIVE FUCKING DOLLARS should merit an actual mechanic who knows what the crap he is doing changing our damn oil. Fucking men.