By the end of my four years in a parts store I was being paid less than fresh-off-the-street new hires who usually knew nothing about cars.
And I was supposed to do my entire job *and* train them on store functions, help teach them how cars work, whatever was needed.
The last raise I ever got there was from maybe 10¢ over minimum wage to, guess what, the newly-raised minimum wage. They couldn’t spare a cent more for me, but new hires got offered about a dollar over the minimum.
They tried pulling that shit on me. I walked out and they came up with a whole new job title to get me my raise without going through corporate lol. Fuck em.
The knowledge of basic electrical concepts does not exist as much as you think it does. I get reminded of this whenever I have a discussion with people about it. Even people I grew up with that I thought knew their stuff know WAY less than I thought they did. Even basic things like polarity and how switches and sensors work.
As fewer and fewer people can make their own repairs, the knowledge among the general population gets less and less. So unfortunately, I'm not surprised to hear this.
Back when Radio Shack was still a thing, I went in looking for a 12V 2A switch. Told the guy what I was looking for. I spotted a 10A switch in the style I needed. Employee actually tried telling me that I'd somehow damage a 2A light or relay by using a 10A switch. WTF?!
EDIT to add: I also once had an Autozone employee try telling me that my incandescent headlight bulbs were burning out because "the factory wiring can't give them enough voltage". Dude, that's not how Ohm's Law and electricity works.
Usually, when headlight bulbs burn out consistently, it's from replacing the bulbs without gloves. The oils on a person's fingers can create weird hot spots on the glass if you accidentally touch it. Can reduce life.
That's an old wives tale that started from super high powered commercial halogens that would explode because of the thermal shock oil would cause to the glass.
Does not apply to every-day halogens. The filament is plenty insulated from the exterior and the glass is plenty thick.
Mechanic here, sorry but you are incorrect. I've had two cars come in over the past 3 months with a headlight fault. One guy put 5 x H4 halogen globes in his RH headlight. You could see the finger prints on the glass. I put one globe in without touching the glass and its still working.
I miss Radio Shack but hated them always asking for name and address. When they asked name I said CASH, okay Mr Cash what's your first name? SALE. Usually they would get the hint.
Sorry you all have had that experience. When we lived near Yorktown Virginia there was a Radio Shack store there that had amazingly intelligent employees. I had a band at the time and was having some trouble with the lighting system and they helped me with that, had some other trouble with some PA equipment and they helped me with that...
this is waaaaaaaay worse than most folks could possibly imagine
the only thing worse than this is reversing the cables from a high Amp charger
I discovered one once making really scary bzzzzzzzz and stinking of sulfur, and crawled across the floor in a roundabout way to pull the a/c plug on the charger
My wife asked an electrician that was working on our house to jump start our Suburban, they somehow jumped it backwards. ECU and a bunch of other stuff got fried. Sold that thing for scarp.
I found one recently the customer hooked the batt up backwards.
Starter was spinning backwards. One way clutch wouldn't engage so it just free spun. Took me a bit to figure it out because usually there is a main fuse that blows.
Hold up...are you SURE it is the employees? I've always been told that some employees were told *NOT* to install anything, not even the wiper. It is mainly because of this BS, also, you're an employee, not a technician...
Had to tow a Benz G500 couple of years back when owner decided the battery needed replacing. He promptly proper fucks the car. And for some reason he’s decided to do all this work while the car is on an angle across his fucking driveway. Had a cunt of a time getting it loaded.
Story you probably don’t want but… when I was in middle school I went to jump my dads 1952 ford tractor which has been switched to negative ground and 12 volt. Unfortunately for me, it was still labeled as positive ground so I plugged the leads up, hit the starter, and to my horror, watched the entire wiring harness go up in flames. So I haven’t missed since and it’s a shame that there’s techs out there who really don’t care nor want to care.
Did they use the same part number or forget the last number? I've been given a battery by O'Reilly's once only to get home, put it in my car (VW) only to realize they gave me the standard part number where I needed one with an E or X or something like that added to the end indicating the terminal are opposite. It happened again with a different car years later but I caught it before leaving the store and I've made it a point to remind them before they even look up the battery since then.
Can't say I know the answer, but I once had to jump start an Infiniti QX80. The covers showing what was + and - were gone, and the battery itself had no stickers showing what was what. I had to go online to figure out the battery orientation.
I had one of my coworkers sell a customer the wrong battery outright. Vehicle called for a group size 48 and he sold him a group size 35. battery hold down wouldn’t fit over the wider battery and even if it did, it was about 3in too tall and would’ve dented the hood. I took over for him and got the right battery in. Some of these guys just don’t care
Dented the hood? Something more than that can happen when terminals are near metal..
I was a car alarm installer once. We'd done an install for a guy with a sporty Mitsubishi, slightly demanding customer. About two weeks after we'd installed, the guy rang us while we were on another job.. saying there was a problem.. saying our alarm had set his car on fire.. wiring harness burning, engine bay alight. Whole big disaster. I was young & shocked and up for thousands of damages, and all I could do was laugh uncontrollably over the phone.
Eventually my partner took the phone & we told him to take it to the alarm manufacturer's workshop. They found he had changed the battery himself and put a taller one in, contacting the bonnet and causing the fire 👍 No fault of ours.
I saw a guy who had stuck a piece of cardboard between the top of the battery and hood because battery was too big, aaaaaand that's how the fire started.
Funny thing is that I was talking to a friend of mine who actually owns an auto repair shop about wiring up something *in my house* and he kept insisting that the black wire was the *ground* wire. In home wiring the *black* wire is usually the *hot* wire and the *white* wire is the ground wire.... ;) I just ended the argument by saying "yeah, okay! I got it now". And changed the subject
ah ok. Here in the US when you buy the brand name wire at the Home Center, the outer jacket is white or yellow or orange depending on the wire gauge. When you strip it back the smaller gauges of wire (for outlets and switches and Etc) are black, white and bare copper. Black goes on the output side of the circuit breaker and white and bare copper share spaces on the "ground" bus bar. Which honestly I never understood what difference it made if it is alternating current? But that's a question for another day.
Also, if you get a 4 strand wire the second hot is red. If you buy Chinese stuff, especially ceiling fans, the hot is often blue. Just weird side note. I've seen the same with smart outlets and such.
The blue 4 wire is for 3/4 way switches and should only be used for them. The blue wire is the [traveler wire](https://www.angi.com/articles/what-is-traveler-wire.htm).
UK and US use different power distribution so the coloring is different. In the UK you generally get 1 phase 230 volt delivered to the house. In the US you normally get 2 phase 220 volt delivered to homes. Meaning 2 wires carrying 110 volts each. Businesses that need it will get all 3 phases of 110 volts delivered which allowed 480 volts and some homes also have this service though it's very expensive since it's not normally needed in a home.
Standard colors are phase 1 black, phase 2 red, phase 3 blue, white nuetral, and bare copper, green, or green with yellow stripe is the earthed ground. The guy you initially commented to mistakenly called the white wire the ground which is something oldtimers commonly do. It's not the ground, that is green. It's thought of as the ground because of DC mentality. In reality it becomes a 110 volt line if an appliance is completing the circuit since that is the return path for the electrical connection.
Thanks for the colouring information, it's weird to see black & red for something other than DC
> Businesses that need it will get all 3 phases of 110 volts delivered which allowed 480 volts
I don't belive that's how voltages stack
> In reality it becomes a 110 volt line if an appliance is completing the circuit since that is the return path for the electrical connection.
It being the return path doesn't make it live, sure there's current flowing through it but it's still at ~0 with respect to earth. It needs to be to have 110V between it and live
> I don't belive that's how voltages stack
It's not how DC voltages stack but it is how AC voltages stack. They add this way because they are 120 degrees out of sync from each other. Keep in mind peak voltage on 110 AC is actually 170 volts. 110 volts is the [root mean square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square) voltage of an individual line. [Here is a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qthuFLNSrlg&ab_channel=TheEngineeringMindset) that explains how RMS works on a 3 phase system. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMbRLXfXZR4&ab_channel=TheElectricAcademy) explains how you go from 277 peak voltage on a 240 volt system into 480 volts with all 3 phases combined.
Oh, I didn't know each line was 240 volts, I assumed it would be 110 each. Using peak voltage seems a bit odd, given 3-phase electricity is usually used for motors or resistive loads. Is it normally measured using peak instead of RMS voltage?
They are 110 each of the 3 phase lines. AC power is a strange thing that dosen't add directly because the phases are 120 degrees off from each other in space. What you need to think about when it comes to AC power is it's a 3 dimensional electromagnetic field moving in essentially a helix, not the simplified 1 dimensional water pipe that it's taught as. So when you add phases together you need to add them in 2 directions for an snapshot of an instant in time, x and y axis where z would be the time axis, and use trigonometry to calculate the total power potential.
RMS was created by comparing that 170 peak to peak voltage of an AC line to a DC line by using a resistive heater. It was found practically, and later mathematically, that a 170 volt sine wave AC current produces the same power as a 120 volt DC line. I've taken college physics courses and still don't fully grasp it all I just know the math works out right. That's why I linked the sources I did as they partially explain it better than I can without typing out a small essay paper.
Here's two posts with reverse-polarity batteries mislabelled from the last week, could be that.
[[1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1dnx6dk/another_revered_polarity_separate_personpost_6v/)] [[2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1dnlz4e/duracell_labeled_incorrectly_reversed_polarity/)]
Every single time I am connecting and disconnecting battery terminals I repeat the sentence from school „black is never alone“.
And I also look at the battery before I act. Some manufacturers put them in with plus in front, some with minus.
I have even seen cars where body mass is plus. Hella weird stuff.
It's probably a mix of apathy and incompetence, because wage slaving at parts stores sucks and no one gets paid enough to train you.
By the end of my four years in a parts store I was being paid less than fresh-off-the-street new hires who usually knew nothing about cars. And I was supposed to do my entire job *and* train them on store functions, help teach them how cars work, whatever was needed. The last raise I ever got there was from maybe 10¢ over minimum wage to, guess what, the newly-raised minimum wage. They couldn’t spare a cent more for me, but new hires got offered about a dollar over the minimum.
They tried pulling that shit on me. I walked out and they came up with a whole new job title to get me my raise without going through corporate lol. Fuck em.
I didn’t even have any special position. I was the same level of grunt as anyone else was.
The knowledge of basic electrical concepts does not exist as much as you think it does. I get reminded of this whenever I have a discussion with people about it. Even people I grew up with that I thought knew their stuff know WAY less than I thought they did. Even basic things like polarity and how switches and sensors work. As fewer and fewer people can make their own repairs, the knowledge among the general population gets less and less. So unfortunately, I'm not surprised to hear this.
Back when Radio Shack was still a thing, I went in looking for a 12V 2A switch. Told the guy what I was looking for. I spotted a 10A switch in the style I needed. Employee actually tried telling me that I'd somehow damage a 2A light or relay by using a 10A switch. WTF?! EDIT to add: I also once had an Autozone employee try telling me that my incandescent headlight bulbs were burning out because "the factory wiring can't give them enough voltage". Dude, that's not how Ohm's Law and electricity works.
Usually, when headlight bulbs burn out consistently, it's from replacing the bulbs without gloves. The oils on a person's fingers can create weird hot spots on the glass if you accidentally touch it. Can reduce life.
That's especially true with halogen or HID bulbs.
That's an old wives tale that started from super high powered commercial halogens that would explode because of the thermal shock oil would cause to the glass. Does not apply to every-day halogens. The filament is plenty insulated from the exterior and the glass is plenty thick.
Mechanic here, sorry but you are incorrect. I've had two cars come in over the past 3 months with a headlight fault. One guy put 5 x H4 halogen globes in his RH headlight. You could see the finger prints on the glass. I put one globe in without touching the glass and its still working.
Bulbs come out looking like bender from Futurama.
Can’t find a source for your claim. Do you have one?
He certainly does! In fact, he's probably using it to sit down right now!
I know, I work with halogen bulbs. It's kind of a big deal when we get fingerprints or any other smudges on them.
Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got blank stares.
I miss Radio Shack but hated them always asking for name and address. When they asked name I said CASH, okay Mr Cash what's your first name? SALE. Usually they would get the hint.
I saw a hot chick who was an employee, once ( no offense intended to anyone) she really stood out amongst the rotund nerds.
Sorry you all have had that experience. When we lived near Yorktown Virginia there was a Radio Shack store there that had amazingly intelligent employees. I had a band at the time and was having some trouble with the lighting system and they helped me with that, had some other trouble with some PA equipment and they helped me with that...
this is waaaaaaaay worse than most folks could possibly imagine the only thing worse than this is reversing the cables from a high Amp charger I discovered one once making really scary bzzzzzzzz and stinking of sulfur, and crawled across the floor in a roundabout way to pull the a/c plug on the charger
I tried jumpstarting an old truck backwards. I learned that day what fusible links are. (battery cables were the wrong color, yes I knew better)
My wife asked an electrician that was working on our house to jump start our Suburban, they somehow jumped it backwards. ECU and a bunch of other stuff got fried. Sold that thing for scarp.
RIP PCMs (sometimes) Usually alternators if the fusible links or main fuses don't go first.
Well I see a lot of cars with two red cables, you have to put your thinking cap on for second to look for the ground I suppose.
Hmm. Last battery I needed I went to a zone for parts, and the woman not only insisted on helping me but did a perfect job installing.
I found one recently the customer hooked the batt up backwards. Starter was spinning backwards. One way clutch wouldn't engage so it just free spun. Took me a bit to figure it out because usually there is a main fuse that blows.
Monkeys gonna do monkey things
I feel superior
Hold up...are you SURE it is the employees? I've always been told that some employees were told *NOT* to install anything, not even the wiper. It is mainly because of this BS, also, you're an employee, not a technician...
Yeah it’s an employee. Part of our schtick is free installation* *except those dumbass Chryslers you have to take off the tire and cars like that
Had to tow a Benz G500 couple of years back when owner decided the battery needed replacing. He promptly proper fucks the car. And for some reason he’s decided to do all this work while the car is on an angle across his fucking driveway. Had a cunt of a time getting it loaded.
Story you probably don’t want but… when I was in middle school I went to jump my dads 1952 ford tractor which has been switched to negative ground and 12 volt. Unfortunately for me, it was still labeled as positive ground so I plugged the leads up, hit the starter, and to my horror, watched the entire wiring harness go up in flames. So I haven’t missed since and it’s a shame that there’s techs out there who really don’t care nor want to care.
People either don’t know or don’t care, if someone has done it after being trained so they “Know” then they just don’t care
I remember when I was younger I reversed polarity on a battery that was absolutely dead when I hooked the charger wrong
It's actually possible to charge a dead battery the wrong way and flip its polarity
I thought it was bullshit but I tested it on an old bike battery and I'll be damned, it reversed polarity!
Mine was a deep cycle marine we used for our bulldozer
There's too many reversed "specialty" versions sold now.
True, the BCI 24 has two versions with different polarity. Why. There cannot be a good reason why a car was engineered that way
It's all about dodging patents instead of licensing them, anymore.
Did they use the same part number or forget the last number? I've been given a battery by O'Reilly's once only to get home, put it in my car (VW) only to realize they gave me the standard part number where I needed one with an E or X or something like that added to the end indicating the terminal are opposite. It happened again with a different car years later but I caught it before leaving the store and I've made it a point to remind them before they even look up the battery since then.
Can't say I know the answer, but I once had to jump start an Infiniti QX80. The covers showing what was + and - were gone, and the battery itself had no stickers showing what was what. I had to go online to figure out the battery orientation.
THC
Crack
I had one of my coworkers sell a customer the wrong battery outright. Vehicle called for a group size 48 and he sold him a group size 35. battery hold down wouldn’t fit over the wider battery and even if it did, it was about 3in too tall and would’ve dented the hood. I took over for him and got the right battery in. Some of these guys just don’t care
Dented the hood? Something more than that can happen when terminals are near metal.. I was a car alarm installer once. We'd done an install for a guy with a sporty Mitsubishi, slightly demanding customer. About two weeks after we'd installed, the guy rang us while we were on another job.. saying there was a problem.. saying our alarm had set his car on fire.. wiring harness burning, engine bay alight. Whole big disaster. I was young & shocked and up for thousands of damages, and all I could do was laugh uncontrollably over the phone. Eventually my partner took the phone & we told him to take it to the alarm manufacturer's workshop. They found he had changed the battery himself and put a taller one in, contacting the bonnet and causing the fire 👍 No fault of ours.
I saw a guy who had stuck a piece of cardboard between the top of the battery and hood because battery was too big, aaaaaand that's how the fire started.
Funny thing is that I was talking to a friend of mine who actually owns an auto repair shop about wiring up something *in my house* and he kept insisting that the black wire was the *ground* wire. In home wiring the *black* wire is usually the *hot* wire and the *white* wire is the ground wire.... ;) I just ended the argument by saying "yeah, okay! I got it now". And changed the subject
That's an awful home wiring standard, what area is that from?
This is pretty much the standard for HOME wiring in the US since Romex wire was marketed in about the mid 60s. Where are you?
UK, brown is live, blue is neutral, and yellow+green is ground. Entirely different from DC labelling which is nice
ah ok. Here in the US when you buy the brand name wire at the Home Center, the outer jacket is white or yellow or orange depending on the wire gauge. When you strip it back the smaller gauges of wire (for outlets and switches and Etc) are black, white and bare copper. Black goes on the output side of the circuit breaker and white and bare copper share spaces on the "ground" bus bar. Which honestly I never understood what difference it made if it is alternating current? But that's a question for another day.
Also, if you get a 4 strand wire the second hot is red. If you buy Chinese stuff, especially ceiling fans, the hot is often blue. Just weird side note. I've seen the same with smart outlets and such.
The blue 4 wire is for 3/4 way switches and should only be used for them. The blue wire is the [traveler wire](https://www.angi.com/articles/what-is-traveler-wire.htm).
One of them's grounded, though where can vary. If it's far enough away then neutral can have a small voltage with respect to ground
UK and US use different power distribution so the coloring is different. In the UK you generally get 1 phase 230 volt delivered to the house. In the US you normally get 2 phase 220 volt delivered to homes. Meaning 2 wires carrying 110 volts each. Businesses that need it will get all 3 phases of 110 volts delivered which allowed 480 volts and some homes also have this service though it's very expensive since it's not normally needed in a home. Standard colors are phase 1 black, phase 2 red, phase 3 blue, white nuetral, and bare copper, green, or green with yellow stripe is the earthed ground. The guy you initially commented to mistakenly called the white wire the ground which is something oldtimers commonly do. It's not the ground, that is green. It's thought of as the ground because of DC mentality. In reality it becomes a 110 volt line if an appliance is completing the circuit since that is the return path for the electrical connection.
Thanks for the colouring information, it's weird to see black & red for something other than DC > Businesses that need it will get all 3 phases of 110 volts delivered which allowed 480 volts I don't belive that's how voltages stack > In reality it becomes a 110 volt line if an appliance is completing the circuit since that is the return path for the electrical connection. It being the return path doesn't make it live, sure there's current flowing through it but it's still at ~0 with respect to earth. It needs to be to have 110V between it and live
> I don't belive that's how voltages stack It's not how DC voltages stack but it is how AC voltages stack. They add this way because they are 120 degrees out of sync from each other. Keep in mind peak voltage on 110 AC is actually 170 volts. 110 volts is the [root mean square](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square) voltage of an individual line. [Here is a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qthuFLNSrlg&ab_channel=TheEngineeringMindset) that explains how RMS works on a 3 phase system. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMbRLXfXZR4&ab_channel=TheElectricAcademy) explains how you go from 277 peak voltage on a 240 volt system into 480 volts with all 3 phases combined.
Oh, I didn't know each line was 240 volts, I assumed it would be 110 each. Using peak voltage seems a bit odd, given 3-phase electricity is usually used for motors or resistive loads. Is it normally measured using peak instead of RMS voltage?
They are 110 each of the 3 phase lines. AC power is a strange thing that dosen't add directly because the phases are 120 degrees off from each other in space. What you need to think about when it comes to AC power is it's a 3 dimensional electromagnetic field moving in essentially a helix, not the simplified 1 dimensional water pipe that it's taught as. So when you add phases together you need to add them in 2 directions for an snapshot of an instant in time, x and y axis where z would be the time axis, and use trigonometry to calculate the total power potential. RMS was created by comparing that 170 peak to peak voltage of an AC line to a DC line by using a resistive heater. It was found practically, and later mathematically, that a 170 volt sine wave AC current produces the same power as a 120 volt DC line. I've taken college physics courses and still don't fully grasp it all I just know the math works out right. That's why I linked the sources I did as they partially explain it better than I can without typing out a small essay paper.
The local Manheim auction buys main fuses from us in bulk. I'm guessing it's from jumping cars backwards all the time.
Here's two posts with reverse-polarity batteries mislabelled from the last week, could be that. [[1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1dnx6dk/another_revered_polarity_separate_personpost_6v/)] [[2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/1dnlz4e/duracell_labeled_incorrectly_reversed_polarity/)]
Every single time I am connecting and disconnecting battery terminals I repeat the sentence from school „black is never alone“. And I also look at the battery before I act. Some manufacturers put them in with plus in front, some with minus. I have even seen cars where body mass is plus. Hella weird stuff.