Episode 359: Lock’Em Up

On this weeks episode of Grease the wheels ,we talk about one of the very real threats that dealerships and their staffs face on a daily basis: security. For some reason, the criminal element loves car dealerships. It’s probably the tens of millions of dollars of inventory sitting on the lot or the fact that their harbor freight saws-all’s are simultaneously cheap and effective and catalytic converts are not cheap. There are tens of thousands of property crimes that happen every year at car dealerships. There are also tons of ways to protect yourself as well, from documenting all of your equipment with photos for insurance reasons, to packing heat as the Texas do! We get into how to defend yourself, your property, and equipment, as well as some fun stories about the things that have gone down in dealerships. We didn't even get to cybersecurity, because there are just so many other ways for people to rip shops and dealerships off. Everyone has a story when it comes to this kind of thing, and we would love to hear yours! 
 
Also Uncle Jimmy talks one of the worst payment security situations we’ve ever heard! 

This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Alright, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome one more time to Grease the Wheels. I'm your Uncle Jimmy here, parked behind the microphone at the rock and roll garage. Thank you very much for listening. Step on in, grab a brew, don't cost nothing. Have a seat. Not there. Not there. Sit over here. All right. Okay, now we got that straightened out. Hey, it's your Uncle Jimmy with your automotive podcast that comes to you semi-weekly, semi-regularly, mostly just intermittent. Isn't that a terrible word? Intermittent. Listen, before I get too far, I want to say thank you for what you do. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I know that there's a hell of a lot of you out there who are keeping this world moving uh with whatever it is you do, whether you're building it and or fixing it and repairing it, manufacturing it, using tools properly. Using tools sometimes improperly. I'm all for it, baby. Go ahead. Do it. Do it. Just do it. Send it. Thank you very much for for uh doing all of that, really. Honestly. Fucking planet with screech. Come to a screeching fucking all. If it wasn't for you guys. And me. I'm part of it. I'm part of it. I'm I'm still doing. I'm still doing the job. So uh I wanted to bring you uh I wanted to kind of get away from talking about slates because I know I did that two weeks in a row, but uh I I think it's an extraordinary opportunity for a lot of people. Just wanted to throw in a little pitch there. Uh I hope that it has at least caused you to think maybe a little differently about what you do. That's all I can ask for. And uh one of the things that I do here on the podcast is I try to get you people, you technicians, men, women, uh, children, in my case, uh, you know, whatever race, whatever sex you are, whatever creed, color, what doesn't really matter. I'm worried about you. And I mean this sincerely. I really worry about you because the the things that are going on now, there's just a lot of crap coming down the fucking pike. And there's a lot of really honest to God unreasonable people out there. And uh at times I myself am unreasonable. I will freely admit that. Um, I try not to be, but some of the things that I think are not good and not correct, and but most of the time, uh what I think and feel is in line with what most people would like for me to think and feel. And I think the same is true for you, honestly. Now, what I want to talk to you about in keeping with that theme is security and safety and uh keeping your your stuff and keeping it together and keeping just basically keeping it. I wanted to kind of bring you an episode where we talk about the things that nobody ever really seems to talk about, and yet they happen every day all over the place. And uh, when I say security, I'm talking about security for everything, security for you, security for your stuff, security for your families, even your vehicle, the shop you work in, the people you work with, and the building that you work in, and the neighborhood you work in, and possibly the county, and maybe even the state that you work in. I'm talking about security, things that you need to be aware of, things that you you should think about uh on on a little bit more than a uh regular basis, possibly. Uh things that are gonna help keep you safe and keep you employed and keep everybody uh you know on the up and up. Okay. Now, I made a little list of things that uh that I thought honestly were things that that could rear their ugly head. Okay, now I know that there's uh some of you out there work in some really terrible neighborhoods. So security is something that you have to really you kind of have to be keen on it. Okay, you have to kind of be on your fucking toes, especially you know, if you have uh your shop door or maybe maybe your garage doors or door or doors, however many you have, uh if they're open in the summertime, if it's uh not too blazing hot outside and you can do what it is you do with just the door open to keep you cool. Uh, or if perhaps your building's air conditioning, air conditioned and uh the doors are closed most of the time and they only open up for a few minutes to let a car, maybe even just a few seconds to let a car in and then they automatically close. A lot of shops have those kind of doors, and they represent a level of security that you you don't think about. I don't, and honestly, I don't think about it until I was kind of paying attention to some of the shit that was going on in our shop the other day. And one of the things that I was thinking about was, and and this kind of this kind of murders me, okay? But it is uh the company I work for, it is their kind of a thing that they do to try to maintain security. Uh, I'm supposed to uh present an RFI chip card to a pad by the doors to get into the building. I'm pretty used to it. I keep it in my wallet. I could brandish that thing quick enough and get in the door without really losing my stride, even uh the other people that I work with have the same thing, and so we get to come and go pretty freely. But what one of the things that fucking kills me, and it used to be worse at the dealership I was working at a couple of years ago than it is where I am now, is that there seems to be a lot of fucking people in the shop at any given time who are not fellow employees. They're in there somehow or another. They get they they sneak in when the door's open, they sneak in when a car is being pulled in, or they they come in through the the door that the service advisors use, or maybe they come in through the parts department. There's a lot of fucking people roaming around our shop at any given time. And most of them, I would I'm just guessing, most of them have some sort of reason for being there, but it doesn't always appear that way. I mean, I'll see uh on any given day, I'll see insurance adjusters, they're there to look at a car, kind of get to know them a little bit, at least they look familiar. You see them a couple, two, three times, you know what they're up to, you know what they're doing, and maybe maybe you've talked to them before, so they're not total 100% strangers. Uh still they can kind of present a security risk, maybe a very small one, but still, you know. Uh also, too, there are vendors that come in, and and typically they're uh talking to people in the parts department about, you know, maybe refilling this display or refilling this cabinet, you know, getting getting more wire ties or getting, you know, shop towels or break clean, whatever. Um, and there's kind of a lot of those people too. And and you fortunately for us, it is usually the same person uh from the from a specific vendor. So you get used to seeing them. Uh and then uh if you have laundry, if you have uniforms that that get laundered, those people are in the shop. Typically, that's one guy. He's he's he's usually grumpy as shit too, because he has to carry in a whole shit house of clean clothes, stick them in the appropriate lockers, and then take all of the shitty, the shitty, dirty clothes that you have and get them the fuck out of there, and then get them cleaned up and bring them back to you. Now, I don't uh I don't uh I don't plan my week around this guy showing up with my laundry. I wash my laundry myself because I've actually seen how they wash them and couldn't have really been any more disgusted with that process. So I'll wash them myself, thank you very much. And and honest to God, uh I'm losing money doing it really because I know that somehow it or another in my paycheck, I'm actually paying for that laundry service. I know it. I have in every shop I've ever worked in. It's not that huge of a deal. It's it I don't know how much it is. I haven't looked at my paycheck close enough to pinpoint where the the money for laundry is coming out, but I'm sure it is somewhere because that's how businesses work. Um, if they can charge back for something like that, they're definitely gonna, and there isn't really any accountants anywhere in the world who are gonna say, yeah, we we won't charge you for laundry. That's bullshit, right? But then there's always about a every week a handful of motherfuckers who walk into your shop for one reason or another, and you're not aware of it, and neither are the other, you know, three, five, ten, fifteen, twenty people that work there, they have no idea why that fucking guy's in there. And I am typically not a suspicious person, but when I see people I don't recognize and they're looking around at stuff, I'm like, mmm, this is one suspicious looking motherfucker. I'm gonna keep my eye on him, you know. And uh, and then I have heard stories from some people that I haven't experienced this myself, but I've heard stories of uh an individual who somehow got his hands on a uh uniform that looked very similar to the uniform that they wore at a shop that would that's uh about you know, it's one of our competitor shops about 30 miles from us. And one of the guys who works for us now used to work there, and there was a guy who came in and he had this sort of pseudo uniform on, so he semi-looked official, and he started asking about borrowing a piece of equipment, or he just needed it for a minute or something, and then he disappeared with it. And then finally, at some point, somebody got uh wind of this. I mean, because it's equipment started disappearing, and uh somebody threw a fucking uh a net over this guy and got him fucking arrested and got a lot of their shit back, and they found that uh the dude had like a Tahoe or a suburban or some shit like that, and it was full of equipment that he had kind of procured from places like this by acting like he worked there. So you definitely want to be on your fucking toes. And if you're not the equipment that they steal, oh, it might be yours, it might be your equipment. And and even though even though uh we have this RFI chip thing that we need to get in the building, these sons of bitches get in anyway, somehow or another, you know, and and you can always tell, you know, if it's like a subcontractor and he's gotta, I don't know, paint the walls or fix a uh a fucking electrical outlet or whatever, they'll block the door open with something because they don't have an RFI chip and they need to get in and out, and they don't want to stand outside knocking on a fucking door for half an hour until somebody opens it. So you get that going on, and that's kind of not cool. And uh I I feel like myself personally, I feel like that whenever somebody needs to get into the shop, they should check in with somebody up front in the service department in the serve in the drive-on area, you know, and check with you know, service manager or maybe an assistant manager or some sort of uh uh a liaison with the dealership and get themselves uh a temporary pass, a lanyard that they can carry so that we know that they're out there on official business. Because if I saw somebody, you know, if I saw somebody rolling a piece of equipment outside and I didn't know they were there to fix it, I might tackle that son of a bitch, especially if he starts loading it into his truck. You know, I might be like, hey, you know, that's not fucking years, you know. Uh, but that that hasn't happened yet. But I I am always really suspicious of a lot of fucking people, just because I don't know, and I don't where that comes from, but uh I know that there are some bad fucking actors out there, as they say on the internet, there's bad actors on Amazon, so you want to look out for them. But and and there's bad actors in real life, and I'm not just talking about people who are on TV or in movies, talking about people who are fucking criminals, basically, okay. And honestly, uh and you got to know this, okay. And if you don't know this, I want you to listen to this very carefully. Car dealers, use car dealers, new car dealers, shops where you fix them, shops where you detail them, shops of all kinds where cars are, is a fucking magnet for criminals. It is a fucking holy grail because there's lots of fucking people out there who would love to steal a car and either resell it or strip it and sell the parts or whatever, or maybe just take it for a fucking joyride. That happens too. All right. And if you think it can't happen to you, I'm gonna tell you right now, it can. Okay, good neighborhood, bad neighborhood, neighborhood, whatever in the middle, it doesn't matter. If you've got cars, somebody is looking at all of them all the time, driving through, looking around, da da da da da da, you know, and that's why a lot of shops have cameras because if something happens, they can go back and go, oh yeah, this guy rolled through the lot a couple of times. Here's his plate number, and then the next time we saw that car, the plate was covered up and he's wearing a fucking ski mask and he fucking smashes the window of a car and somehow or another maybe has the keys, or maybe he just wants something out of that car. But you don't you don't want to be a party to that shit. You don't want that shit to happen to your shit or your company shit, because when something bad like that happens to your company, you are gonna lose because they're gonna have to pay whatever it is they pay to get this situation taken care of, and that's money that they can't or they will not give to you. Okay, now what you have to do as a as an individual, okay, and I want to I want to I want to make this pretty clear. There's a lot of things that you should be doing to protect yourself from any kind of criminal activity that could occur, uh, any kind of disasters, any kind of tragedies, any kind of death of destruction. There's things that you need to do, okay. And I'm gonna kind of try to lay them out for you. And I want you to think seriously about doing some of these things and just paying attention to what the hell's going on around you, okay. Number one, you you probably have, if you're listening to this and you're an automotive technician, you probably have at least $5,000 worth of tools, if not ten times that. Some of us out there, and I would say a lot of you guys who work on, you know, different, you work in an independent shop and you work on all kinds of different shit, and you probably have a more comprehensive set of tools than say uh a lazy prick like me has for just working on one brand of cars. Okay, so you have a substantial investment in tools, a substantial investment in a toolbox, and a substantial investment in uh, you know, air tools and and battery-powered tools, cordless tools, uh jacks, jack stands, lift tables, even, uh, engine cranes, all that stuff. And a lot of that stuff might just be yours, and you use it at work and you brought it with you and whatever. So you kind of want to keep wraps on that shit. And one of the things that you're gonna want to do is take pictures of all of your shit, and I mean all of it. Take a picture of your engine crane from about three or four different angles, take pictures of you know, whatever you have. If you have jacks, jack stands, lift tables, take photographs of them with your phone or with the camera. I mean, who the fuck even uses a camera anymore, right? But if you have one, go do that, okay? Then I want you to open every drawer in your toolbox one at a time, please. Okay, we know what happens if you open all if you open all of them at the same time, you're buying a new toolbox, probably. You're gonna want to take a picture of every drawer with all of your tools in it. If you got tools scattered across the top of your toolbox, put them where they belong, and then take a good clear picture of each drawer with the tools in it. Okay, and I don't give it, I don't really honest, honestly, don't give a fuck how many tools you have or how many drawers you have. And and by the way, take a picture of the snack drawer. I mean, we a lot of you guys have like little Debbie all fucking stacked up in one drawer. Take a picture of it. Because if something happens, and only really God knows what could happen. I mean, uh, you could have a fire and all your shit gets burned up, or you could have uh something fall on the building. I mean, it it could happen. I mean, if you're you know in a building that's next to a construction site and a crane for some reason flips over because some idiot forgets to put the legs down or something and it smashes through your building and it just happens to hit your toolbox and fold the fucking thing in half. I mean, crazy shit can happen. Maybe somebody breaks into your shop like real late Friday night and they know you're not open over the weekend, and they just clean you out. They get a big fucking U-Haul and they just roll all your shit out and it's fucking gone. And then an insurance company is gonna come in and they're gonna say to you, Oh, well, what did you have? And they're not gonna believe you. You know, you say, Well, you know, I had a great big fucking Mr. Big Snap-on toolbox, and I had every fucking socket in the Snap-on catalog, and I had two sets of scan tools, and they're not gonna believe you. They're gonna be like, Well, where's the fucking receipts? I go, Well, I kept them in my toolbox, and then and then you're gonna get screwed because somebody's gonna go, Yeah, he didn't have all that shit. But if you have pictures of it all and you have stored them somewhere that isn't in your toolbox, thank you very much. Maybe you know, you store them on the cloud, or you maybe even download them into your PC, put them on a stick, or maybe even onto a CD, or even who the fuck knows? Maybe a floppy disk, whatever. You store it fucking somewhere, okay? So that when and or if, and I pray that nothing happens. I I really do. I pray that nothing happens to any of you, that none of you get sick or hurt or die at work, and that all of your stuff is just mint from day one to the day you retire. But things fucking happen, and you gotta be ready for it, okay? So that if you have pictures of all of your shit, then they can't argue with you. And be like, yeah, I had a snap-on scanner. Oh, sure, you do. Here's a fucking picture of it, Mr. Insurance Adjuster asshole. And so you can get your stuff reimbursed a lot faster, a lot better, and a lot more accurately than your cohorts. And I would I would suggest to them that they do the same thing, really. Um, I know that that was several years ago. Uh, somebody said that we should do that at the shop we were at. And so we did. We did it, we all did that, and then we submitted the pictures to our shop and they stored them on uh, I don't know what. Uh maybe I don't think they had a server at the time. Um they made, I think they do now, but they stored them somewhere where they could go, okay, this is you know, this is here. And I mean that was a solid, well-built building, but also, and and this is just uh, oh yeah, by the way, we where our shop was at that time uh was downwind from the airport, and jets came in, you know, a couple two, three hundred feet above us on a day on an obviously daily basis. I mean, we're in a fairly large city, not the biggest city in the world, but still not the tiniest one. And uh, there was a lot of planes flying overhead every fucking day if the wind was blowing right, you know, which was you know the one way it usually blew anyway, was the uh prevailing winds in that area. So we saw a lot of planes flying over our shit. And uh just imagine one of them not making it in. And actually, while I was working there, a plane did actually crash on downwind for that airport, but it crashed about four or five miles farther away from us. But it could have easily crashed into our building, and then probably if there had been a fire, it would have destroyed all of our shit, you know, including the the company's shit, my shit, my buddy's shit, the guy across the shop from me, his shit, uh everybody's shit would have been fucked. You know, sorry about that. I get carried away with the swearing every once in a while, and I think a lot of people uh don't like it. I don't know. I get no feedback, so I just have to assume that what I'm doing is okay, right? Seriously, try as desperately. I I wouldn't say desperately, but try uh as as hard as you can to protect yourself and your stuff. Okay, always be safe. We've talked about that a bunch of times. Always make sure your lift is set, always make sure your lift is in proper working order. Holy fucking shit, you do not want to get crushed by a car. Please don't let that happen, please. Also, to look after your stuff, make sure it's squirreled away, it's all where it's supposed to be, and you have it all. Okay, because I know uh I think there's a lot of you who are like me, but when I lose a tool, man, I lose my fucking mind right along with it. And if I don't find it, uh it takes me, it takes me a long time to come to the realization that I'm not gonna see that tool ever again, and then I have to buy a new one. And the feeling of being pissed off about that takes a long time for me to get over. I'm quite I'm just being as honest as I can with you. I don't like losing tools, and if something happened and I lost all of them, I would I would go insane. I would I would search Facebook Marketplace every day. I would talk to people who sell toolboxes, I would talk to people who sell tools, I go to every fucking pawn shop in the goddamn city, and I would find the son of a bitch who took it, and I would probably murder him. And if I went to jail, I'd be fine with it. You know, really honestly, if somebody steals a whole lot of shit from me, they deserve to fucking die. So protect your stuff and and don't get yourself into a situation where you might have to commit homicide. Just don't don't do it, okay? Now, one of the other things I want to add is that the reason or the probably the main reason that a dealership or a shop is just like ground zero for a lot of different criminals is not so much because of our tools or even our facility or our equipment, it's just straight up the fucking cars. Now, where I work, we have a great, great, great many very high-end cars. There's probably, if I had to add it up, 15, 10 to 15 million dollars worth of cars, and that might be low on our lot. And then there's used cars, there's probably another 10 to 20 million dollars there. I mean, it's just an enormous amount of money in automotive inventory on our lot that we're attempting to sell. That doesn't even include the cars that other people dropped off for us that we don't own, that we're trying to fix, or at least get somebody to tell us to fix, which is you know happens quite a bit too. And then there's also uh our cars, our the employees' cars. Okay, so if you were to take and look at the I'm just gonna use my own dealership as an example, there's probably 50 million dollars worth of automobiles on that lot between new used and employees' cars and and used cars and shit that needs shit that needs to go to the wholesaler and maybe even some shit that needs to go to the pick and pole. There's a lot of fucking money. And this attracts people who want to either steal them or fuck them up. And you you need to pay attention to the people who roam your lot. I I'm and I'm being honest with you, it's all I can tell you is I've seen a lot of people roam. Roaming the lot, you go up to them because I'm not afraid. I'm not, it's it's probably not a good thing, but I'm not really afraid of anything. So if I see somebody fucking around on a lot, I'll go up to them and go, hey man, can I give you a hand? You need, you know, is this your car? Or, you know, are you looking for something or whatever? And then it spooks them and they fucking leave. And it's happened probably it's probably in a 25-year career, probably happened about half a dozen times. But somebody is lurking and looking around and just looking for shit they can steal or something that they can fuck up. And I'll go right up to them, hey man, what's going on? You know, and sometimes you you know, they oh I'm just looking, just looking. Hey, okay, you can look, that's fine. Just don't touch, you know. And then sometimes I I've had a couple of people get nasty with me, and then I like to remind them that if they want, I'll go get a hammer and we'll adjust their attitude with the fucking thing if they want. And then I'll start walking towards the shop, you know, because I also know that in most places I've ever worked, there's also a few other heavy hitters there. And in a lot of places I work, especially in Texas, even though it would probably be highly frowned upon, they have guns with them. They're either in their car or in a holster in their toolbox, or maybe they've got them right on them. I mean, you know, who knows? Some people down here in Texas, where I am, absolutely refuse to uh to not carry a weapon. They refuse to give it up. They die, they they are carrying all the time, 100% of the time. They probably sleep with it. Who knows? Um, and and the security that it gives them, I can understand it. I don't do it myself. If I was to carry around a gun all day long, I'd probably shoot my dick off with it. Uh I'm not even kidding you. I'm just fucking there are times when I'm the clumsiest motherfucker on planet earth. It's ridiculous. And I wouldn't recommend anybody to be if they if they had to get the job of playing me in a movie, I wouldn't go, I wouldn't do that. It's just like I'm just too clumsy, you know. So, but there are a lot of people who have guns, and sometimes the criminals have guns too. So that's probably one of the reasons why a lot of my uh fellow co-workers are legitimately carrying at work. Um, it's and I'm not trying to blow anybody in, and I would want to be very careful uh that I don't, I'm not gonna name any names, and I'm not gonna say anybody, you know, I'm not gonna say that this guy did that or that that guy did that, but a lot of people feel they like they need the security of having a weapon on them. And the people that I know who who do have guns, they're fine I'm fine with it. They're good people, they just are armed. That's all. And then it's probably one of the reasons why it's probably one of the reasons why people in Texas are so friendly, because if they're not, they'll just get fucking shot right in the face. Uh no, I don't think that it that is why it is because people down here really honestly seem to be very genuinely friendly, whether they're armed or not. But when it comes to talking about cars, okay, and the fact that people are sometimes trying to steal them or steal parts off of them. I have I have numerous stories about this, so uh you're gonna have to sit through this because I want to just kind of relay to you some of the situations that happened out there. And when I relay a situation uh about something that happened to me, I'm not necessarily trying to tell you stories of my life or things that happened to me. I'm just trying to give you a cautionary tale, at least in this particular case, because these things fucking happen, and you wouldn't even believe some of it if I hadn't been there. Now, uh it was a great many years ago a gentleman traded in a car. I was working at a brand dealership, I still work for the brand, and a gentleman traded in a car, it was actually in really excellent shape. And at one point, a car had been there a couple days, and I said, Listen, go out and do a uh used car check of this car, right? So I'm like, okay, so I go get I go get the keys because you know they had a place where the keys were kept, but it wasn't really honestly all that secure. But that's uh that's uh we're gonna get to that in a few minutes here. But I went out and I tried to pull this car in, and it just it drove into the shop, and I only had to drive it about a hundred feet, which is good. Uh, but it drove really weird, and I was like, what the fuck? So I put it, I put it in my lift, I put it up in the air, and I noticed that one of the rear lower control arms, this is a big control arm too, had two separate bushings in it, and it had a ball joint and kind of a ball joint and a big long stud arrangement, and it was completely missing, completely missing. And by the looks of it, because I looked at it, you know, I spent a good I spent a good time, how the fuck did anybody take this off? And and I'm looking at it, and there were really no tool marks that I could see. So the only conclusion that I could come to was that whoever took this part off knew exactly what they were doing because it wasn't like you know, they didn't take a cutting torch and cut you know three other arms in half and and melt this, this, uh, you know, melt the brake lines or melt the brake hose or melt anything. They removed it almost literally surgically. They must have they had to have taken the tire off, but then they put it right back on again. And I'm like, I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm gonna get this guy, he took the fasteners with him too. He took the nuts and the bolts. I mean, obviously, if you if you steal something and then you leave the nuts and bolts on the ground underneath it, it's kind of like somebody goes, Hey, uh, what's going on with the nuts and bolts? You know, so but then the car had but like I said, had been there a couple of days. And when I talked to the salesperson who had taken it in on trade, he goes, you know, it drove just fine. I mean, the guy drove it here, so it happened on our lot, and we had cameras that were not the state-of-the-art cameras, and that's another thing we're gonna talk about here in a few minutes. But that's some of the shit that can happen. You know, parts get stolen off your car. It was at this very same dealer also that a gentleman uh this this was just funny. Uh, a gentleman, I I use the word loosely, dropped his car off for service, got parked out back, and then he showed up much, much later and uh keyed the living shit out of his car. He keyed the fuck out of it, he even keyed the mirrors. But did he key any other cars in the lot? Nope. Just singled that one car out and keyed it. And he was wearing, of course, he was wearing a ski mask, right? So you couldn't tell who he was. And we had him on camera. And my boss, and I gotta say, this is probably the best thing that this guy ever did, and and honestly, he had a very short list of things that he did that were good. But one of the best things he ever did was he was talking to this guy. He was like the VP of operations or whatever, some fucking fancy title for being the uh owner's right-hand man, and and it means exactly what you think it does. But uh he told this kid, this kid goes, Oh, my car got keyed on your parking lot, and he showed him the video and he goes, Yeah, you're the motherfucker who keyed it. Get the fuck out of here, take your car with you, you prick. And I was like, Wow, that's pretty cool. But then I I realized later, I go, Yeah, obviously he was the one who did it. I mean, it was more than obvious. I mean, if he'd you know, if he'd keyed like 12 cars around it, then yeah, you know, obviously it was just some asshole who's pissed off at the dealership. But this was this was no bueno about it. This was just this guy keying his own car, including the fucking mirrors, which was I thought was a really nice touch. And I hope he's having fun driving the fucking thing around. But it was a really long time ago, so that guy probably doesn't have that car anymore, and who knows, he might even be dead, which he would probably deserve anyway. But uh, you have to this these are things that you have to you have to know, honestly, as as a uh technician, as somebody who works on the cars, you have to know what this shit happens because you have to kind of keep an eye, help keep an eye out for it. Unless, of course, you don't give a fuck about the place you work, which is which is you know, I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of you out there who don't really give a fucking rip where you work. But I think a lot of us, and I would hope it's a large majority, but I think there's a lot of us who do care about where we work because they hopefully treat us okay and they pay us okay. And and maybe not, maybe they deserve to have their shit fucking hammered on. But uh no, that you and and with the with the cars, we we it it if they're not stealing parts off the cars, they're stealing the cars. And this this happened uh at the last dealer I worked at before the one I'm at right now. Uh we that dealership was kind of in a I don't want to say it was in a ghetto, it wasn't in a super bad neighborhood, but it wasn't also the greatest neighborhood. And and it had, I don't know, there was just a lot of shenanigans going on at that particular dealer, and every day it seemed like something different. But we had uh a car wash, and what we would do as technicians, we would get done working on a car, whether it was an oil change or even a repair, do the test drive if we're gonna do it, and then line it up for the for the uh line it up for the car wash. And then one of the guys from the car wash would come down, jump in the car, and drive it through the car wash, and then take it over to a little area where they vacuumed them out. Pretty standard stuff for most car dealers these days. I think if you're not washing them, you're missing out on on a key point that makes your customers very happy with your service. You need to wash the cars. I always say that there's power in the car wash. You bring back, you bring somebody's car back to them, it had you know an inch of dirt all over it, and then you bring it back to them and it's clean, they're like, holy cow, you know. So then you can't really buy that. There's no amount of money that can buy that, just have them have somebody wash the fucking cars, it's really important. But in this particular case, there was a line of cars waiting to be washed through the uh car wash, and there was only one or two guys there because they're not gonna hire a whole army of people to wash the cars, they're just gonna hire a couple of dudes who can drive them through the car wash, and that's it. And if they get busy, and they might have even been right in the car wash, but since we, and I include myself with this, as technicians, we're a lazy bunch of pricks, we pull the car up to the car wash and just leave the keys right in it and leave it open. Uh on occasion, we would leave the car running because the battery was low and they didn't want to buy a battery. And and and I think some of you have probably done that, right? Okay, well, I would recommend you don't, but uh, you might be in a better neighborhood than we were. Down there, we were there was a lot of wacky stuff that happened there. Uh, I was there probably six years. Uh, I left one Friday night, and uh a guy had pulled in with a car right as I was leaving, and he had been shot uh out on the street, and he pulled his car into the into the parking lot of our dealership. It was late at night, so I was like the last one to leave, and I drove right by it, and uh I didn't really pay any attention. There's all kinds of dumb shit that goes on at that place, and and uh ended up the guy was shot, and they had to bring in the fire trucks later to hose all of his blood off the parking lot, and cops came down, it was a big fiasco, and my service manager was there for a long time that night, but uh they got it all taken care of. Um, and then there was another time, and this was really weird because when they built our our building and our lot, the city said, Well, you need to have a small parking lot of about 10 cars out in front of the dealership off to the side for public parking, public parking. And I'm not sure it was kind of a weird place to it was in Austin, Texas, and they have kind of some crazy rules there. So it's like, whatever, you know, you want us to pave, you know, maybe a quarter of an acre and put some parking space, you know, paint some parking lines on it. Whatever, we'll do it. We just want to get, you know, we want to get into business, we want to get our our business up and running. And so we really didn't think about it, but we all knew that it was a public parking spot and anybody could park there and anybody could leave anything they wanted there, and it was public parking and it was it was basically free. It wasn't like you know, there should have been meters or anything there. And then this dude pulls up in like this crappy, crappy looking motorhome, and he decides for about a month that he's gonna live there. And so he was there every day. And when we were open, he used to come on the lot. He did not work for us, but he would come on the lot and he would pick up trash, pull weeds, and and and I think he even had a weed eater at one time. And I don't know if he wanted a job or if he wanted tips or if he wanted money, or or I don't know what he wanted. I it seemed to me, because I I didn't really talk to him, and it's unusual. I usually would have would talk to people, but he just was there every day. And then one day uh he overstayed his welcome and the police asked him to go and he left. And I hadn't I didn't see him ever again after that. But that was just really something weird is that we had like a homeless guy living in his car on a public parking lot that was right in front of our used car lot, right off to the side of our used car lot was kind of crazy. We had a lot of homeless people that camped in the woods that was right next door to our dealership, so we had to deal with whatever that was going on there. Uh, there was this is I I have to laugh. Um, and it's not really funny, but we had uh at night we would go, uh the sales managers, whoever was working that night, would kind of go around and make sure the building was secure because it was kind of a problem. And one night we had a second floor at this particular facility, and there was a set of stairs that went up to the second floor where cars could be parked outdoors. They weren't indoors, they were outdoors. And he was coming down the stairs, and some uh a homeless woman was coming up this the stairs, and I'm I'm sorry, I'm laughing, because it really wasn't funny, but it is kind of in retrospect. Uh, the salesman is coming down and he sees this woman and he's like, Hey, you know, uh, she's walking up the stairs like she's I don't know, gonna camp out up on our uh second floor or something outdoors. And so he goes, Hey, you know, you can't really be here. This is private property and you're trespassing. And instead of saying, Oh, okay, I'll leave or anything like that, she just punched the guy right in the chest. And apparently she she was a little but a little on the butch side. So he was like not knocked out or anything like that, but he was he was kind of shocked and stunned a little bit. And it's not fucking funny, Jesus Christ. But this is the kind of shit that happens that you need to keep yourself safe from. You know, you see, you know, if you're working in an area now where I work now, we do not have a really a real homeless problem where we are right now. But a lot of other dealers in this city, in the city of Dallas where I'm at now, they do have a large problem. And and I gotta be honest with you, I was in Houston for some baseball games. Uh I went to what it used to be called Minute Made Park. It's got a new name now. I don't know. In the beginning it was Enron Field, so I don't know what the fuck it's called now. And if they're gonna change the name every year, they should I'm just gonna give it a name and call it that. But we would go to ball games down there, and there was a a dealership that my friend worked at was pretty close to the ballpark, and there were so many fucking homeless people there. It was unbelievable. You couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting somebody who's homeless, sleeping on the sidewalk, sleeping in a gutter, sleeping under a bridge, sleeping in a tent, sleeping on the ground. It did there was so many of them, and uh they they're gonna do whatever they can if they have any kind of addictions, they're gonna steal whatever they can. So you gotta be safe. You gotta you gotta look after what's going on. And I'm sure that the some of the dealers down there in Houston and some here in Dallas and even Austin and across the southwest where it's typically warm all year round. I mean, obviously, not real warm in the in the wintertime, but still warmer than where I'm from anyway. You're gonna have people who are gonna live outdoors and be homeless. And and and I there's nothing, it's terrible to say this out loud, but there's really nothing you can do about it because it's not one problem. I mean, yeah, homeless people sounds like it's one problem, but every single homeless person is a different problem. You you would have to be able to solve a million different problems to help these people, and it and I don't know what to do. Uh I I'm torn between because they're they're always gonna be at stoplights and that, especially down in Austin. It was really bad. There's always they're holding up a sign, you know, I need food, I haven't eaten, and you know, how who knows how long? And they want money. And then and like the the first instinct is to give them money if you have any, because most of us don't have any anymore, right? We buy everything with a card. I'm certainly not gonna hold a car out, card out uh debit card out the window and have them swipe. I mean, you know, if a homeless guy has stripe on his phone, I'm just not gonna do it, you know, or whatever it is, or whatever it's called, where you can uh swipe a card. But uh these people sometimes they will resort to uh drastic measures to try to get money for whatever it is they need, whether it's food or drugs or drink or whatever. So you gotta keep careful. Uh one of the buildings that the company I work for rented to move some technicians into, they had uh, I want to say it was an electric generator of some kind, it wasn't even gas-powered, and some homeless people tried to steal it. So, like I said, you gotta keep an eye out. Um, but when we're talking about the cars, the important thing to really keep track of, and it makes it a little bit easier because it's not very big, but there's a huge problem with it sometimes, and that's the keys. Because it's really difficult to steal cars nowadays unless you have the keys or a really good USB stick and you're trying to steal a Kia or a Hyundai. But really, who steals those? Just like young, young kids uh who who've dropped out of high school are stealing those things and doing donuts in the in the grass of the high school they used to go to before they got kicked out. But for some of the stuff, like I mean, like I said, I'm working at a highline dealer, we have to keep track of our keys, and we actually have a thing called key tracks. Oh, ironic, right? But uh, we have to keep our keys in that so that nobody can get at the cars that we have, whether it's uh dealership car or uh one of our customers' cars. And I think honestly, you know, if if if a car gets stolen off our lot, if they hit us at the right time, we might not know it for 30 days. They go around and they do an inventory once a month, make sure all the cars are still there. And I haven't heard anything yet, but I know that uh some places they go, yeah, we're missing two, and then they can't figure out why, you know, and then they don't and then they go back and they look at cameras because a lot of dealerships have cameras, of course, and they'll see, oh yeah, somebody stole that car three weeks ago. That fucking car is in pieces parts, bro. That cars that car's been stripped to its nuts and bolts. But uh, if you keep track of the keys, hopefully this won't happen. Now, one place I worked at uh this was actually a little bit clever. Uh, a gentleman came in on a Saturday, test drove a car, and somehow switched a set of keys that worked for that car, gave those keys back to the salesman. Salesman thought, oh, that's cool. He just came to look at it and he doesn't want to buy it, and he left. Well, he left with the keys for that car, and the and the uh salesman actually put a set of keys that fit nothing on the lot into the key tracks or wherever they're keeping the keys. And then the guy shows up on the lot like later the next day when we were closed on Sunday and stole the car, just drove off in it. Just drove off in it. They got him, they got him, he got arrested. I mean, and I think they got the car back. Unfortunately, and fortunately the car came back in one piece, okay? But you know, as as far as uh a technician goes, if somebody steals a car, eh, who gives a fuck, right? I mean, there's factories all over the world fucking kicking them out in the millions every year. So if somebody steals a car, just just you know, don't be a hero and jump in the middle, you know, the guy might be armed or something, but you know, you want to keep track of what's going on and you want to make sure, uh, and then this is probably an important part of what I'm trying to tell you here. If you handle the keys properly, somebody comes up to you and says, Hey, you got done working on that used car or that you did a PDI in that new car, do you put the keys back in the into the key tracks and the key tracks that we have anyway? And I think a lot of dealers have this, it you put a key in a slot, it knows who who put it back in the slot, what car it is, and what slot number it is, and that it's the keys are safely stored away properly, where nobody can get at them unless they have a password for that particular machine. It's computer controlled, lets you in. Ours is biometric, so I I stick my thumb on a little pad and it says, okay, what what do you want? You know, it doesn't say that, but it it pops up what do you want and put in the keys and out they come. I think a lot of you have those. Those are very good, but you don't want to be this the fucking guy. And I'm telling you, I'm you know, I'm not advocating for your dealer at all. I'm just telling you that you want to keep you want to protect yourself and your livelihood. Put the keys back in that fucking key tracks every time. Because I'll tell you what, there's going to be one time where you leave a set of keys on your box, somebody breaks into your building looking for keys to cars, and he finds a key on your box, and he goes outside and he clicks it, and it's it's a customer's car, and maybe it's you know, maybe it's a fifty thousand dollar car, maybe it's a seventy-five thousand dollar car, maybe it's a hundred thousand dollar car. It doesn't really matter, it's not theirs and it's not yours to lose. And all because you didn't want to walk 20 or 30 feet, maybe 50 feet, to put the keys in the proper key vault, and this guy gets his key, gets gets your keys, gets the keys for that car, walks outside, finds it. So you'll real easy to find them at night, especially. You hit the unlock button, the lights light up, you go over and you go, You're all mine now. And out the door he goes. Out the door he goes. Now we have uh gates on our dealership, so you really can't drive in and out. But I I can tell you something right now. I walk almost every night. I walk about three miles. I live real close to the dealer. I walk down and around the dealership up to a point, and then I walk back, and that's how I stay healthy or at least semi-healthy. I can tell you many, many, many nights, those gates are not fucking closed. They're not closed. Whoever's supposed to close them is fucking the dog. They're not doing it. So if somebody went broke into the building, which they can do, they can do that, gets a set of keys, goes outside, they've got a free car. So lock up those keys and keep them put away. You know, uh keep them put away where they're supposed to be. And I don't want to sound like your boss, but you personally do not want to be responsible for a car getting stolen in any way, shape, or form. And if you had keys on your toolbox and that car got stolen, that's pretty much your fault. And a lot of insurance companies, if they find out the keys were not locked up properly, they won't pay off on that. And that's a fucking mess. That's a problem, that's a big fucking problem. And you might end up getting fired over something like that. So let's not let that happen. Unless, of course, you want to get fired, but even then, there's better ways to get fired or quit than to. Leave keys hanging around for some criminal to drive off with somebody else's car because it's just a bad situation all the way around. And you know, you could conceivably get a bad reputation as a technician for not taking care of customers' keys and cars properly. You don't need that, keeping track of your equipment uh and all the stuff in your shop. Uh, I can't imagine somebody uh here I go. I'm gonna say this and then I'm gonna tell you something, okay? I can't imagine anybody really honestly pulling into your shop with a U-Haul on like a Saturday night, somehow getting in and not setting an alarm off of any kind and then loading up tools and equipment into a U-Haul and then just driving out. And as and as as I say that, as improbable as that might sound, I can guarantee you that it's happened. I can guarantee you. I don't have to read, I don't have to search on the internet for it, I don't have to ask people. I know that it has happened because there's a lot of fucking ballsy criminals out there, and and maybe what they want is just, I don't know, who knows what they want. Anything of value? Be sure. Maybe they want specific equipment or specific tools or just any tools. It's tough to tell, and you have to kind of safeguard all of it, okay? There's one other portion to this that I want to talk about, and that's that's the money. I don't suspect that a lot of dealerships anymore have a lot of money hanging around. I don't really think that a lot of people are rolling in with you know $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, or even $100,000 worth of cash to plunk down to buy a car. But here again, I'm saying it out loud, right? I'm sure somebody has. Somebody's rolled in and said, Oh, I want to buy that Ferrari. How much is it? It's $250,000. They open up a suitcase, booyah. There's $250,000. Now let's just suppose for a second that this guy's friends know he went down to the Ferrari dealer, bought a Ferrari for cash, and that the fucking dealer's sitting on a quarter of a mill. So they're gonna break in later that night and steal it or knock the guy down when he tries to take it home with him or take it to the bank. It's just something. And as I say that, I can assure you that it has actually happened. All these scenarios are not so far-fetched that they can't happen. And so you have to be on the lookout, you have to be alert, you have to be paying attention. And this is not just to protect you, because let's just say, and and this almost happened uh back back in New York where I'm from, many, many, many years ago. It almost happened. The dealer principal, and I think it was the owner, honestly, the owner, and this was this was honest to God, probably in the 60s. And I know you probably go, oh, Jesus Christ, Uncle Jimmy's talking about the the long ago past, you know, it's fucking the 60s, you know, BC, right? But this guy had gone down to the bank to make a deposit of all the cash they had gotten that day. And in the 60s, there weren't debit cards, there were checks, and people wrote a lot of those, but sometimes people just bought shit in cash. And of course, the cars were a lot cheaper then, the repairs were a lot cheaper, but still at the end of a successful day, maybe you've sold 25 cars and you've fixed 50 of them. You could have anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 on you cash if you're going to the bank to deposit it. And this particular owner, it was the owner of the building, of the dealership, had actually gone down to the bank to deposit the money that that company had made that day, and a guy tried to rob him at gunpoint. And one of his employees saw this happen. Maybe he got out of work or something and he was headed to the bank, or maybe he was headed to who knows, the bar next door, maybe, but and he was armed. Now, this was a long time ago, but he shot that fucking robber, that guy trying to rob his boss. He fucking shot him. And it and and the story gets, you know, and it's a story, right? I'm hearing it two, three, third hand, fourth hand, and I don't know all the details. But it was it was relayed to me by several people who assured me that it happened, and I don't have any doubt. I mean, that stuff could easily happen. I mean, you want to hang out by a bank and wait for people to show up with money? Fuck, back in the 60s, that was a good way to make a living, probably. But this dude ran into an immovable force. He fucking dude comes up and says, Oh, you're trying to rob my boss? Yeah, I don't think so. Blam blam. See you later. Have fun dying, asshole. And so, and then and then the boss, the owner of the uh facility, was eternally grateful and offered this guy pretty much employment for life. And uh he was there for many, many, many, many years and phoned it in for many, many years, by the way. Also, uh, which is not good, but nowadays you have to protect people's credit cards, you have to protect the valuables that are in their car. Uh, I can't tell you how many times, and and this is I'm on the fence about this, and I think maybe some of you might go, Well, Jesus Christ, Uncle Jimmy, what's the big deal? Uh lots of people have a lot of shit in their trunk. And you you know this, I know this, and and it is really hard. I mean this, it is really hard to resist fucking with some of it, right? Uh, in Buffalo when I was in butt when I was working in Buffalo, hockey sticks were the thing. There seemed to be a lot of them in people's cars. And we always had these goddamn shipping spacers from when we PDI'd the cars laying around, and they would make really good pucks. And so we could we kept we would bat them around for a little while, you know. I mean, a couple, two, three minutes is all. I mean, we weren't gonna put on a full-blown Stanley Cup playoff, but uh we were fuck around with them. Baseballs, footballs, golf balls, everything, basketballs. I mean, we actually have a couple of basketballs in the shop. I'm pretty sure they came out of cars and uh somehow or another never made it back into them. Uh, that's not really a good deal, but you gotta kind of keep an eye out for the customer stuff. Because if something comes up missing in a car and you're the one who worked on it, and it and it could be a football, and maybe it was signed by by who knows, you know, uh Jim Kelly or Josh Allen. I'm not gonna mention any other quarterbacks. Come on, get real. And it's valuable, and you start playing with it, and maybe you fuck it up, or maybe they throw it somewhere and it gets stuck up in the rafters, and you're just like, oh, whatever, it's just a football. And that dude, it's like that dude's prize possession. Don't you you know, security runs both ways. You gotta kind of corral your you gotta correct, you gotta kind of corral the shit that goes on with the stuff from the cars that you're working on. Don't fuck with it, really. I mean, it you're supposed to provide security for those people, not just their money, not just their electronic devices or their sports equipment, but in general, everything for them. You know, I I know that that stuff has disappeared from cars. Uh the stories are endless, really. There's there's there's so many. And uh one of them is one of them is a really weird one. We had guy left a like a little uh notebook in a loaner car. He left this notebook in one of our loaner cars, and it had something like three thousand dollars in cash in it. So, and I I gotta be honest, you're probably all thinking the same thing I'm thinking is how the fuck do you forget to take three thousand dollars in cash with you? And honestly, I'm thinking the same thing too, and then I think maybe he left it in there on purpose. Because what ended up happening was the kid who had to clean the car took the notebook out, opened it up, saw the money, quickly set it down, finished cleaning the loaner car. It wasn't even this guy's car, it was a loaner car that we loaned him. It was our car. He took the notebook, he took them, he took the money, and he he he just set the notebook down, he just left it, you know. And then the guy comes back a little while later, he's like, Oh, I left my notebook in that car, it's got some money in it. And he said he had like six, eight thousand dollars in it. When I know for a fact, because that the kid who was doing it, I had taken him home a few times. It was really weird, kind of a weird thing. He would ask for rides home, and I gave him a ride home, me and a couple other guys, we gave him ride homes all the time. He was a good kid. He says that he there was about three thousand dollars in there, and he had spent like a couple hundred of it, and he gave him the money back, but that guy insisted that he had like eight thousand dollars in there. And I'm like, oh, that guy's full of fucking shit. Because I trust the kid who fucking took the money out of that notebook more than I trust the fucking dickhead who left it there. So honestly, let that be a cautionary tale for you guys as technicians, for you guys who work on them, maybe clean them, whatever you do to them. Don't fuck with people's stuff. If they and and obviously it was a loner, it really wasn't it really, you know. I would have just said, oh, you left it in the car. Fuck you, finders keepers, you know. But a lot of dealers are not gonna see it that way. That kid got fired, he'd I feel like he didn't deserve to be fired. You leave something in a loaner car, it's fucking finders keepers, motherfucker. You're not smart enough to keep track of it. And plus two, honestly, I feel like it was a scam. You know, you put $3,000 in there, you let the kid steal it, and then you tell them, oh, it wasn't three thousand dollars, it was eight or ten or twelve or fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. What are they gonna do? They're gonna call you a fucking liar? No, most dealerships are just gonna fucking dig into their coffers, pull the money out, hand it to you, you you roll off, laughing the whole fucking way, and they fire a kid who doesn't really, honestly, in my book, deserve to be fired. He worked hard, that kid did. But you know, it's it's another one of those cases where you got to look out for yourself, man. We had one car that I used to work on all the time. It's it's been gone a long time, and nobody ever brings them to the dealer anymore. But they had these two drawers that lived right in the center of the console underneath where the uh uh audio equipment was. And early on, when these cars first came out, they were state-of-the-art, they were expensive, they were bought by people who had money, they were bought by people who wanted prestige of owning this fine, high-class, high-tech automobile. And these drawers on every motherfucking car were full of money. And I'm sometimes a lot, and I never once touched a fucking penny of it. Because I knew a lot of these motherfuckers knew exactly how much they had. And if you even wrinkled a bill, they would know, you know. So you don't want to you don't want to do that. Keep yourself employed, keep yourself from getting fired or even arrested. Don't fuck with don't especially don't fuck with people's money. That's just a basic, that's just basically a good a good rule of thumb. Don't ever fuck with people's money. Because 95% of the people on this planet, all they give a flying fuck about is money. So don't mess around with it. Don't mess around with it, don't cost them money, don't do anything that costs them money. Try to re avoid their money, okay? Stay away from it. Uh, credit card numbers, this is dumb. But uh shop I worked at many years ago had some customers that would drop their car off. They wouldn't even want the advisor to call them. They would just say, I'm dropping the car off, fix it, whatever it is, just fix it, get it done, and then bring it back to where I live or work. Just bring it back, just valet it, just drop it off. They didn't want to talk to anybody about it, they didn't give a fuck what it needed, they just said do it. And they kept the dealership kept that individual's credit card number, expiration date, and their uh security number, the three-digit security number. They kept it on file, and in a couple of cases, they actually put it in with the customer information that printed out on the repair order. And I'm like, well, that's probably not a really good idea. But there it was. And so if this guy got a repair order, you know, and he left it in his car form and he wadded up and threw it out, he just threw out his credit card number with the expiration date, with the security code. Anyone could have gone up to an ATM, put in his shit, bought something online, whatever, they could have fucking cleaned this guy out. So, and and I had to point out believe it or not, I had to point it out to him. I'm like, hey, you got to get this guy's fucking credit card numbers off these ROs because these things end up everywhere. They're wadded up in the trunk, they get stuffed in the glove box, they fly out the window, they could be on the side of the road. You just don't want that. You don't want that, and especially if you do it more than once, if you've got like six to eight different ROs with customers' names, addresses, phone number, email address, and then underneath all that, they got their credit card information. If I was a criminal, which I'm definitely not, if I was a criminal though, I'd keep a copy of everybody's RO. I'd have all these all these numbers, and if they wanted to fire me or if they gave me shit, or I would just go and run up huge bills on these people's cards, and they would have no way of knowing who it is because you have all the proper information to use it, right? So gotta keep an eye out for that shit. Uh, I want to I wanted to kind of try to make this one a little short. I'm at an hour already. I don't know what's gonna happen here, but uh, I just wanted to kind of give you a synopsis of what's going on here. Look, um, your security involves you keeping your stuff safe, keeping yourself safe, keeping your family safe, keeping yourself employed, whatever security is necessary, whatever security is involved, make a record of your stuff so you have it in case something happens. Uh, and then I cringe because uh every once in a while I see stuff that makes me just cringe. I see shops that caught on fire. It happens, it happens a lot more often than I wish it would. Uh, it appears that the oh this guy that rents my garage with me here, the rock and roll garage, he had a fire in one of the garbage cans. So I'm gonna have to have a chat with him. And he may be a former tenant fairly soon here. But you want to you want to try to keep your stuff safe and keep yourself safe. Uh if you have guns, make sure if you have guns with you in your toolbox or in your car that they're the safety's on, and maybe I don't know, it's kind of weird to have a gun that's not loaded, right? I think a lot of you feel that way. If it's got to be loaded, make sure that there's no way it can discharge accidentally. This has caused problems in the past. It's ridiculous. Also make sure that the cars are secure, the dealers' cars, they're new, they're used cars, and the customers' cars. People are always out there looking around for an opportunity to steal shit. Don't give it to them. Don't fucking do it. Don't do that. Okay. Try to be safe around all your stuff. Try to be safe when you're working on stuff. That's a that's a form of security. Just not hurting yourself, not not fucking yourself up, not crushing yourself with a car that was improperly put on a lift, keeping an eye on people who come through your shop who look like they might be uh shifty, so to speak. Okay. Keeping an eye on your money, keeping an eye on your customers' money, but not fucking touching it. Thank you very much. Uh keeping track of uh, you know, the credit cards and that stuff. Also, too, I forgot to mention a lot of us that work in dealerships have uh very specific brand proprietary scan tools and equipment. These things are absolutely unbelievably popular, especially with Russians. Okay. Yeah, you want that stuff needs to be safely and safely stored away and secured, and a lot of it's not. A lot of it can be walked off with in seconds fucking flat. So you're gonna want you know, you're gonna want to keep an eye on that stuff, make sure that stuff doesn't go away. You can't do your job without your brand's specific proprietary. Oh, and by the way, Eric, I can say proprietary. Thank you very much. He was giving me hell because I had trouble with it a couple of podcasts ago. But listen, this stuff is super, super valuable because they're not letting anybody else have it. The whole right to repair thing comes down to the to the fact that they don't want to share with anybody, they want to just give it to you, and they don't want anybody else to get their fucking hands on it, and all they got to do is pretend that they work at your dealership. They can roll in and go, oh, this the this is the computer that's bad. I need to go fix it. And then next thing you know, it's fucking completely gone. That guy doesn't fix dick, and he's not coming back with it. So that's another thing you want to make sure that it's safely and securely taken care of and looked after and guarded, really, not with your life. Please don't guard anything with your life, especially in a car dealership's not worth it, okay? Somebody wants to steal a car and they pull a gun on you, that's your car, Mr. Treat it nice, you know. Happy motoring. Don't fuck around with that stuff either. If somebody pulls a gun on you at a lot, just say, take whatever you want. You know, don't ask somebody to shoot you. Please don't do that. And then also, too, one of the last things I wanted to talk to you about here. And uh I said I was gonna get off. I promise. Your parts department has a lot of it money tied up in parts inventory. You don't want to let people get in there and get their fucking hands on that stuff either. Okay, if you've got some parts on your toolbox, you might want to just kind of, you know, make sure that there's nothing nobody, you know, is is eyeballing them or looking them over, or you know, maybe maybe somebody's decided that they need something that you have, maybe, maybe a fellow employee, I hope not, but but possibly somebody who's just kind of strolling through your shop and checking it out, casing the joint, and they see you have all these parts on your toolbox for somebody's car. Maybe they feel like they need them, maybe they feel like they could sell them. Next thing you know, they're gone. And if you think it hasn't happened, I can tell you right now, I'm sure as I'm sitting here that it has. Okay. And there's other there's other problems with uh cores and even scrap metal, that's a little sore subject for me. I was trying to, you know, make a little extra coin, uh pulling some scrap metal out of the scrap dumpster that was worth more than just the regular 33 cents a pound they get, but uh you know, I got shut down on that. So whatever. You know, I think you have bigger fish to fry, bigger things to worry about. But no, we gotta fucking clamp down on that. No excuse for that, right? So anyway, in conclusion, keep an eye out for your shit, keep an eye out for your friend's shit, keep an eye out for your dealership or your shop's shit. Don't let the stuff get stolen, don't let it walk off, don't let it get damaged or destroyed. If you can, again, obviously if somebody's coming to take something from you and they've they're armed and they're showing you pretty plainly that they're armed, back off. You need to be safe first and really safe first, then secure. Safe and secure, yes, that would be great if you can get them both together. I think it's possible. But listen, if you and I'm telling you, this is the last thing I'm gonna say to you right now. If you go into work tomorrow and you decide that you don't want to keep keys in your toolbox anymore, and then you put them all into whatever it is you store your keys in, whether it's a vault or a lockbox or whatever, and then the next night somebody comes in and grabs keys off the guy next to you toolbox or a guy across the shop, and those cars get stolen, you're gonna breathe a sigh of relief that it wasn't fucking you. All right? All right, and speaking of it wasn't fucking you, guess what? See ya.