How’s she goin’ eh?

[Steve O’Rourke]

Hello, ladies and gents.

I’ve been watching Eric’s vids for a while now and happened to come across the forum while searching for tool box reviews (I was comparing Snap-On versus the TCA 56″ box I saw at the recent APC trade show in London, Ontario).

Thought I would say hello and introduce myself. My name is Steve and I’m from a small town called Chatham in southwest Ontario, Canada. I’m a single parent to a lovely daughter (Adia, 11) and stepdaughter (Arianna, 14). When I’m not working Iove to cook (slight man crush on Gordon Ramsay LOL), drink wine and dark beer, date pretty women, snowboard, skateboard, mountain bike and practice yoga.

I’ve been in the trade since 2005 where I started as a lube tech at our local Honda dealer. I have had Hondas since 1995 and it was just the logical progression for me LOL.

I got drunk at our work Christmas party (like I always did and was famous and admired for by my coworkers LOL) in December of 2005 and ended up talking with the owner about becoming a tech. The following month he signed me up as an apprentice. I went to the Acura/Honda Apprenticeship Program at Centennial College in Toronto in 2007, graduated in 2009 (proud to say with honours and second highest overall in my program) and passed our Red Seal Trade license exam shortly thereafter.

I have always loved Honda (I own a 2004 Element) and the company as a whole, but the dealership environment was too political for me. It was a small hourly-pay shop and I found personal conflicts and a not-so-ideal working environment prompted my decision to leave in 2012.

I bounced around to about a half dozen different shops trying to find my “happy workplace” only to discover that I will always run into douchebags LOL.

I ended up being let go from a Chrysler dealership by the service manager who felt that my “skillset did not meet his expectations” and that “my heart just wasn’t into it”. I took my own personal trade sabatical and collected unemployment for a year in 2014. Shortly before my EI benefits were to be exhausted, I accepted a position with Trican Well Service in Grande Prairie, Alberta and chased the almighty oil patch dollar as a Nitrogen Pump Operator. Earned my Alberta Class 1/Ontario ACZ trucking license while I was there which is a nice backup to have :).

Given the fact I was a single parent with two daughters, I lasted about four months before I came to the conclusion that $90K a year wasn’t worth only seeing my daughter for eight days a month. At 4pm on Christmas Eve in 2014, I packed up mt Element and began the 4700km trek back home to Ontario and re-entered the trade at a small shop I had worked at before.

The Honda dealership called me up in 2015 and asked me to come back to work for them and I returned under the allure of more money and hoping things had changed. It took me about eight months to realize things had not and would not change and decided to leave the trade again and try my hand at long-haul trucking.

This too didn’t last (long story about that) so I took a temporary job installing satellite and rural LTE high-speed internet before I was given a lead on a small four bay/three tech shop in Sarnia, Ontario. I met with the owner on Family Day in February last year and he hired me on the spot. It’s my boss, the other licensed guy, our apprentice and myself. I’ve been working there every since and aside from the other licensed guy suffering from king shit syndrome (another long story LOL), my boss is amazing to us and gives me the freedom to learn and spread my wings. He also doesn’t hound me or breathe down my neck all day which is such a blessing. He knows I work hard, work well, that I’m the go-to diagnostician and electrical guy and generally leaves me be when I work.

There’s my story in a city-sized nutshell :). It’s been an interesting ride since leaving the cozy dealership realm in 2012 and I can definitely say I’ve learned a lot in that time. I don’t have much time to surf the net outside of using my iPhone, but look forward to reading a lot on the site :).

Topic

[college man]

Welcome to the forum Steve. 🙂 Quite the story. Thanks for sharing.

[Steve O’Rourke]

Thanks. It’s quite an Alice In Wonderland tale for sure lol.

Truthfully, I was expecting a lot of TL:DR responses :P.

Thanks for actually writing something back :).

[Author]

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