Big Old Fat Cats Rule the Shop

Georgetown Foreign Car on Route 113 North of Hardees changed its name to 4N Car several years back because too many people misspelled foreign when writing out checks. Geru Randy Gooner is the owner and master mechanic when he’s not off running a bucket truck for Randy’s Tree service. His son Randy is the climber.

Tom is the always on site mechanic with 30 years experience working on Japanese cars mostly at dealerships. Tom is a mechanical genius who doesn’t waste or mince words and he will diagram your engine or undercarriage in pencil, talk about sensors and computers, there will be waves and amplitudes, minus and negative numbers, until you finally tell him “fix it” but if you don’t want to he doesn’t care about that either.

Last Friday I was hanging at the counter of Georgetown 4N Car with the rest of the fat cats talking about codes, sensors and catalytic converters. My on board computer has been throwing a 430 cat code which sends my entire dash board into amber alert. But the truth is it makes no difference on the performance of the engine while at the inspection lane “it passes the sniff test” according to Tom. And so for a thousand dollars give or take another grand I can live with creating a trailing wake of hydrocarbons, fluorocarbons, nitrous oxide or hydrogen peroxide. I don’t trust any of the data and I’ll stop believing in global warming too if it saves me money.