It's the simple things

I've often found that it's the simple things in life that provide us with the greatest amount of pleasure. Likewise, I believe that it's the simple things in life that can cause us a lot of frustration. I'd like to introduce you to my car, a 2002 Toyota Corolla. It's run for 125,000 miles and hasn't had any catastrophic failures that would require me to dump it and buy a new car. I've kept up with the regularly recommended maintenance and have been pretty fortunate.

I wasn't so lucky this past Friday. The air conditioning stopped working a few weeks ago and I finally got the chance to take the car to the dealer to get it checked out. I explained that air will blow through the vents but it isn't cold. They checked it out and told me that there was a small hole in the condenser. The total cost to replace the condenser and all of the peripheral parts would be about $1100. Not cool. I asked the mechanic if it was really necessary to replace the entire setup or if he could just patch the hole up. Apparently the entire thing has to be replaced.

Whenever the mechanic at the dealer recommended that I get some kind of repair or maintenance that I was initially skeptical about, I would take the car to a different shop to verify the finding. The second opinion always agreed with the dealer mechanics original prognosis. So, it probably safe to say that the condenser is shot. This is not the frustrating part though. What IS frustrating is that this is probably a very simple repair that I could learn in about 5 minutes if someone explained it to me. Of course, the mechanic isn't about to do this; it's in his best interests to make this problem sound a lot more complicated and expensive that it should be.

I encountered this trend of induced complication so many times that I eventually asked one of my friends his opinion on it. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illnois at Urbana-Champaign (also where I earned my B.S. in chemistry) so I thought that perhaps his advanced degree could shine some light on my supposed ignorance. His response was simple, "If someone can't explain something to you in 5 minutes or less, then they don't know what they're talking about." I've used this test numerous times and it almost always weeds out the people that are knowledgeable and open about a subject from those that are unknowing or evasive.

The moral of the story is that life is inherantly simple. It's people that end up complicating it. Try not to be one of them that does.