Express Tech At Three Months Asks Whether 'Once Things Settle Down' Is A Bay Number Or A Season

The badge clip had worn a shine into three shirt pockets by the time an express technician sat down and asked the forum the one question his shop foreman had not answered.

His service director thought he had a lot of potential, he wrote. His goal was mainline. His foreman had told him, more than once, that once things settled down they would work him into an apprenticeship. Three months in, he wanted to know the right time to bring it up again, not seeming impatient, not rushing anyone, but not wanting to waste a season either. He had not named the dealer group. The forum did not need it to.

The thread split the way those threads always split. One camp told him to ask again immediately, on a Monday, in person, with a specific date in mind. The other camp told him that asking twice in three months was how you got remembered as the guy who couldn't wait. Both camps were certain. Neither camp had his foreman.

What nobody could tell him was what the phrase meant, because the thread produced nine different shops that had used it and no two meanings. One commenter had heard it about a lift that never arrived. Another had heard it through an entire model year. A shop owner wrote that his own foreman had been saying settle down since the spring, and that the spring had been two years ago, and that the apprentice in question had eventually settled down at a Honda store across town.

"Potential is a compliment," wrote a service writer who had been on both sides of the counter. "A start date is a plan."

The arithmetic is not complicated, which is why nobody at the dealership wants to say it out loud. An express technician three months in is cheap, fast, and profitable: tire rotations, batteries, multi-points, and the oil changes that keep the lobby full. Moving him to mainline costs the shop a trained set of hands in the lane and buys back a tech who can't yet diag a network fault. Settling down costs nothing to say. The quarter-year it consumes comes out of someone else's calendar, and that someone has not yet learned to charge for it.

A commenter from a competing group noted that their shop had handed an apprentice a bay at nine weeks and lost him to a transmission rebuilder within the year, offered as proof that rushing didn't work either. The reply underneath it pointed out that nine weeks was at least a number.

The sentence that changed the room was not the vote. It came from a flat-rate veteran two replies from the bottom: "Settle down isn't a date. It's a season, and it starts the day you stop asking."

What the thread could not establish, what no thread can, is whether the foreman means it. He uses the phrase about parts, about the lift that needs a switch, about a Monday. It is possible he is stalling an apprentice. It is equally possible it is simply how he talks, and the apprentice is hearing a promise in a filler word.

The original poster thanked everyone, re-clipped the badge, and said he would ask again after the weekend. Nobody in the thread told him what to say if the answer was the same sentence.