Category Archives: Rants

Rants

Fabwerx – Sun Valley

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This is a long winded 1 Star Review. They have way too many projects going on and also manufacture stuff. One small shop, not enough people, horrible customer service. You will wait and wait and wait and wait. They dont answer phones, dont respond to emails, string you along…and then post on their social media like they turn things around “while you wait”. Dont fall for it.

About 6 months ago I bought a spankin’ new Polaris Pro XP 4 SXS (UTV). I jokingly call it the red rocket. In my constant obsessive quest to customize every vehicle I own, I pre-ordered a sweet new cage with roof, optional rear chase lights, front windshield, and any other option you could get on it. I subsequently bought a bunch of other lighting accessories to mount on the cage. Bunch of lights from Baja Designs, a few thing from KC HiLites, and some 5150 187 whips.

I was looking around the internet and came across this video from UTV Source and a company called Fabwerx was doing a full custom build on a PRO XP 4. Turns out, the shop just happened right around the corner from me so I stopped by. I met with Thad the owner, told him that I had a cage and bunch of accessories that I wanted him to install for me. He gave me a reasonable price and he told me to let him know when I had the cage.

Fast forward about a month and I got word that my cage would be ready in a couple of weeks. This is where the fun began.

I called him, left numerous messages, I emailed him, I stopped by the shop (he wasnt there), so I hit him up on Instagram where I saw him helping people out “while they wait”. He mentioned he was busy and would let me know when he could “fit me in”. Crickets. Hit him up again. Same story, “we are crazy busy. Ill check the cal and let you know”. Crickets. Pinged him AGAIN, he said sorry, crazy busy, ill call you tomorrow. I think you know how that went. I tried calling again, no answer. I finally just said, hey I’m not trying to waste either of our time. If you cant do it, just let me know. I got the “crazy busy” speech yet again. I felt like I was dealing with Dory at this point. I was frustrated and sent him a last chance text saying, “maybe IG DM’s, emails, and/or phone calls arent the proper way to schedule a cage install with you. Can you let me know how all your customers schedule work with you?”. I finally got an honest text from him saying, “Honestly, we are swamped, try these other shops in Simi Valley or Santa Clarita”. Finally some honesty out of this guy.

I replied back saying thanks for being honest, if you could have told me that a month ago, I could have had my cage on already. “Good luck”.

His response? “Sorry pal. good luck to you too” followed by a thumbs down emoji. As if I had rubbed him the wrong way. Super classy.

He gets minus stars. I would stay clear away from this place. They do good design and fab work but getting them to do anything in a timely fashion wont happen. Besides, there are plenty of other places that can do the same thing. SDR Motorsports has much better design and engineering if you ask me. I have another friend that has a Turbo S and ordered a cage and much more Fabwerx. Same story. He had to wait over 2 months to get his cage and then another month to get a slot to install it. And this was for a cage they sold readily through UTV source all day long.

Speaking of UTV Source, remember that video? Watch the video and you will see how frustrated the owner is by the time he picked up his UTV. The 1st video was posted July 15th. The “reveal” video was posted September 20th. “A tornado that spun out of control”. I dont think it was a good spin personally.

Im going to try a couple of other shops around my area. Ill update this when I get my cage installed.

UPDATE: 3/4/2021

SDR Motorsports recommended a few shops to me. One was DirtDirect Motorsports in the San Fernando Valley. They are right by the San Fernando Mission, in fact. I had a brief conversation with Raul, he provided me with a reasonable quote, gave me a date to bring the car and parts and BOOM, that was that. They are very knowledgeable, informative, and helpful and exactly what you want when you are about to drop thousands on upgrades for your baby. They have had my car for about 2 weeks and even worked directly with SDR to obtain some missing parts from their kit. I cant say enough good things about these guys. I called numerous shops to get my project off the ground, these guys are by FAR the best. Big thanks to Tim @ SDR for being a great business owner too. It took quite some time to get my kit but he has always been very responsive and goes the extra mile to make sure you are taken care of.

Happy off-roading everyone. Stay safe out there.

Rants

GrubHub

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Had a strange interaction with GrubHub this evening. My wife called and ordered some food. They took our order, charged our card, and we waited. Patiently. Until it was “a while”. My wife called the restaurant to find out the status of our order. They said they didnt have the order…

My wife logged into her GrubHub account and the order wasnt there either. I started to question her at this point. This was bizarre. She called GrubHub in front of me and they told her that the order was “blocked” and if we wanted an explanation, we could have one delivered via email and the funds would returned in 3-5 business days.

That’s right…they charged our card, didnt get us our food, and didnt even let us know that our order had been blocked at any point. Theft in my eyes.

An hour later, we are ordering food again. Im going to pick it up and Ill never use GrubHub ever again. Those are some questionable business practices. I could see a business doing that if there was an issue with the credit card or negative feedback on the account or something similar as to where the end user isnt being upstanding. What happened here is beyond me. Ill update this when I get an explanation.

I use GrubHub for business meetings from time to time. I cant even imagine how upset I would be if this had happened under those circumstances.

Rants

Semantics

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Why details in dialog are important:

 

At the drive-thru window:

 

Me: …Large Fries annnnd a Large Pepsi.

Speaker: OK, so large fries and…you said Diet Pepsi?

Me: No just regular Pepsi.

Speaker: OK, that’ll be blah blah blah please pull forward…

 

I ended up with Large fries and a medium (regular) Pepsi.

Rants

Interviews

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Throughout my career I have been on many interviews and interviewed a few as well. I realized quickly that its about your mind more than it is about your brain. One interview stuck in my head. I was the one being interviewed. Best interview ever. I replicated that interrogation method when hiring my teams and the folks that were hired as a result of that process, flourished. They all went from generic break/fix Sys Admins to well respected architects and directors/VPs in our industry.

As a systems engineer, we are required to have to have technical prowess. We should know how to navigate our way through some pretty challenging scenarios. Quite often, its under a tremendous  amount of pressure (“get the site back up, we are losing 1000s of dollars every minute!”). Any engineer that has been in the trenches knows what that feels like. They also know how many things are learned…and eventually forgotten. Nobody knows it all. We have all discovered a lot, resolved complex issues as a direct result of our better than average reading comprehension skills, potentially picked up some “good habits” along the way, and again, probably forgot a lot of the minutia involved in resolving the issues. The more of them we fix, the more we realize the minutia is unimportant. Do you remember the KB/TR  number of an issue you fixed 3 years ago? Probably not. However, we all remember how DNS works all the time though, right? Well yes…because that’s fundamental to computing. See my point?

I recently interviewed at a company and was mostly embarrassed at the questions I was being asked. This is a very well known company with a market cap in the billions and growing every day. The position was a middle manager of systems engineering. Nothing I couldnt handle. Unfortunately, two minutes in, I felt like I was 25 again trying to get a job as a desktop support guy when the questions began. No matter how well I did, I didnt want this job.

My point here is that the questions that are asked during an interview process are crucial to the level of talent that is acquired. Be smart with them. A lot of times, the question will be, “what are the 7 layers of the OSI model”. Bad question. Why? You end up with a guy that knows how to memorize things. It has no reflection on the candidates critical thinking skills. Going back to my “best interview ever”…what was the question that was asked that gave me the ability to showcase my talent?

“Tell me everything that happens between the time you type in ‘Google.com’ in your web browser to the time you see the logo and search box”.

Bingo. He not only was able to determine that I understood the OSI model, but that my understanding of applications, proxy servers, DNS, html, tcp/ip and web servers (“the internet”) was up to snuff. I understood the order of operations and clearly, my troubleshooting skills would allow me to isolate and pinpoint the problem. Memorizing the layers of the OSI model doesnt really help you figure out why users cant get to the application.

As an interviewer, dont play Jeopardy with your candidates. As an interviewee, if you see someone playing Jeopardy during an interview, keep faith that you are a professional with industry standard skills and talent. Not knowing the specifics of a google search which enlightened someone a few days prior, doesnt make you a bad candidate. It just means they have an amateur hiring manager without any vision or leadership skills. Keep searching for someone that values your mind.

Good luck out there.