It's Sunday and I'm posting this week's blog entry. Usually I post the entry on Saturday, but I had a few errands yesterday so I didn't have the time. I could have found the time, of course, but I wasn't really looking that hard.
One of the errands was to get an oil change for my car. I have two cars -- or actually, one car and one truck -- but I hardly ever drive the truck. It's old and rundown and I only keep it around because I figure it might come in handy someday. So the truck probably doesn't need an oil change, unless oil can go bad just by sitting around inside an engine that hardly ever gets started up. Maybe it can. I don't know. In any event, I had the oil changed for the car. I'll worry about the truck some other time.
When I was in college, I didn't need a car, because the public transportation system was pretty good, and it was free for students because of some deal the university made with the transit district. I had a few friends who had a car, but most of the people I knew just took the bus. There were a few times when it would have been more convenient to have a car, but I managed to get through those times somehow.
But after I graduated, I needed a car so I could look for a job. The car I bought was only about seven years old, but it hadn't been taken care of very well, so it seemed a lot older. I only had it for about two years before I decided to get rid of it, because things were always breaking down and as soon as I fixed one thing, something else stopped working. I calculated that I'd spent about as much on repairs as I spent when I bought the car.
In the thirty years since getting rid of that car, I've owned three other cars -- or actually, two cars and one truck. They were all manufactured by different companies, but they all had one thing in common. Actually, of course, they had many things in common. They all had four wheels, a windshield, and an internal combustion engine, for example. But the one particular thing in common that I'm talking about is that they all had a routine maintenance schedule of 7,500 miles.
That means every 7,500 miles, you're supposed to bring in your car so they can perform the scheduled maintenance, which varies somewhat, but typically includes things such as checking the brakes, tuning up the engine, replacing the belts, rotating the tires, and whatever else they think is important. They also change the oil and replace the air filter.
So here's a quick question: Regardless of what kind of car you drive, how often do they say you should change your oil? That's right, every 3,000 miles.
You probably already know where I'm going with this, but I'll tell you anyway. If you change your oil every 3,000 miles and bring your car in for service every 7,500 miles, you're going to get a few unnecessary oil changes. For example, let's say you buy a brand new car with 0 miles on it. After you've driven it 3,000 miles, you change the oil. Then, after you've driven it 6,000 miles, you change your oil again. And once you hit 7,500 miles, you take your car in for service and they change your oil, even though you've only used the old oil for 1,500 miles and you could have driven another 1,500 miles without an oil change. That seems like a waste of perfectly good oil to me.
So I bend the rules a little bit. Rather than change my oil every 3,000 miles, I change it every 3,750 miles, since 3,750 is half of 7,500. That way, when I bring the car in for service and they change the oil, it actually needs an oil change. I've been doing this for thirty years, and the cars don't seem to mind a bit. It's a perfectly rational and sensible thing to do, so I'm sure a lot of other people do the same thing. But I bet a lot of people don't. As a matter of fact, I bet most people don't. I wonder what they do instead. Maybe they do something that seems perfectly rational and sensible to them. Or maybe they don't, since a lot of people aren't very rational or sensible. I have a feeling they just do whatever they feel like.
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