So here we are in front of the house, thanks to the Goodfellow Auto Hobby Shop closing. Very cool truck from Clark’s Auto Salvage… and the driver’s name is Rusty (a little bit of NASCAR irony there  ).

Drove it around through the alley to park in the driveway. Felt a little weird driving it on a ‘normal’ street (don’t tell SAPD, though  ).

All tucked in with about 3 feet all around – don’t want anything scratchin’ the new paint!

Yup. The Auto Hobby Shop is now closed for good.

I got an e-mail saying it was closed 2 Wednesdays ago, and have been scrambling to get it ready to come home. Still gotta get my boxes of parts tomorrow, but after that just gotta help Jim Eimer get his stuff out of there. Then – Done.

The worst thing about it, it that Jim and I were treated like pond scum despite the fact that we were literally running the shop for them over the weekends for almost 2 years after the low-life they hired to replace Jim after re-directing him to Transportation basically stole from the USG to support his meth habit. When they finally fired him after AFOSI found AHS property in local pawn shops, the whining little maggot of a Flight Chief (who’d given us nothing but crap about our cars taking up so much space while we worked on them) came to us hat in hand asking us to run it for them until they could find someone to hire. No problem, but we’re not paying stall fees and we’d like to not get hassled about how long our projects are taking as a result of running your shop. He agreed, and having sold our souls, so began our torment.

When they decided to shut it down – just 18 months later after never actually getting around to hiring someone to replace the meth-head, they didn’t even come talk to us like men who’d saved their bacon after firing the meth-head (despite taking advantage of us). We received e-mails saying to get out, and when we showed up to begin that process, they’d changed the locks – effectively, seizing our property, and told us we’d need to be escorted while we were there. WT Actual F?! We ran the shop for 18 months… gratis… helped turn a small profit and grow patronage, and now we can’t be trusted?!

They’ll eventually open it back up, but at a GREATLY diminished capacity – there will NEVER be the level of greatness experienced at the Goodfellow Auto Hobby Shop ever again, as from the early ’90s when I arrived and started using it, through the Don Myers years, and when Jim Eimer took the reigns as manager in the early 2000s through the early 20-teens when it was shut-down because of some elitist asshole MSG Commander’s disdain for such commonplace things.

Too bad as well – all it’s doing is screwing the military out of yet even more of the meager ‘benefits’ they have. I was hoping someday (after I retire from my Day Job) to become one of “those old farts working at the Hobby Shop who can fix just about anything” that I’ve come to respect and admire over the years. I guess those dreams will be fading from existence now.

If I ever run into that POS MSG Commander, I’ve a good mind to punch him in the face… but, since I value my job too much, he’ll never know just how lucky he really is.