Hail Yeah!

All of a sudden, Go Tell Mama got accepted to the Hoboken Film Festival in New Jersey right across the river from Manhattan. This was the biggest festival that it had gotten into so far. I started thinking that maybe, after all that had happened, the opportunity had finally arrived. I decided to go to the festival to see what might come of it. 

The films were shown one after the other throughout the festival in several local theaters. Mine showed in the afternoon so it wasn’t well attended. I went to some free seminars for those of us whose films were being shown and we also got passes to see all the other films and to the final awards dinner. I also took the opportunity to drive by the World Trade Center Twin Tower remains since I was so close.

The final banquet was held in an amazing location on the water, at night, across from the lights of Manhattan. I was very personable and animated with the others at my table. But, once again, I didn’t know how to schmooze the big dogs in the house. So it was back to Virginia with nothing to show for it except another interesting experience. Now it was really, really over and it was just a matter of enduring until March when I could hopefully start with Integrity.

Fortunately, I was accepted, along with a couple other guys. My friend Chris ran the training, which was like an apprenticeship. We started in the warehouse with the basics, then went out with the other dent technicians to their car lots. They would fix stuff we couldn’t get right or finish off what we couldn’t complete until we slowly got better.

It takes about a year before you really know what you’re doing but training only lasted three months. At that point, you had to do well enough to make it out by yourself. The pay was commission-based and while the company helped with some leads, it was up to us to find opportunities and knock on doors. We tried to work synergistically with the paint guys to get in their lots to provide the “total solution”. The other dent techs also let us work with them if they had plenty of work until we could make it on our own. 

Nobody wants a new guy working on their cars so you had to come up with a good answer if someone asked you how long you’d been doing dents. One of the other techs gave me the line that worked perfectly. It was, 

    “Long enough to get the fever”. 

This, of course, made them ask what the fever was. The answer was, 

    “Every car I see, I notice dents”. 

This usually distracted them enough so that they didn’t pursue asking exactly how long it had been.

There wasn’t enough work for all the Integrity techs in town, so everyone did at least a day or two out of town. This usually turned into what we called an overnight where we stayed in a hotel for the night so we didn’t have to drive back home at the end of the day and drive back out the next.

It was on one of those overnights that I got the call. It had been several weeks since I started and it was a struggle. Before I started with Integrity, I had refinanced the townhome to get my payments really low since training pay was minimal and I knew it would take some time to get busy. I had struggled to stay busy that day and was staying in a bit of a ratty motel. I was also thinking about the challenges of finding work the next day when I got a call from Chris to tell me that one of our lots had got hail!

Dent techs love hail. It pays really well. That is all some techs do. They chase hailstorms during the season, which usually lasts about six months and it pays so well that they don’t have to work the rest of the year. Some even travel internationally and can work even longer. It is hard on a family though when the husband and father is gone for months at a time. It can also be hard on the body. But when the hail hits one of your lots, it can be a boon, especially if you’re not very busy otherwise. The next day I skimmed through my other places and got there as soon as I could.

For the next couple of weeks, me and the other guy I trained with practically camped out at that lot for a little bonanza while the other techs got there when they could after taking care of their regular lots. I’m a pretty methodical guy so I am usually slower, especially when I was newer. I made more than them because I was there more but the others made a lot more per hour. That was when I summed up the comparison in the phrase, 

    “I have to work twice as long to make half as much”. 

With the financial bump from the hail, I didn’t feel as frantic that I didn’t have a full week of work right away. I slowly gained accounts and ended up with a decent year.


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