Not on your own car, you don’t. But as a pro you do. Unless you can tell me off the top of your head how much and what type of oil goes in a 2012 Audi A6 and what the lug nut torque is and how to reset the maintenance indicator. Put another way, would you want someone working on your car–even a simple oil change–without all the resources to make sure it’s right?
In that specific instance it was a crew repairing a water main that dug through the cable and killed a 10 block area. So even though the local network was still up I still had no access to Mitchell ShopKey to do so much as bill out an oil change or order a filter.
Has your shop looked into a cellular-based failover system? My wife and I owned retail stores and everything was web-based - point of sale and cc processing. Tough to operate a store when you have 100’s of daily transactions but no way to take payment so we had a failover system. It detects when the internet is down and switches over to the cellular system. 11 guys aren’t going to be able to look up specs simultaneously, but it would at least allow you to take care of most stuff and certainly the critical items.
I stopped at the gas station a while back and it wouldn’t take my debit card or anything. Turns out the system was down so had to pre pay with cash. Don’t know whether it was their system or the internet but luckily my purchase was small. Yeah hard to transact business now without computers.
I’m very tardy to this party and am catching up but I noticed you mentioned Car Talk seemed to be getting complicated as well. Is there anything in particular you are finding troublesome?
Car have an owners manual in the glovebox you can look at?
and as I said - that’s EXTREMELY RARE. We own and operate 4 server sites all over the country. Plus we monitor remote sites in at least 10 different countries. I can count on one hand the number of times we lost complete access to any of these sites for more than a couple hours over the past 10 years.
That happens to me if the browser closes unexpectedly while composing a post. The draft save function is a convenience provided by the Car Talk web software so you don’t have to retype the whole thing again. Try this: Click on your own icon, upper right, this page, then the icon of a person (lower right, edge), and from there you should see a link to your open drafts.
Well, like I said when I begin to post my post drops out and seems to go be saved as a draft but it’s difficult to dig it out. Amazingly just now my post dropped out but I caught it and continued. Usually I give up and sign out.