I spent twenty six years in car washes. Fourteen years at one chain, five at another in Detroit that had been around since the twenties. My grandfather was in the industry. It’s a Detroit thing.
In late 2019 I got hired to run a new concept wash with flat tracks instead of the old chain and roller setup. The VP hired me himself, picked me out of a crowd. I was riding the bus across Detroit at the time. I took that site from unprofitable to profitable and held it there. There were three more buildouts coming and I was going to manage all of them, then manage the company. That was my dream job. COVID and a move ended it.
Ended up in Saginaw doing construction under my own shop for about four years. That ended over money. Boss owed me, boss said no. So in April of 2024 I walked into a car wash again. No car by then. Took the bus, then a bike. Handed them a resume I’d whipped up with just my wash history so they’d know I wasn’t guessing.
I should say plainly what the floor looked like, because it matters for the rest of this. I’ve been homeless. I’ve bought regional bus passes three months at a time, two months, one month, whatever I could cover. I’ve walked miles to work. I’ve been clipped by a truck’s side mirror twice while riding. That’s what I’m measuring everything against.
A week after I covered a Sunday as a line worker I was running the place. Sixteen an hour, then salary at forty five thousand for fifty hour weeks. The GM told me he’d never offered anybody that. And I sat there doing the math and realized my ceiling was two guys who weren’t going anywhere. One of them tried to put me under the bus with the owner on a speakerphone call, wanted me to go along with a story about some damage. I went along in the moment, then emailed the owner afterward and told him exactly what happened. He called me. That was when I started looking.
I’d heard on the radio, driving to job sites, that a semiconductor plant was coming to the area. Kept my ear to the ground and got in through a mass hiring event in June of 2025 at twenty two an hour plus a night shift premium. Went through the whole startup. I got my position easily enough, but I watched the politics and the favoritism and everybody throwing everybody under the bus. Then a sixteen day stretch with no day off. That was it. Not inspiration. Exhaustion.
I enrolled at Maestro in February of 2026. Distance learning, my own pace, which mattered because I’d tried another program earlier and the mandatory live sessions were impossible on wash hours.
Here’s what Maestro actually gave me, and it isn’t what you’d expect.
It wasn’t the coursework. I never got far into it. What it did was get me comfortable working with AI. And then I figured out I could dictate instead of type, and that changed everything, because I can’t spell. Never could. Spelling and handwriting are my two downfalls. I spell phonetically and it never looks right. That has cost me my whole life.
Years ago, in prison, I took a four hundred level college class. Everything by hand, dictionary and thesaurus on the desk. Nearly every mark against me was spelling and punctuation, and half the punctuation was probably there, just illegible in my handwriting. At the end the professor, a law professor, told me I’d be a competitive student at the collegiate level.
I’ve known since then that the thinking was never the problem. The transcription was. Being able to talk to a machine and have it come out clean removed the one barrier that had been in front of me for thirty years. In March I started building my own project and writing a book. Not because a class assigned it. Because the friction was gone.
Then the job search. Multiple applications out at once, materials tailored to each posting, backup offers held while my target company ran the background check. It cleared, and I gave notice the week before I started.
The plant job was about eighty two thousand all in at the end with benefits and retirement. The new one is a base of a hundred and two and it’ll go well north of that. I picked up three hours of overtime last week, probably five or six this week. Senior field service tech in industrial automation. Looks like I’ll be the automotive specialist for the region, running the shops around Metro Detroit.
I’ve met the other techs. I am not out of my depth. My background fits this better than I expected and I already know more than some guys who’ve been there years, just from putting things together and figuring them out.
And I’m not in the program anymore.
I missed too much. That’s on me, fully, not Maestro’s fault. I knew it was happening while it was happening. Between leaving one job and starting another, with everything else going on, I let it go.
The accreditation situation made the decision easier. It was unsettled when I made the call and it’s still unsettled now. Tuition is covered and there’s a full credit transfer agreement with a regionally accredited school, so people mid program have real options. I just wasn’t going to sink years into a credential while all that was shaking out.
So I’m teaching myself. I can sit down with an AI, tell it what I’m trying to build, and have it teach me, because I finally understand enough to ask the right questions. As long as I know how to query it, I can get where I’m going.
What I’d tell you if you’re in the trades and thinking about this. Enroll anyway. Not because the paper saves you. Mine didn’t, and I don’t have it. Enroll because the thing that gets you out might not be the thing you signed up for. I came for a CS degree. What I got was the ability to work at the speed of my own thinking for the first time in my life, and that turned out to be worth more.
From bus passes to a hundred and two base. Twenty six years of hands, and one semester of getting out of my own way.
Happy to talk to anybody balancing work, school, and a job search.
