Custom, right?

Back when I was younger and dumber I found myself caught up in the auto styling mania that followed the first Fast and Furious film.  Those days seemed to be filled with a craze of dress-up items you could practically buy in most any store.  The most hilarious products (which also were most popular) were the least useful. I remember seeing kits that had stickers you could put over where you wanted light to pass through on your headlights so you could paint the rest, effectively rendering your headlights useless.  Of those, the colored hose and sleeving kits for dressing up the under hood caught my eye.  Blue and Red were most popular, but my preference was the yellow, which happened to go on clearance when I started working at an auto parts store.

Out I went to the truck and used every scrap of the dress-up kit to "beautify" and "customize" my engine bay.  The results were surely not show-worthy but my pride remained.  Eventually I did show underneath the hood to someone who introduced me to the term 'ricer.'   

I was offended. 

I had spent a lot of time getting that together.  I thought it looked good.  Everybody else was doing it.  But it was exactly not what I wanted.  It was not custom.  Somebody once used the phrase "polish a turd and its still a turd."  I had done nothing to improve performance, function, or (even questionably) appearance.

Since that time custom has taken on a new meaning for me.  I have learned that putting in things that don't belong with the deception of originality is custom.  I found that engineering custom parts with the same mindset is very custom.  These days, custom can be subtle and it can also be glaringly obvious, but hardly obnoxious to avoid being 'ricer.'

And so, as my professional career continues, I remain stalwart to the conviction of never being called a ricer again.