How to align Wiper Linkage?

Last night I was helping my neighbor with his wife's 2000 Jetta. Yesterday she said the wipers quit on her.

After a brief inspection with the flashlight I discovered that the nut and washer had fallen off of the output shaft of the wiper motor transmission which connects to the linkage.

Easy fix, right? Not so fast. While the linkage was in the car I was not able to get the little peice of metal on the linkage that should slip over the splines on the transmission output shaft to go over the shaft. It was about 1/4th of an inch off.

After that, I removed the linkage from the car and was able to get it to fit with relative ease. Once we put the linkage back in the car, the wipers were totally out of alignment. They would move up about 1/4th of the windshield and then they wanted to go basically down past the cowling.

After removing the linkage from the car, moving the linkage position, and then refastening the linkage to the transmission output shaft about 3 times I finally got it to an acceptible position. It still doesn't look totally correct, but it's good enough.

Is there a process to align the linkage? I think I'm missing something obvious here as there's quite a few posts on servicing the wiper linkage however nothing about alignment.

I'm probably going to help him install a new linkage when the time comes. As is typical with the MkIV, his linkage is about to the point of being completely siezed, I'd like to have this job take the 15 minutes it should vs. the 2.5 hours I spent swearing at it

remove the wiper arms, turn on the wipers, turn off the wipers (park), reinstall the wiper arms horizontal or a a little below. Operate and wipers and re-install the arms as necessary.

I think that proceess works as long as the linkage is in line with the park position on the transmission. (Then it's a no brainer..)

If the transmission and the linkage get out of sync, the only way I figured out how to do it is to have the motor/transmission do a full cycle and park, then use a wrench to loosen the nut, freeing the linkage movement from moving the transmission, then manually move the linkage all the way to the passenger side of the car, then push the linkage connector back onto the splines on the transmission, then tighten it back up and test.