It has been a hellish fortnight here at the Farm, but, when all is said and done, hell has proven not to be such a bad place after all.
It all began the day Helen took her car, a 2004 Subaru Forester, in for servicing. She had been complaining that the car seemed to be floating, and, sure enough, it needed an entire new set of shocks. But the bigger deal turned out to be the fact that her dashboard light wasn’t burned out after all. No, the problem was that the on-board computer’s mother board was burned out, and it would cost a hell of a lot more than a new light bulb to replace. We were looking at repairs equal to the trade in value of the car, so we went ahead and bought a new Forester for Helen since she had been talking about a new car for some time.
Not such a hellish event, is it? The fact of a new car takes the sting out of so many things. It took most of the day to accomplish, however, since we had to deal with all of the various salesmen, managers, and assorted hangers-on who make car dealerships across America their home. A new car buying experience is like being swarmed to death by a herd of cockroaches; while they are simply striving for survival in a competitive world like the rest of us, there is simply no pleasant way to experience the process of being shaken down while conscious that you are being had; of being eaten alive.
But we did get a new car out of the deal, so we were pleased with the outcome even so. Pleased, that is, until we drove home to find a very cold house. It seems the furnace had died sometime during the previous 24 hours. Oddly, a furnace service company was scheduled to arrive the very next morning, so I didn’t bother to call our usual serviceman. But when the service guy arrived, he reminded me that he was only there to service our two propane stoves – a fact I had forgotten in my excitement over the fact that he was on his way and the house would soon be warm again. But he did his best at a cursory review of the furnace even though it wasn’t within his expertise, and then cleaned the propane stoves as promised.
Since he was not an expert in furnaces, I called our regular service person who blithely informed me that he was busy and couldn’t possibly arrive any time soon. When only vague promises and no specific arrival date was forthcoming, I told him that I would use the folks who were already on premises, instead. I went back to the propane stove service guy, and he arranged with his office to have a bona fide furnace service guy at the house that very afternoon.
That’s when the real fun began. The furnace service guy arrived as promised, and quickly discovered that there had been a short somewhere in our heating system – a heating system that consists of an air handler (I have now been educated, and have learned that what I once thought of in pre-snake-bit days as a furnace is merely an air handler) and a heat pump. Have you ever tried to isolate a short in an electrical system? No? It’s somewhat akin to trying to discover the hiding place of the aforementioned cockroaches. By the end of the first day, we knew two things: (a) there were several hundred dollars worth of new parts required, since the short had taken out the circuit board which controls the air handler, and (2) the service guy did not have the parts on board his truck. Clearly, I should have anticipated both things.
Did I mention that the day in question was a Friday? Of course I didn’t. Even I can see that by re-reading what I’ve written above, but you somehow knew it anyway, didn’t you? And you fully understand what that meant, don’t you? Yes, dear reader, we spent Super Bowl weekend huddled in front of our newly serviced propane stoves during the day, and freezing our asses off at night despite the quilts. It is perhaps the only time this year – or any year, for that matter – that I have blessed an overly strong El Nino, since the February temperatures have been in the high 40’s instead of the customary low 20’s.
I greeted the service guy Monday afternoon with exuberance and confidence, knowing that I was about to get warm. He put in all the new parts, including a new fuse that had blown – a specialized part that only the manufacturer of our particular brand of furnace (make that air handler) employed, consisting of a screw top cleverly glued to what appeared to be a common, garden-variety automobile fuse. He powered up the heating system to my great joy – and the hybridized fuse blew out within a millisecond. And, since it is not just a common, garden-variety automobile fuse which the service guy had oodles of safe within his van, it had to be ordered; and, since it was now 5:00 PM, it wouldn’t be available until late the next afternoon. And that’s not to mention that the service guy obviously hadn’t yet found the source of the short circuit.
Another propane fired evening awaited us.
The service guy returned the next day, filled with determination and promises of quick resolution. He didn’t have a new fuse with him; he had something better. He called it a popper. If the circuit shorted out again, the popper would open like a circuit breaker instead of blowing out like a fuse. Instead of having to replace it another day, you would simply push the popper back in to restore the circuit. Clearly, no mere fuse, nothing of glass and tin, was going to stand in the way of glorious heat this time! We’d conquered the little bastard!
And while the popper didn’t get in the way, something else did. And what that something else was, was beyond the service guy’s ability to find on that darkening afternoon. (Since the service guy has been featured long enough in this story as a faceless meme, we ought to give him a name. Let’s call him Drew, since that is, in fact, his name.) Drew is a nice young man. Despite the ongoing lack of a fully operational heating system, he gave me confidence. He fretted and persisted; he explained and demonstrated; he researched on his own time, and kept coming back for more – not unlike the Canadian heavyweight champion, George Chuvalo, who, in his one and only championship fight with Smokin’ Joe Frazier, went down repeatedly but stubbornly refused to go out. In fact, Drew came back a total of 4 times in all.
No, make that 5 times with a question mark. More below.
Drew was now focused on the heat pump. He first focused on its circuit board, from which he could get no amperage readings. He told me that heat pump manufacturers had not yet given servicemen a way into circuit boards to be able to diagnose their possible shortcomings properly, so all they could do was measure whether electricity went into the damned thing and came out again – which wasn’t happening. He was convinced the circuit board should be replaced; it was likely, he concluded, that it had been blown out by the short circuit just as the air handler’s had.
Well, even if circuit boards are expensive, I now had hope of heat and reasonable expectation of warmth. In fairness, I should say more robust heat. The replacement of the circuit board in the air handler (and a couple of other fried connections) had allowed us, the night before, to run the heating system on its emergency heat setting. So the house was considerably warmer than it had been in the days of propane only, and dead-of-night trips to the necessities for things not to be written of here were no longer trips though a gusty snow field to an arctic outhouse. But emergency heat is thin heat – it warms the ambient air by means of constant furnace – air handler – operation, but does nothing for such things as tiled floors or frozen souls (or soles, if you prefer).
Drew came back the next day with the new circuit board. He plugged it in, reset the thermostat as needed, threw the large circuit breaker near the heat pump into its on position and ….. nothing happened. Nothing, that is, except that the popper popped. There I was, the proud possessor of a new heat pump circuit board, a much larger, redesigned, more efficient version of the one it had replaced, and nothing worked except the popper. I should have been pleased with the new circuit board since it was promised to be more efficient, but I was now somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 of seriously displeased. Peeved even. Another night of emergency heat stretched before us.
Drew was now reduced as a person, crushed in his manliness. He had failed us, and was calling in the Seventh Cavalry. He promised to return the next day with Jim, a more senior, more experienced service guy, and they would find the source of the short together. He was abjectly apologetic. He was taking things personally, and I could tell he had a sense of failure. I felt bad.
He had just a few additional parts to test that afternoon so that he could be certain he and Jim would return with a full panoply of necessary parts in order to avoid further delay. He would be out of our hair in a matter of minutes, but he wanted to be certain they could achieve victory on the morrow. It was when he turned to conduct his very final test that our neighbor took out the telephone pole located at the most awkward turning point of our private lane while swerving to miss a deer. A god-damned, common, garden-variety deer. Not only did the telephone pole suffer a direct hit, all power to the neighborhood went bye-bye for the next 5 hours – meaning, of course, that Drew was unable to complete his final electrical test since it required an active electrical circuit.
It was only long after Drew had folded his tent, stuffed his van, and left us to our fate that the power came back on. They had to tow the neighbor’s car away before they could fix the power, and the tow truck took its own sweet time arriving. It was 9:00 PM before the power came back on. In the interim between Drew’s departure and the return of power, we had gone back to using the propane stoves. No new episode of Season 6 of Downton Abbey for us that evening. No siree!
During the pre-dawn hours of yesterday, the phone rang and I picked it up on the library extension. Drew was outside in our driveway wondering if he could come in and look at something before he went to his first scheduled appointment that morning. He hadn’t been able to sleep due to worry and concern, and he knew I was an early riser for I’d told him so. So, dressed in my pajamas, I went downstairs to let him in. I then went off to shower and fix him a cup of coffee since he clearly needed a stimulant. He was in a funk. By now, I was worried about his mental health. He was very down on himself, feeling that inviting Jim in was an admission of failure. I tried to buck him up by noting that the experienced hand always knows when to call in the troops, but my preaching wasn’t working.
When I finished my shower, dressed, and took the coffee out to Drew, he asked if he could look in the garage – the home of our new car, our new car which produced far more heat than the air handler in a much shorter period of time. I said yes, and then asked why. It might be the wiring between the heat pump and the air handler, he replied, and he wanted to know where the lines went through the house in case they had to pull new wire. Amazingly, I knew just where the wall had to be opened to achieve this, since both the furnace and the heat pump were newly installed when we’d built the library 8 years ago. The spot in the garage wall near my car – the now oldest car in our fleet – had recently been re-patched, and I sadly reconciled myself to the prospect of it being cut open again.
I left Drew to do his thing, and he came back inside twenty minutes later to tell me that while he had to leave for his first appointment, he had good news. It wasn’t the wiring. No holes need apply. It was the damned heat pump, after all. He would be back with Jim, and thanks for the coffee as he’d needed it. His spirits were low. I bucked him up as best I could with a story of an early failure of my own during my first years of practicing law. Failure happens to all of us, I told him; the trick is to learn something from the experience. I was, by now, seriously worried about his state of mind.
I believe at this point, Helen was certain I’d lost it.
Hours passed, and then a knock on the door. Helen was at a restaurant lunching with friends, so I knew it wasn’t her. I opened the door to find Jim standing there – a very large, white-mustachioed, much more seniorish-than-Drew Jim who exuded self-confidence visually and effortlessly with few words and a lack of braggadocio, and who embodied the promise of a painstakingly methodological approach to finding whatever it was that was causing the short. He knew nothing about Drew returning, but was ready to go to work if only he might use our bathroom room first. And no, he didn’t want any coffee since that was the cause of his problem in the first place.
In Drew’s absence, I told him what I knew, carefully using the term ‘air handler’ to exhibit my expertise. I explained to him that I was worried about Drew, because he thought himself a failure. “Like that, is it?” Jim mused while looking at me as only two men of considerable experience and of a certain age can do when discussing the young of the species. I explained that, according to Drew, the problem was in the heat pump. Jim sniffed and shone his light over the air handler anyway. Then he went outside and went to work on the heat pump.
An hour passed and I heard the back door open as he came in to check the thermostat for information. Only it wasn’t Jim, it was Drew. I hadn’t heard him drive up. I welcomed him warmly – to use an adverb in short supply in the house.
I went outside a few minutes later to find a 60 degree day, Jim sitting carefully on a small step stool, and Drew deep into the bowels of the heat pump. Jim was talking Drew through it, helping him understand the need for methodical patience and careful tracking. Drew was feeling better about himself, and so was I. It was a spring-like day, after all. I decided to take a short walk down the drive before returning to my appointment with Agatha Christie; it was just as warm outside as it was inside, so I might just as well blow off a few cobwebs.
I went back outside again an hour later to find them winding up for the day. They now knew where the short had originated. A heat sensor on a pipe carrying extremely hot effluent had failed; a heat sensor far underneath the machinery in a location that required the heat pump to be dismantled and then reassembled after it had been replaced; a heat sensor which would be replaced on yet another day as they, of course, hadn’t one with them after all. But again there was good news: the circuit board was fine and I could keep my $500.
They had further good news. We would no longer have to rely upon emergency heat, since they had bypassed the failed heat sensor to allow the heat pump to work without shorting out. When I expressed my fervent hope that we wouldn’t be blown to smithereens during the night because of the bypass, Jim merely sniffed at my ignorance. I shut up and counted my blessings instead.
So I’ve woken up this morning after having enjoyed a full night of real heat, the full-blown, heat pump aided variety. The tile floor in the master bathroom no longer feels like the surface of the Mendenhall Glacier, and the air in the library no longer has a frosty edge. No, the new heat sensor hasn’t been installed yet, and, no, I cannot yet be certain that everything will work satisfactorily once it has; but I have hope. Drew’s confidence has been restored by means of Jim’s kindness and step-stooled oversight, and the world is once again a more ordered place.
As I write this in our library, I have to wonder whether Jim is just a caring old goat and a good mentor to younger servicemen, or whether he might really be a sort of Tom Sawyer – with the heat pump having been substituted for a certain well-known, best-beloved, white picket fence in a sort of modernized morality play. Somehow the image of Jim sitting complacently on his step stool with Drew on his knees in the dirt poking about in the innards of the heat pump, avidly following instructions being delivered at the point of Jim’s finger or whatever tool he happened to be holding was greatly reassuring. For just as surely as we’ve been snake bit, it seems certain that patience, methodology, and careful item-by-item elimination undertaken beneath the caring gaze of a virtual demigod must have identified, once and for all, the cause of the short circuit and saved all of the days to come.
I’ve learned a lot from this experience, but I just hope the goddamned heat sensor does the trick.
If it doesn’t, I think I’ll scream.
