Dear Reader,
On most occasions, I make an effort not to complain too much. My rate of success is well south of 100%, but I don’t want this to be a blog of “things that get my goat” or whatever the kids say these days. This weekend, however, has been One Of Those Weekends and I’m going to blow off a little steam. I reckon the title may have given that away, so consider yourself doubly warned.
Let’s start with Saturday morning. Early Saturday morning. Pre-sunrise Saturday morning. I am a long-time supporter of Leicester City football club and their match this weekend was at 12:30 PM in the UK. That translates to 6:30 AM in my neck of the woods, so I got up early, put some water on to make tea, and settled in to watch the match. Just before halftime, we scored a goal to take the lead. Somehow, between that goal and halftime, one of our players did something very bad and was sent off. That meant we had to defend a narrow lead for the entire second half short one player. We did a marvelous job for half an hour and then we…didn’t. We gave up three goals in the last fifteen minutes for a very demoralizing defeat.
Reader, I am not kidding when I say that this might have been the highlight of the weekend.
It was about the time the match was over I was awake enough to notice that it was unusually chilly in the house. I checked the thermostat and…uh oh. The current temperature was 58 degrees while the thermostat was set to 68. Nothing on the thermostat looked out of the ordinary, so the next step was to ensure there were no outages with our gas provider. There were none. Nonetheless, I put in a call to the gas company to send someone out and started a ticket with the home warranty company to get someone out to look at the furnace because it makes sense to get the ball rolling ASAP.
I tried to look at the furnace myself, but it’s in the attic and the attic is only accessible by climbing a ladder to get on the roof and going in through an access hatch. I might as well have been looking at hieroglyphs for all I understood. Fortunately, the gas company was very responsive and had a fellow out there in an hour. He was super helpful, confirmed that the gas pressure was good, climbed into the attic, checked the furnace, fiddled with some simple stuff and then we did some testing. It would come on briefly and then stop. Nothing he could do about that. He turned off the gas at the furnace and unplugged the unit to ensure nothing caught fire, which I appreciated. Anyway, good thing I started the other service call.
In the meantime, there was some work-related goodness going on as well. One of our vendors finished a server replacement at one of our sites. It was critical to do this quickly because we had to be able to get the date to that vendor’s above-store reporting tool so we could run payroll for the site. With this being a holiday weekend, this was critical enough to have the payroll team standing by. We’d arranged for the vendor to have their team that installs the data movement software ready to go as soon as the server came up.
The server came up at 11:30 AM, so I let the payroll team know that we should have their files shortly. This was a mistake. I saw the ticket go to the vendor’s team at 11:30 AM. I heard nothing from them, so I followed up. I followed up seven times. I asked for ETAs, or at least when I would receive an update. I never heard back, so I kept bugging them. Pro tip: When dealing with work stuff, never hang up the phone without both parties understanding when whatever task is being discussed is due and/or the update cadence. At 11:30 PM, I gave up.
I had also not heard anything from the furnace service company. That was extremely worrying as, while Saturday was quite pleasant, Sunday was going to be cold. Monday and Tuesday were going to very cold.
So, this morning, I followed up with the home warranty company and they seemed shocked that I would expect emergency service from one of their subcontractors. I pointed out that the types of service that one would have a home warranty for tend to be emergencies, but their ears were a rocky place where my words could find no purchase. They suggested instead that I could expect a call to schedule service on Tuesday. This represented A Problem. So, Nicole found a local vendor who did weekend work and we called them. Fingers? Crossed.
In the meantime, the vendor had finally completed installing their data movement software at 8:30 AM. This should have marked the end of the issue, but alas, while they installed the software, they did not retrieve the missed data. And, thanks to a recent update to the process, I no longer have the capability to initiate this retrieval. So, I called them again. I should point out that calling them is a special sort of ordeal. We have a local phone number for them, but this number does not work anymore. So, we have to call the corporate office and navigate a phone tree rife with unskippable instructions that require 9 button presses to get to the support team.
I bring that last bit up because, while I was dialing, I was installing another vendor’s software on the new server. I needed a code to complete the installation, so I opened a ticket with them. I received a response that they were working on the ticket. Then I received the code I needed. I did this all in the time it took for me to navigate the other vendor’s phone tree.
It took another three hours for the original vendor to pull the data into their system so I could run a report for our payroll team. At least that much was now right with the world.
It was about this time the gent from the heating company showed up. He was a good sport about climbing into the attic and taking a look. We found three possible culprits: the thermostat, the air filter in the furnace, and the flame sensor. We were able to correct the first two in short order. For the third, he sanded it to get rid of the accumulated carbon and we fired it up. Heat! Glorious heat! It even stayed lit. I may never have felt such pure joy. I contacted the home warranty folks and canceled the service call in a fit of uncharacteristic optimism.
A joy that is so pure is almost invariably short-lived. Such was the case for us. The temperature inside our house rose from 51 to 60 degrees and then it fell back to 58. Then 56. The fan was still blowing, but the fire was out. I texted the heating fellow and he said it was almost certainly that there was a problem with the flame sensor and he had to order the part on Monday.
So, this leaves us with a house with a current internal temperature of 50 degrees, and, seeing as it is 22 outside, that number will likely drop We have four cats and two space heaters in the back half of the hours. We have lots of blankets. We have robes. We are camping as there is really nothing else to do.
And that, my friends, is the story of this weekend. I doubt very much that it made for riveting reading, but there were a lot of moving parts and I wanted to get them down on paper before I started forgetting bits and pieces. I make no predictions about the trajectory of things in the immediate future. It is quite cold outside and it will be getting colder. This is Texas. Our electrical grid is the envy of no one. The plumbing in this house is the work of enthusiastic but none-too-gifted amateurs.
We live in hope.
-RK