When you’re hot, you’re hot

As I feared, the new thermostat didn’t cure Piet’s overheating problems.  His new habit is that he heats up quickly to 215, at which point I guess the thermostat opens (it’s supposed to open at 195) and the engine temp suddenly drops back to about 190, whence it works its way back up.  At highway speed that means he stabilizes at about 200, but in stop-and-go traffic he drifts up to 225 or 230.  Which means I’m going to get up early tomorrow and get to Jiffy Lube as soon as they open (seven, I believe) and have them do a radiator flush.

I’ve got to go early because we’re supposed to be meeting a friend-of-a-friend at an air park near Leander, to retrieve a bunch of stuff we have stored at a hangar.  We never intended to store anything out there.  When this began, we were using the original friend’s garage to store stuff we had to move out to redo the ceiling and sheetrock in T’s room, and it was only going to be for a few months.  Somehow, “a few months” has stretched to three years, and it’s been on my mind a good deal for a long time, because we’re no longer on nearly so good terms with the first friend as we were when he agreed to keep our things.  Besides, I’m sure that hangar has no climate control of any kind, and we’re going to have to go carefully through every scrap of paper in the boxes out there to make sure we don’t bring back silverfish, roaches, termites, or worse.

L agreed tonight to meet the FOAF at nine-thirty tomorrow.  I hope (1) that Jiffy Lube can get done with me in time to meet that deadline, and (2) that the flush really fixes Piet’s heat problem.  If it doesn’t . . . well, I’ve been reading the Chilton’s manual for 1987 S-10s and I think I could replace his water pump myself, if the manual is accurate.  Just in case, I asked about prices for rebuilt water pumps when I was at O’Reilly’s tonight buying a trailer hitch, and the guy at the counter said they run about $30, including the return charges.  That’s a lot more manageable than the couple of hundred Ron would have to charge me if he did the work.

The Empire was nasty today as well.  We were short ten heads on the floor, because there’s a rule that when you convert from being a Minion to working for the Empire itself, you have to take three working days off between the two.  Those ten red-badgers were off today for that reason, so calls-waiting stayed high all day, at times spiking as high as forty callers waiting for a tech to answer the phone (if we go higher than mid-single digits waiting, the queue manager gets hives).  And half the calls I took today were long-and-nasties:  a two-hour call where I telnetted into the system of a customer in New Hampshire and cleaned out several fistfuls of adware that were keeping her from being able to download email, another where I took an hour trying to sort out a tech’s CD burner problem, and a third ninety-minute call where I tried to get some guy’s cowbox running Win98 SE to talk to his Netgear router so he could share the cowbox’s printer with his Empire notebook.  I never did get that last one to work, and Lord only knows why I kept trying except from sheer stubbornness.  Eventually I called a halt and logged it as a “best effort” call.

Because of the bad call volume, I had to cancel the one-on-one meeting that I’m supposed to have every month with the Tulip.  Had I asked the queue manager if I could log out to go to a meeting, he would have had kitten-fits, so I didn’t even try.  I just emailed the Tulip early in the afternoon and asked to re-schedule the meeting, and he agreed this afternoon was a poor time.  Having to cancel annoyed me, because I wanted to use this meeting to try to get the measure of this new manager.  I still don’t know whether I can count him trustworthy, just from everyday observation.  I hope I can get re-scheduled for early next week.

Jimmy Hoffa juggled the flaming Lithuanian bowling ball  Fnord.