Old Dogs, New Tricks
I’m learning all sorts of things in my old age, not by choice really, mostly out of necessity. Lots of my stuff is falling apart and has gone to the Dark Place where no amount of cursing or kicking will bring it back to workable condition. I dismantled my computer last week, pulled out little connectors, changed a battery, beat on it with a fist, but it really didn’t want to power back up again after I’d turned it off when we left for a vacation trip. Lesson learned. The buggers want to be awake. They don’t need sleep and they don’t dream. Mark one up for the machines.
My table saw, however, died a smoky death in mid-cut. Slowed down, made a strange garbled cry of protest, then blew the shop fuses. It wanted to sleep forever. Which, after some amount of troubleshooting, I decided it deserved a proper burial. But not before a few well aimed kicks to its cheap aluminum shroud. Good riddance. I had a backup saw ready to go. Course, it needed to be completely assembled with parts cannibalized from previous incarnations. Only took most of a day, but in the end, mark one up for us humans. So what if it’ll probably run for only a short time before it too joins the growing junkpile out back.
Next day, the refrigerator decided to stop chillin. I know, it seemed like a conspiracy to me too. Revenge of the Machines, soon to be a major motion picture. You know, if the TV will still play DVD’s. I did what any modern repairman would do in these days of internet research — I went straight to Google. Where I learned that 21st century refrigerators (ours is a 20th century model) have a fan in the freezer compartment that pushes cold air down into the fridge area and sure enough, I had blocked that port with frozen goods enough to raise the temperature below by 20 degrees. Only took a few hours to figure all this out, simple fix. We’ll call this one a draw.
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Tags: computer repair for dummies, refrigerator repair, revenge of the machines, tool repair