Baby, It’s Cold Inside
Greetings and Regards from SBGville.
First of all, I wanted to add a little note about my foray into social media and the limited success to this point in having you sign up. I set up a facebook page and twitter account for this site for two reasons. One, I wanted a way to inform you of when I had new content available on the site. Sure, I can drop a link into the WGOM’s cup of coffee every time I write a new post, but I want to make sure that if you are inclined to read my writing, but miss a cup of coffee (how could that actually happen???) post, that you get a notification of a new post. In addition, I do want to try and grow this site’s audience beyond the WGOM group. Perhaps I can attract some new readers that will bleed over to the WGOM and that would be cool. So anyway, part of doing that is liking the SBGville facebook page so that your friends can see that and say, hey, what is that? Also, I intend to use that forum to put out some short form stuff that I may want to send out and not put on this site. So, like the SBGville page, follow the twitter account. If you don’t want to do either but do want to get a notification as to when I’ve posted, sign up for the e-mail notification. It’s all there, people!
On New Year’s Eve, I was working down in my basement and I noticed that it was pretty cold down there, despite my little space heater. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but when I went upstairs, I saw that the temperature was down to 61 degrees in the house. Ye-ouch. On New Year’s Eve, no less. Well, I wanted to pretend that it wasn’t the furnace, so I turned off the heat system on my programmable thermostat and then I turned it on. Voila! The furnace kicked in and warmed up the house. Then yesterday, the furnace was off again. A similar cycling of the heat cycle on the thermostat again resulted in a restarting of the furnace. Again, this morning, it was 58 degrees in the house and a cycling of the thermostat kicked in the furnace and it is warming the house up right now.
Yesterday at the WGOM, there was a discussion about fighting with wives and how to handle that particular joyousness of life. I am blessed with my share of battles and they usually center around my inadequacies. This morning when I reset the thermostat, I told my wife that I would go out today and get a new thermostat, as I think that actually is the problem. Her first response was “maybe you installed it incorrectly.” Good grief. I installed it, what, a year and a half ago and it has worked fine until now. I doubt that the problem is that I installed it wrong. Her next response was to text a friend for a referral on a furnace company. We use a company that we have our furnace tuned up with and there is nothing wrong with them. They do a fine job, but regardless, it doesn’t appear that there is anything wrong with the furnace (I haven’t ruled out completely that there is something funky going on there, but Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s probably the thermostat). I don’t know if other men have this frustration, but it seems to me that I spend an inordinate amount of time fixing things that my wife has broken or simply doesn’t know how to operate. I am sometimes quite flabbergasted by her lack of operational skill vis-a-vis things around the house. And yet, if something isn’t working, her first inquiry invariably seems to be how did I screw it up. Ugh!
So, anyway, I’m hoping that a new thermostat will fix things. If not, I’m sure I’ll hear about it.
I have very similar issues because I also have a wife with about zero technical/mechanical abilities. I imagine the lack of trust that you can figure out and fix the issue may be because its extremely tough for someone with no mechanical aptitude to fathom how someone could do this stuff just like its tough for you or me to fathom how someone isn’t capable of, say, changing the oil. This also makes her prone to wild fancies about things she wants to do without understanding how much work its going to make for me.
That said, yeah its annoying that, after all these years my wife doesn’t trust my abilities.
I am happy that my wife trusts me with the operations of our home, and I reward that trust by telling her that I have no frackin’ idea what is wrong when I have no frackin’ idea what is wrong. But thankfully I am allowed to make a few low-cost attempts at diagnostics before I make throw out that statement.
I had a similar problem last fall after the annual furnace tune-up. It wasn’t the programmable thermostat that I’d installed a few years back (which was also my first thought), but the sensors on the furnace access panel. Turns out, the little knobs which hold the panel also engage a switch(es?) that lets the furnance know the panel’s closed and it’s okay to run. They either weren’t turned sufficiently to engage the switch(es) after the tune-up or had become disengaged by vibrations from the blower or somesuch…
As for the wife part, mine pretty much leaves me alone about household maintenance and other mechanical stuff. She trusts (expects) me to fix things around the house and knows that I take pride in doing things the right way. Also, she does ask really good questions (if she’s paying attention). I try hard to listen to her questions about why something does or doesn’t work or needs replacing as there’s usually a bit of insight or a different perspective that I hadn’t appreciated about the issue. She’s also much better about money than I am and her questions usually help me land on the least expensive or more reasonable solutions.
I am amused that the engineers’ wives don’t trust them to do things mechanical. Also, it makes the social scientist feel better about his wife’s certainty of his inadequacy with mechanical repairs.