Seventeen Days of Sh-- Hmm, maybe not. Instead:
Where TF's that Bloody .357!?Gary Kline
The last Tuesday in March I was watching an interesting lecture when the stream hung up. After trying a bunch of things it was becoming more and more evident that my modem (actually a DSL router) had died ... again. Between balancing time spent typing--code or prose-- and watching or listening to web streams, this was the third or fourth time the modem had flaked out in just the past few months. By the time Bet got home and called the phone company, it was clear the modem was bad.
“Are you sure?” she said. “The modem was just fixed. Or replaced.”
I pointed to the red power LED. “That should be green. And the Internet light should be on, too.”
Well, I was more than a little bit down, but things were soon going to take a giant leap Southward. I backed the new wheelchair out of my office and headed for the bathroom when the right motor died. The only way it moved was in tight, clockwise circles
World War III almost broke out between Bet and me. She got the flashlight and squinted at the space between the tire and where the axle ran into the motor that is geared to control the right wheel. Bet moved the lever on the motor from Push to Drive and back. Nothing. Not even a hum. I was going to ask if Bet could hear anything with her ears closer to the motor but her hearing loss made that a useless topic.
“Can you get down and see?” she said.
“I could get down, but it'd take a fork lift to haul my dead weight back up.”
She shrugged. “So, now what?”
“Call the wheelchair shop and see if they can come out tomorrow and do something,” I offered.
Bet heaved a sigh and went to our land line. She had the shop's number in her Yahoo email account. She soon realized that since her computer ran through my server she couldn't even get out. “I need their number,” she said.
My hand went to the joystick, but the chair would only go in tiny circles. Eventually she used Allyson's MacBook to get out to the Net. This was one time it paid hugely to have two separate ISP's. We have the cable for our daughter and the phone company DSL for me.
Twenty minutes later, things had gone from simply looking dark to ink-black.
“It can't be twelve days!” I said as she disconnected.
“That's what they said. They said it is the motor, and it will be twelve days to get a new one from the factory.”
I remember inventing at least five new obscenities in the next minute. Bet was a bit more together. She headed into the garage and steered my 1994 scooter inside. “Oh Chri--” I began. Then fell silent. It was either the old scooter or crawl.--Unfortunately, there was no .357 Magnum at hand. Damn. Got to order one.
I half hopped, half-stepped, and fell into the scooter seat and was off.
I made as fast a trip to the head as was reasonable. The last time I had done this was eight years earlier. Using the scooter inside was close to a nightmare. It was extremely difficult to use the toilet since I had to get to my feet and balance hanging onto the grab bar. Make sure I was stable, and so on, and etcetera. Et cetera. Using the scooter at my desk (read: computer) was even more difficult since the desk was made out of plywood and hammered into the wall. The display and keyboard were in the corner. My server is very safely against the wall. I have an ancient firewall computer and my desktop. If I bumped the scooter into either of those computers, all hope was lost.
The only thing worse than things being ink-black was to be 100.0% hopeless. That made me feel about an ounce better. Naw, maybe a milligram better. Or a nanogram better. Things were at about that level of hopefulness.
From a call center in Utah, Bet learned that it was going to be at least eight days before a technician from the phone company could bring out a new modem. They were sorry, but according to their logs, the soonest a technician could get out would be Monday--no, make that Tuesd--no, may that Wednesday. It would be late afternoon.
That wouldn't do. The excruciating pain in my shoulder made work all but impossible; there were several hours of music and old podcasts I had stored. Nowhere near eight days' worth. Of course I could always read my old homework essays and try to un-dull them. There were six semester’s worth of scholastic-style philosophy writings. All involved life and death and pertained to the-ethics-of. The footnotes were embedded in [[“double-brackets text like this; e.g. “Schopenhauer, Arthur, pages 237-245, Foo-and-Bar”]] to save the professors from having to look to and fro from what would have been regular footnotes.--Actually, I was planning to strip the footnotes. But this would have involved some typing and my shoulder was murdering me.-- This all flashed through my mind in an instant. I heaved a sigh.
“I know,” I said, maneuvering the scooter within two feet of the keyboard. “I've got the number of some Downtown boss here. Some guy here in Seattle. I got that when they first installed the modem in '08. I begged the technician for the number of his supervisor. I said I wouldn't bother the guy unless it really was an emergency.”
I found it in my address database and Bet copied it down.
“I left a message,” she said several minutes later. “I'll check back while I'm at work tomorrow.”
The phone number of the boss downtown got a network technician sent out Saturday morning; thanks to his skills and a new modem I was back in touch with the Real World by noon Saturday. I spent the three days getting some miscellaneous work done; not just listening to music like a slug.
I had to use the scooter for my first appointment with a new internist at Virginia Mason in early April, but after that the scooter shop brought out a loaner motorized wheelchair, not my wonder horse, but serviceable. That saved Bet’s back as well as my joints.
As for the busted DC wheelchair motor, there was utterly nothing I could do but wait. The wheelchair vendor let me know that, yes, it was a bad motor, and it would be 12 to 14 days before they could get a new or refurb motor from the factory. Install it, test it, and bring it out.
After several days the company sent out a standard, front-loader type wheelchair. It was hard to get used to, beat-up and missing parts, like the steel cover over the right caster wheels; nonetheless, it was lightyears better than my old, side-loader scooter with handlebar and tiller. There were still more than ten days left to be spent in the loaner.
There are few people more dimwitted than I when it comes to anything mechanical, yet I had designed the footrest of my new chair and the mechanic who implemented my design had things working flawlessly. The loaner had the old style footrest that was a simple steel plate for both feet. It was all but impossible to use; it forced me to lean way forward, lift each clodhopper off the foot rest onto the floor, raise the rest, and reposition my feet to be able to stand correctly. Only after that could I get to my feet. To obviate this hassle, most of the time I tried to rest one foot atop either of the caster wheels and hold the other leg off the floor.
To avoid being scratched by the missing steel cover on the right caster, once, getting down to the floor to crawl over to the tub I wrenched the left side of my back. Not severely, but bad enough. And there were other
miscellaneous injuries that aren't worth mentioning. The nutshell of it was that after a few days in the loaner I was close to being a blathering idiot. ...Now where was that .357 Magnum?
I've used hundreds of DC electric motors; this is the first time an electric motor has ever just-quit on me. And this was a medical device motor: you'd think it would be virtually 99.9999% flawless. Evidently no such beast.
Anyway, after 17 days of crap, there was light at the end of the tunnel; the shop delivered my new chair with the improved-design foot-bar. And a motor that hopefully will last another 7,8,9 years. Or longer. There were still some minor things for the vendor to set right; these were done under the supervision of my occupational therapist.
Cancel the order for the .357.
{
draft 0.97b
Last update 17may11
}