Category: Salesmen

Today a friend came over and helped me install two new main cutoff switches to my house. Or, maybe it was I who helped him. I at least knew where the tools were and did a fairly good job of keeping him supplied with the right tools at the right time.

I am not getting consistent power in my house. Particularly the upstairs. I have two boxes, one that controls downstairs and the other for upstairs. The old fuse boxes are old. The lever that you throw to cut off the power on one of them was mostly broken. The way you would have to cut the power was to reach in with a pair of pliers and pull the interrupter switch out manually. Not good.

We mounted the newer, smaller, boxes inside the old boxes. That gives them one more line of protection from the weather. And we did something novel. We actually grounded the new boxes. Now there is much less of a chance that you will kill yourself trying to cut the electricity to the house.

I have asked 3 different electricians on 4 occasions (one of them I asked twice) to come and replace these boxes. They never came back the next day to do the work. It only took 2 amateurs 3 hours to do the replacement, not including the almost 2 hours spent yesterday shopping for the items we needed. I am not sure why an electrician would not want to take on a job that should be easy money.

Now the next project is to run a ground wire to a couple of outlets so that I have some grounded ones for my computer equipment. That will be a nice change.

If there were only something we could do about the 190 Volts coming into the house. We should have 220 V. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It just fluctuates. The electric company won’t do anything to investigate the problem until you get a certified electrician to write a report saying that the problem is them and not the house wiring. All 3 of my electricians said they would write the report when they came back to replace the boxes.

Still waiting.

Yesterday as we were pulling into Tampico on our way back south, we were about 10 minutes from our friend’s house when a police car pulled up beside me. He asked me to pull over.

His claim was that I did not use my blinker when I changed lanes. I cannot say whether I did or did not. I most often do, but not always.

This is a particularly bad area where the police try to take advantage of the people. This is my third encounter with them in town.

It all boiled down to he was going to write me a ticket for $120 and take my license. The fine I could pay the next day at 5:00 in the afternoon. Or, I could give him $60 on the spot and he would take care of the ticket for me. After I lectured him on how illegal that was he asked me if I was a Christian (as opposed to a Catholic). I told him that I was, but that it did not matter. What he was asking me to do was illegal and that I would not do it. I would rather take the ticket and pay the proper fine than to do something illegal.

My wife was getting a little panicked at this point. She thought I might be facing arrest if I did not back off. But the officer knew as well as I did that what he was doing is called extortion. For one, I do not think that the failure to use a blinker would really command a $120 fine. Nor would he want to go through the paperwork to make it happen. I was not at all concerned.

He then backed down and said that if I would just buy him a coffee, then all would be good. I told him to give me my license and paperwork and let me go, or to give me a ticket and leave me alone. He handed me my papers but still asked for a coffee. I shook his hand and walked away. I got in the truck and left with him still standing there with his hand out for his money.

I will not bow to that!

What hurts is that there are so many people who do. On the other hand, because it is such an easy money making (illegal) business, he would rather let me go than to have a fight on his hands. It is not worth the time for him to escalate to actual legal proceedings.

This is a follow up to a post from 2 weeks ago.

I took the truck in this morning to another mechanic. Maybe he can find what is wrong. I was looking for professional advice this weekend, so I called my uncle. He is a Chevrolet nut. Though not a professional mechanic, he knows a little something about engines. He has built his own race cars for the last 20 years. Currently he is building a mid-80s Chevy S10 race truck for his girlfriend.

After describing my symptoms to him the other day on the phone, he simply said, “When you figure it out, let me know. I have a truck that is doing the exact same thing and I can’t figure out what is going on.” Wow, that was encouraging.

I seriously suspect the computer, as does my uncle.

It is having a fuel issue. It acts like a delivery problem, but it is not that. It is not getting proper mixture and therefore it has no power. Sensors, computers, intake valves, etc. can be causing the problem. Whatever it is, it is telling the computer that the mixture is not right between fuel and air.

The mechanic I took it to this morning says he has it pinned. At 11:00 he said that he had replaced a horribly carbonated gasket that seals off the intake manifold. It was leaking air into the wrong spots. Which then caused the air/fuel mixture to be wrong. Sounds reasonable.

When I was there at 11:00 he said that he had already taken it on a test drive and it ran great. He was waiting for it to cool back down so that he could run the diagnostics on it again to see if there was something else he could charge me for. He was going to run it again after it cooled.

I went back there at 2:00 and he said that it was still cooling. Huh? 3 hours to cool? He said he would call me at 3:00 with the truck ready to go.

I am crossing my fingers that this really was the problem or that he will find it and fix it quickly. My only hesitation is that I have been told by 3 other mechanics that they have tracked down and fixed the problem. When I took it back to them they said there was no longer a problem. Hmmm.