Spud's blog: New Year 2023 Post

"For what else is tragedy than the portrayal in tragic verse of the sufferings of men who have attached high value to external things?" - Epictetus

Speaking of tragedy, our refrigerator began going on the fritz around Thanksgiving - about a week before the end of November. The freezer was most obvious - the ice in the ice maker was wet, and the ice cream was pudding-like in texture. I brought in a little beer/soda fridge that I keep in the shop for temporary use, and told the wife she needed to shop for a replacement refrigerator. I'm not getting involved in the purchase, because it's not something I care about much, other than if it works.

Below: The old refrigerator, unplugged and set aside for now.

Below: The shop refrigerator, repurposed to hold a small amount of food and milk. We finally have a stainless steel fridge! Upscale, baby! The dings and dents are from incidents with the grinding wheel.

Warning: Beginning of a rant

The wife did a great deal of online research and decided that a nice replacement for our 20 year old refrigerator would be a GE Profile in stainless steel. It had great customer rankings and finally this appliance would match all the other ones installed in this house.

She went to a local big-box home supply store, only to find that the specific model she had chosen was sold out, with a 30 day back-order time. She decided to purchase a similar model from a different manufacturer - one that was in stock and could be delivered more quickly.

I was off work the following day for the delivery of the new refrigerator, and it arrived damaged. Apparently a forklift driver had poked a hole in the back of the box, right where the fan blows over the refrigerant coils. The slotted sheet metal vent was pulled loose and the copper refrigerant tubing was bent out of place inside. I refused to accept delivery, and the driver said the place we had purchased the fridge from would be calling us shortly - they never did.

Instead, we called them and asked what their plans were for replacing the damaged fridge. They said they would re-schedule for a week later. They don't do daily deliveries out here in the hinterlands. At that point I asked the wife if she had checked the customer satisfaction ratings on this replacement refrigerator. She had not, so she got online to check. She went pale when she saw the customer rankings on this other refrigerator. They were consistently bad, and the fridge had a one-star ranking. No wonder it was in stock while the other was not.

The following day, she cancelled the order for the one-star refrigerator. A week later, we received an automated call notifying us that our fridge would be delivered between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM. A pretty big window of time for an order that we had canceled. Apparently the store had not bothered to inform the 3rd party delivery company that the fridge was no longer to be delivered.

At this point I was getting suspicious, and decided that I'd better check my credit card balance and see if the charge for the refrigerator was reversed. The charge for the refrigerator was reversed, but the $40 fee for taking the old refrigerator away had not been refunded. As you can see in the first image, that fridge is still sitting unused in our kitchen. The wife had no luck dealing with these people over the phone getting the haul-away charge reversed, so she drove into town and spent an hour at their customer service desk. She said she was getting pretty close to giving them the full-on Karen treatment, it was that frustrating.

Afterwards, she went to that store's competitor and purchased the GE Profile mentioned above, with another 30 day back-order. The thirty day back-order date came and went, and they tacked another 30 days onto that. So now we are looking at an early February date, if it arrives then. Weird times we live in, when you can't buy a fairly common household appliance in a reasonable amount of time...

Christmas also came and went. I worked through it, and Christmas day was particularly awful - probably the 3rd worst in my life. The worst Christmas was on the submarine when we were extended on station as our relief was delayed. We were supposed to have made port a few days before Christmas. It's one thing when you expect to be at sea on Christmas, and another when you are not expecting it.

The second worst Christmas I was also in the Navy, at Nuclear Power School in Orlando. I had no home to return to. Mom had moved to Japan to teach, and I was stuck on an empty base, in an empty barracks, while everyone else had gone home for the holidays.

So *this* Christmas, it had been dangerously cold and windy the prior week, which froze a couple of pipes on the boiler and burst them. As the weather warmed up, the ice in those pipes melted - on Christmas day. Due to the high pressure in the boiler, water rapidly drained out of it, and the night shift operator had to manually initiate a trip - you can't have heat in a boiler with no water level. I came in to work Christmas morning to a huge plume of steam billowing up from the bottom of the boiler. Never a good sign. I had been hoping for a quiet day with no management around.

Below: Residual pressure still bleeding off. When this first happened it was not safe to be anywhere near it. The leak ripped the insulation off the pipe, was a roaring vent with superheated water flashing to steam as it escaped the high pressure. This entire area was filled with steam initially.

I spent Christmas day depressurizing the boiler, making a clearance so that code welders could safely work on the repair, issuing permitting, fielding calls from 3 different bosses and the utility that we sell power to. When the welders finished and released the boiler to us, I called the utility and let them know we were available, and began refilling the IP section of the boiler. The dispatcher called back a few minutes later and said to have the plant at minimum load at 1800 hrs.

So I gave the gas turbine a start command - knowing that it has a 15 minute purge of the boiler before it ignites - hoping that I would have enough water in the boiler before the turbine fired. I got a level indication on the Intermediate Pressure drum about 3 minutes before flame on, and then it was into juggling boiler water levels and all the stuff you go through during a start-up. The steam turbine was just finishing the stress holds when the other crew arrived, just in time to ramp the plant to minimum load.

I went home and went straight to bed, mentally fried. The entire day had been high-stress from beginning to end. Merry Christmas... "Other than that, Mrs. Kennedy, did you enjoy the motorcade?"

There was some good stuff after I got off shift, we opened gifts my first day off after. I scored a couple of nice spring-operated auto-punches in a cute pouch - they even have stickers for the toolbox!