No Fan of MONDAY

First, let me set up that over the weekend we broke 100⁰ degrees. Officially, the temperature at the airport was 99⁰, so officially, we haven’t gotten to the triples yet, but that’s the airport. Out in the city where I am, our little mercury tube shot up like a geyser.

It’s only the middle of March and we’re already miserable so we decide to replace the ceiling fan in the living room.

The fan we had was 52”, the biggest you could get ten years ago or so. It doesn’t cover the entire room well and where my wife sits is in the “dead” air space. So we bought a slightly bigger fan – 70”

This thing is supposed to move 8,000 + cubic feet of air per minute. Enough to swirl around the little bit of air our cooler drops into the room like a pebble in a barrel. By the time we made our purchases, and I got a new video card for my PC, it was too dark to put up the fan. I waited until MONDAY (eerie theme music here).

When I got into work at 5:30AM, as I usually do, I picked up an email from the Friday before. One of the processes our vendor ASSURED us would work on their system doesn’t. SURPRISE! So I spent the entire day trying to rewrite an application on the fly while people upstairs were trying to work around while waiting for my solution. I rewrote the app, set it up on the test server to be sure it would work and then found out that the test server had been deactivated.

It took all day to get someone to fix that, so in the meantime I created a test area on the production server. This is a no-no, but, when needs must and all that. The solution partly worked and I had to spend the afternoon “tweaking”. I almost have it; I just need to throw in some error handling, as the people upstairs create a lot of errors.

On the way home, I needed to get some mayo and some buns. The store is a little out of the way, but not by much, it’s just a different street I have to go down. One I didn’t know was under construction.

Just as I got to the barricades closing off the right lane, a little car pulls in front of me and comes to a complete stop. He tries to go to the right, sees that it’s blocked off and then SLOWLY pulls forward toward the intersection. The left turn lane, the one I want, is empty and the green arrow just turned on. The only thing between me and the turn is the little car that won’t pull forward until the arrow turns yellow, when he suddenly decides he wants to go left too. So now I’m behind this same befuddle little man and we’re both waiting for the arrow. When it comes again, he pulls through the intersection at a blazing 3MPH as all the traffic behind us is blaming me for going so slow because they can’t see him around me.

I finally get into the store, find what I need and go to the self service line. Two items. Scan, pay, no problem. Except that all of a sudden my ATM card stripe is too worn off for the machine to read.

I get home and the NEIGHBOR FROM HELL is parked in such a way that he has blocked off half the alleyway to my carport. In that big truck I need as much room as I can get. I was able to slide the truck into my carport, but had no idea how I was going to get out again in the morning.

It was with that attitude I started on the ceiling fan.

I easily took down the old one. I put on the new plate to mount the new fan, wired up everything as per the instructions and tried to put the fan on the plate. ONE bolt out of three wouldn’t line up. The fan was just a hair too low to match the plate, so after a half hour of inventing new four-letter words and running through the available list of well known ones, I thought that if I tilted the fan to that angle, I could get the fan hooked in.

Well, tilting the fan tilted the plate, the plate then dug a hole into my ceiling, nullifying the stability of flush mounting. I took it all down again and moved the plate slightly to get as much undamaged ceiling under it as I could and tried again. Another hour later, my vocabulary had increased to words of five and six letters and each one as filthy and terrible as I could spew. I finally got it on well enough that I didn’t think it would wobble too much. I hooked up the blades and the light fixture and then discovered it took those bulbs with the little tiny miniature bases: the ones that are supposed to look like candles, or flames or whatever. We don’t have those.

Well, the point was for the air to be moving, so I turned on the switch, pressed the remote and … NOTHING. Absolutely no power at all.

By this time I was up to compound words.

Now, of course, it’s dark; too dark to see. I’d been fighting this thing for nearly four hours and now I have to disassemble and start over from scratch.
No. Tomorrow. When the planets aren’t aligned against me and I’m no longer living the book of Job. Tomorrow.

It occurred to me, however, that I DID have two of those silly little bulbs, they were part of an older fan we’d kept, and I’d saved them. I went out to the storage shed, got the two little decorative whatevers and screwed one in.

I screwed the second one in and the base separated from the bulb. I was still holding the bulb, the base was snugly inside the socket.

There were no more words.

By the way, the good light doesn’t work either. There was NO WAY I was going to open up my PC and install the card on THAT day.

Today, I’m getting a ceiling medallion to cover the hole, and trying again. This morning the NEIGHBOR FROM HELL’s car was gone, the people upstairs at work have a temporary solution until this gets ironed out and traffic at 5:30AM was light.

If you happen to have an extra prayer on you, use it for me.

I’m spending the day looking up new words, or at least trying to find them in other languages, just to confuse the dogs.