It's hard for this Chicago city slicker to appreciate how people can live a life without natural gas piped to their doorstep. As it happened, my wife's mom live out in the rural areas of Iowa and that is how she lived. She did have a huge propane tank in her back yard, however. You have mentioned more than once how abundant natural gas is in this country and knowing that makes the potential shortage in my area an even greater mystery than it is. There generally is a lot of talk and discussion when the utility companies need to raise their prices, but I've not heard of a shortage in supply until this one from Spire. Too bad that I don't keep up with Missouri politics. I might know what's really going on if I did.
I have a friend in North Carolina who is disabled and getting SSD payments from the government. Like you, she owns her own house and doesn't have to worry about a mortgage. She never talks about real estate taxes so that I don't know if they even have any where she lives. She does tell me that she goes to a food pantry regularly and is also receiving food stamps. As of October her stamps went up to a value of $146. Prior to that she was getting only $16 in food stamps. I knew the benefit schedule was increased, but I had no idea it was raised that much. Also like you she is taking a wide variety of prescribed drugs. Fortunately she can get by with pills instead of insulin, but that's only part of the regimen. I don't know how she gets away with being able to buy drugs, but then she is on Medicaid, not Medicare. She ends up with around $20 extra spending money each month which astonishes me. Her drugs must be on a different schedule under Medicaid. I don't know how else to explain it.
I worked as the chief alignment draftsman for MRTC for around 6 years. They pipe natural gas from Louisiana and Texas up to St. Louis, and few points between, and beyond now too.
They added a third pipeline while I was working for them, because demand for natural gas went up so much, two pipes were not enough to handle the demand. And if one pipe was down for repairs for a day or three, all other locations other than St. Louis were shut off until the repairs were made, or fed only a slow low amount.
Most of these places that would get cut off did have storage tanks which they usually kept full. While the Storage Tanks in St. Louis were rarely stocked up more than 1/4 to 1/3 of the way full in the latter years I worked there. Probably because St. Louis would get 100% of the output available from us. Plus they did have backup sources from other pipeline companies which could be used if needed.
One of the reasons there are no natural gas lines in our area is because of our degree days and everyone who switched from oil to electric installed heat pumps. So the demand for natural gas was so low it did not warrant running a pipe into our subdivision. Now up by the secondary highway where there are some commercial buildings, natural gas was brought to there, and then a large church paid to have a line brought down Sims Road to their church, which was partially paid for by a new restaurant that wanted to open in an old grocery store building. The pipe installed that far is not large enough to carry adding any more services from it. And remember, we were rural Knox County until the City Annexed us. Most rural areas here don't even have water or sewer service. Most of the county is on wells and septic tanks, except along the commercial main highway.
Medicaid basically covers everything not covered by Medicare, for people who can get approved for Medicaid.
Down here, for those who cannot get approved for Medicaid, there is Tenncare which is basically the same thing.
But your total gross income from all sources, including SS, has to be under like 600 bucks a month. It may be higher now?
My late wife got SSD after she was wheelchair bound, even though she was only in her 50's. But it was not as much as her normal SS would have been if she had reached retirement age. She had excellent insurance and benefits that covered almost all of her costs, up and until her insurance capped out and then I had to pay for everything myself for her. If she would have reached retirement age, some of it might have been covered through Medicare, etc. But at the time, she was just hung out to dry.
I get the impression that we here in O'Fallon are on the same natural gas network as is St Louis. I also think St Louis would have priority if push came to shove. It's hard to draw any conclusions from the letters the gas company sends out, and I think they do that intentionally. However, I'm pretty sure the worst case scenario would involve limiting the supply and not cutting it off entirely. We personally do not use much gas but the entire community is fed by the same line. If there was a reduction I am certain it would cover the entire area. I suppose this would be a good time to go out and buy some electric room heaters. LOL
We have some propane powered emergency heaters, since in our case, it is usually the electric that goes out, and all too often too!
My neighbor on the other side of the hill, to my south, bought one of those compact windmills with no exposed blades. He mounted it on top of his barn so the tip of it is visible from my house while there are no leaves on the trees that is.
I know nothing else about it, other than what it is he put up there. At least he is in the windy valley, hi hi.
When we get wind in our valley, it will blow you away, else it is usually calm with no wind at all.
There are twelve days to the deadline and I've not heard anything about what is in store for us, or not in store. I don't keep too well informed anyway, so it's not unusual for me to be in the dark. I don't mind the dark but I do mind being cold. I take blood thinners and that in turn makes my blood run cold. LOL If the gas does get turned down I"m sure every electric room heater in the county and the county over toward STL would run out of stock in a matter of hours. I'd have to order some on line or have my daughter in Chicago or the one in Michigan send me one. Hmm, Christmas is coming and they do run out of ideas ...
Although not related, but did produce a lot of heat.
My first wife's father's house sat in such a way, the front of his house got both the morning and evening sun during the winter months.
On the front of his house was a large picture window, with a vertical window on each side.
Now under the big picture window was a solid panel, but on each side, under the vertical windows were small windows that opened outward about 2 to 3 inches from the bottom.
It is these two small windows I used to make a solar heat exchanger for him.
I think I mentioned this once many years ago on this forum?
I built a wooden box about 18 inches wide by roughly 5 feet long, and 5 inches tall.
I had a gazillion of the old style baby food jars with the flanged lids, not the plastic threads they used in later years.
I screwed the lids for the jars to the bottom of the box, then painted the inside of the box flat black, using about 4 layers of paint. The outer perimeter of jars were filled with mineral oil, but all the rest I filled with brine, and glued a thin plastic over the top of all the jars. Had to do that for two reasons. #1 if I inverted the box to affix all the jars, it would have been too heavy to flip back over again and set it on the angled mount I made for it. And also, I didn't want the metal lids to corrode and start leaking. Besides, this plastic film made a solid seal to the caps also.
On the left side of the box facing the house, closest to the front door, was an opening into the living room via the lower window in its normal state of opening at the bottom. On the right side, I inverted the window mechanism so it opened with the top out. I was using the logic, heat rises and cold air falls.
Have you ever shot a thick piece of plate glass window with a bb gun?
Well if you do, a cone shaped piece of glass is broken from the window glass.
We spent a couple of hours with a plate glass window, actually the glass slats from an abandoned louvered door, and shot enough of these cones that I could glue one to the top of each baby food jar before we put the final sheet of glass on the box.
I trimmed the tops down a bit an the row of bushes that ran the length of his house so they didn't block the sun from hitting the box. We finished this project in September, before he needed any heat, and little dial type thermometer I had inside the box showed the internal temp up around 130 degrees, with both the small windows closed.
Come a few cold days in late November, the temp in the box was still up around 116 degrees before we opened the windows.
Heat poured out into the living room for a few minutes, then the temp of the box dropped all the way down to around 86 where it held the entire time the sun was shining. It was still at 74 degrees around 8 pm and 70 degrees at 9 pm when he closed the windows and opened the floor registers in the living room.
I installed this unit around 1969 and it was still in use in 1984. I don't know how much longer after that, since we never crossed paths again. I know it was removed before the house was sold around 1995 after his death.
You might find this hard to believe, but your narrative about the solar heat exchange unit is new to me. if you did bring it up in the past, I don't recall you doing so. Your creativeness and inventive skills shine brilliantly in that story. But then, it's nothing exceptional for a guy who had a farm full of plants underground in southern Illinois. LOL
The entire south wall of this house faces south. We are elevated above our southern neighbors by at least ten feet so that we get the full compliment of winter sun. I don't know how much benefit that gives us but we are pretty comfortable in the rooms on the south side of the house. Unfortunately, the sun also heats those rooms during the hottest summer months. My wife got some blackout curtains for those windows and that helps a lot. The windows are made of plastic and leak like a sieve during the coldest days of winter. Those curtains help keep the losses down from that too.
Yesterday we got another letter from the Spire gas people. The renewal permit still has not been issued by the commission which does such things, but they did promise to take action before the December 13th deadline, when the pipeline shuts down. So, Spire thinks it will be OK if those politicians in charge of gas do their job. We'll see.
When I got all new Thermopane windows put in this house. The large double width double hung windows over the kitchen sink, I had specially made with UV protect glass in them. It blocks the heat and color fading properties of the sun. The sun still hits you but you don't get hot from it. That 3 pm searing sun that came in the normal windows made it too hot to do the dishes without closing the blinds, and even then the heat still came through.
When I turned a small bedroom into the master bedroom, it had the existing window, of which I installed a new set of blinds, and a sheet of plexiglass over the inside, before covering the whole thing with drywall.
The heat inside that window was so hot, it first caused the blinds to sag, and then they turned black. Looked awful from outside. I was just about ready to put a sheet of black plexiglass over the outside, when we decided to have the concrete block stucco house recovered with vinyl siding so it blended in better with the new houses beside and in front of us. So no one knows there is a window there at all now. Can't tell from outside or inside.
In the original living room, turned into a second bedroom, aka Debi's Office and our Exercise Room. I covered the entry door, which opened inward, after removing the hardware and framing, it is now behind drywall. On the outside, now an enclosed porch it still has the screen door covered with a few layers of solid foam insulation board. It too will get covered with drywall eventually, when I can afford to pay someone else to do it, which basically means never, hi hi.
I sure hope they get your gas situation under control so you guys don't end up freezing to death!
Apparently the supply of natural gas has been short for many years. Spire planned for this eventuality by making deals with surrounding distributors. That more or less assures we will have some gas, but maybe not as much as we would like. I guess if everybody turned down their hot water heaters and the furnace thermostat a few degrees there would not be a problem. But the population is also increasing so that they can't just ignore it. The gas supply line in question has been used for a few years just to meet the growth in population. I'm still not sure why the do-gooders want to shut it off, but they have no concern for the people who would be affected by such a move. Anyway, the contingency plan would be to augment what we can get with electric heat. Electricity around here is pretty cheap, but still it would add to the maintenance costs more than I care to see.
All the windows here have low emissivity glass and are double pane. I don't think there is UV filters on these windows, but we did have them up north. That was not necessarily a good idea if you wanted to grow plants indoors near the windows. The issue I have with the windows here has to do with the weather stripping and the thermal properties of the plastic. The windows shrink in cold weather and leak. It's not a lot better in summer because the weather sealing actually leaves an air gap around the window frame. It's that fuzzy hair kind of seal and it does work most of the time. But it will wear out quickly in any window that is opened and closed a lot. When the winds are strong and coming from the right direction I can feel a breeze in certain areas of the window frame. The only saving grace is that O'Fallon isn't Chicago. The "cold" here doesn't go as deep or last as long.
One of the reasons not many place down south here use gas, is because with TVA our electric cost per kwh was about half that of electric in the midwest. But it has gone up considerably since I've moved south. However, gas has gone up everywhere too, so electric is still cheaper now. But not in the old days, gas was so cheap you could leave your gas lights on 24/7 year round and not burn up but a few bucks worth.
After my dad had me convert all of his outdoor gas lights to electric with dusk to dawn switches, his gas bill only went down by about 1 buck per month, but his electric bill went up by around 3 bucks per month, even running them only at night.
When I bought Thermopane windows, I normally bought vinyl clad wood, just for that very reason.
Vinyl clad aluminum expands and contracts a whole lot more than vinyl clad wood.
And all vinyl windows, like I used in rehab work, did seal well and were cheaper than anything else.
When I did the windows down here, I went with all vinyl Thermopane, no aluminum or wood.
They don't have any leaks which is good. They are also tilt-in's so easy to keep clean.
I admit to having a bias in favor of wood. All the windows in the old house were wood with aluminum cladding. There were no air leaks around the frames. The double pane glass was put into place with some kind of gooey putty. I was told that would only last for ten years, but we got twice that mileage on all but one window in the kitchen. There was absolutely no maintenance involved with those windows other than keeping them clean.
Aside from wood residential windows can be had in vinyl or fiberglass. The best type for here in Missouri, so I've read, is fiberglass. Developers like to use vinyl because of the costs. Performance is a big issue up in Chicago where the winters can be lethal. That's not the case 300 miles to the south and some leaky windows can be tolerated. Maybe it would be fine for a person half my age, but I am pretty sensitive to the cold. If we ever replace the windows here, it will likely be with fiberglass. They told me to expect the weather seal to lose it's efficiency after ten years so that could be the test. We are half way to that threat at this moment.
One more letter arrived this morning from Spire the gas supply people. Apparently the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted the Spire STL Pipeline a new temporary operating certificate. This will tide us over until next summer, thank goodness for that. Spire promised to keep pounding away at the powers that be to get a permanent permit. We will cross that bridge when we come to it. For now I expect to remain toasty warm this winter, in spite of my crappy windows. LOL
You're probably going to laugh at this one.
I had a customer many eons ago who lived in a century old house.
Above the doors were transom's to give you an idea, and ten foot high ceilings.
All the years his family lived there, they had removable screens and framed storm windows, which was common for the era.
His shutters also opened and closed to, not that it is relevant.
He discovered that the frames that held each individual pane of glass was built up using decorative 1/4 rounds both inside and out. But the ones on the outside deteriorated over the years, and most were covered with caulk and many were missing as the panes of glass were replaced.
Some of the rooms in the back and on one side of the house had 8 panes of glass, while the ones on the front and the other side of the house had 18 panes of glass. Plus one pair of windows with only 4 panes of glass.
He had the money to have it done the way he wanted, and he did buy most of the materials required for installation.
But I had to measure each frame and order unframed Thermopane window inserts. In order to work, they had to be only 7/16th inch thick. About 8 places I called said they couldn't make them. The place I really wanted to make them for me, after I told them how many windows there were and I would be ordering over 250 of them, he changed his tune real quick. He actually gave me a price cheaper than if they used their standard size aluminum seals. So I ended up getting a good deal for my client.
On the inside of the house, he bought some decorative white anodized aluminum strips that fit over the window pane framing, not inside the framing. This was so the 7/16th inch thick panes would fit flush against them on the inside and on the outside.
But for the outside, he bought extruded vinyl molding that would be the equivalent of half-rounds if they were not milled down to decorative shape. They too fit flush over the window framing. Both edges of this molded vinyl had like a soft gel substance on them, not like a glue, more like a soft rubber washer, but not foamy like foam rubber. The client wanted the horizontal pieces placed all in one piece and the vertical ones cut to match the shape of the molding, so they looked right.
That was a bear to do, very tricky, with that darn gel stuff in the way.
Now it just so happened that there was another contractor there replacing the open handrail on a staircase. He came out and watched me for a couple of minutes and told me to wait up a bit. He called his office and asked them to send over a router table, and a set of reversed ogee bits, and a sheet of silicone on a glide board. It took them about an hour to get there, and he set up the router and matched the right bit to the pattern and got me going. What was taking me about 5 minutes each, I was now doing at the rate of about 10 to 15 per minute. Even so, this entire job took over two weeks to get done. The banister guy was done in a couple of days and gave me his card to return his equipment.
I drove over to his house, twice, which was like 30 miles away, and he was not home either time, plus was not answering his phone and it didn't go to voice mail either. I kept trying his phone number at different times throughout the day for over 3 weeks before he finally answered. Turns out he was on an out of state job and just got back only an hour before I called.
He said he was going to be gone again tomorrow, but gave me an address much closer to my house to take his equipment to.
The address he gave me was to an old Dolgin's department store. But I had a name to ask for. They didn't know the name, but someone overheard me ask, and said she thinks that is the name of the crew chief for the contractors working in back.
The lady got on the intercom to the store room and called out that name, and within 30 seconds the guy was up to get it.
He looked at me like I had a third eye, and said you didn't have to buy him a new one, just return the old one. I said this is the one he loaned me, I just cleaned it before returning it. You have to remember, I had the Saw & Sabre Shop at this time, so had all the equipment necessary to clean it like new and preserved it from rusting for awhile anyhow.
Fast forward about a month, and the guy who loaned it to me called and asked if I could clean up some of his other equipment. I said sure, and he sent a guy over with close to 15 machines of different types for me to clean. Because he didn't charge me to use his equipment, I did it for him gratis. Even so, he sent me a check a few days after he got his equipment back for 400 bucks, with a thank you card. I needed the money at the time so didn't argue, hi hi.
That's a pretty amazing story about the window panes. It reminded me of the days we had something similar. Our windows originally were held in place by a wood strip of milled quarter round that got painted into place over the years. Replacing a window was a job and a half trying to remove that wooden strip without breaking it. I don't know exactly when, but those strips were replaced with painted putty at some point. We had to use small metal triangles to hold the glass pane in place and the trick was to be able to pound them in without smashing the glass. I didn't have to replace very many windows, but your story reminded me of the times I did.
The guy that trusted you with his router table was an angel in disguise. I can see how it saved you a lot of work. There probably still are people around who engage in random acts of kindness. They just aren't as easy to find as they once were.
Last edited by yogi on 06 Dec 2021, 22:24, edited 1 time in total.
Yes sir, Glazers Points. We had a special tool for hammering them in. If you saw it in a store, you wouldn't know that is what the flat hammer was for, hi hi.
The window company that made my Thermopane replacement panes for me, often got some weird special requests.
One they got quite often actually was full-sized stained glass windows were brought in, and they wanted those windows encased inside a Thermopane window. AND fit back into the opening they came out of. Which of course required trimming down the original frame. Not a big deal if they were wood and the windows did not open and close. But some of them had a steel frame with hinges so not only could they not be cut down, but they couldn't be covered or placed inside a Thermopane panel.
But given a real challenge, this window guy would come up with something that would work on those types of windows.
Normally they would not exactly be Thermopane, but just double glassed, so the glass could be removed for cleaning. He still sealed them and drew a slight vacuum to make sure the seals held, and hopefully kept them clean.
Yes he was! And I learned another way of doing things from him as well.
I had tile saws that I would loan out to folks doing their own tile work.
They always came back dirty too. I mean they did wash them out, but not clean them to prevent rusting.
In a couple of cases, they never came back too, and trying to track down some of those characters would only lead to frustration.
One guy borrowed one to cut bricks in half, they were not designed for that, so needless to say, he burned out the motor.
He didn't tell me he wanted to cut bricks, else I would have gave him one designed for that purpose. It would have had a larger blade and much bigger motor too. The one I had was already ancient, but worked like a top the few times I needed to use it myself.
I've had many different paint guns over the years too, some of them quite expensive. But ironically, the one I liked best was also the cheapest one could buy, it was a centrifugal hand held sprayer. They fell out of use when latex paints became popular because the paint would foam up in a centrifugal sprayer. But they worked like a charm with oil based paints.
You could set the pattern so fine, you could sign your name with it about the thickness of a large ballpoint pen.
Or spray a pattern about 18 inches wide with solid coverage and no runs in the paint. Loved that little thing!
My dad made a small bar out of steel. He would place it flat upon the window pane and on top of the glazier's point. Then he would whack the bar which would push the point into the frame. As far as I knew he never broke a window doing that.
Lending tools to fellow tradesmen isn't so unusual apparently. I can see where that started given how you grew up on a farm. Many farmers do the same thing because the equipment is so darned expensive that the small farmer can't afford to buy it. Thus it all gets loaned or rented out. I can imagine some of those farm machines running 24 hours a day for weeks at a time during harvest season.
All the tiles I ever cut was done by hand. I could not afford a cutting machine. I didn't do a lot of tile work and it never occurred to me that you could rent a cutter. But then most of the things I did was small time and could easily be done by hand. The saws that I really am awed by are the ones I see them using to cut concrete roads. It looks as if those babies can cut through rebars as well. They never bother to control the dust, or at least the crews I saw didn't. It was very cloudy around the work area and I'm surprised there was no ordinance about keeping it all contained.
A glazers hammer looks like a small rectangular box with a wedge front and is used from the side. The handle is bent out about 15 degrees are so to leave room for your hand between the handle and the glass.
Although grandpa had many large farming implements. Most of the farmers around us all worked together, and sometimes we did also. Each farmer only owned one major implement, and they all worked together on each others farms getting the job done. But then too, they all had to raise similar things because some of the machines, like the big planters, only handle certain types of seeds, but did 8 rows at a time. FWIW: Ours only did 6 rows at a time.
One of the poorest farmers only had a huge hay rake to his name, but after the harvest, he was right there with it running ahead of the guy who owned the hay baler, and others were picking up the bales and tossing them onto steak trucks.
We owned a few tall and wide conveyors, so we would go to each farmers barn and set up and wait for a truck to pull in. We could empty an entire truck in only about 20 minutes with the hay all stacked neatly in the loft. Then we would head over to the next persons farm. Nearly all farmers had a grain conveyor going up to their silos. Ironically, we did not have tall silos on our place. Just the low wide diameter ones. But then we didn't have livestock anymore either. So we usually just had corn in corn cribs or ventilated low silos.
Renting a tile cutter, used to be like 50 bucks a day, and you could buy a new one for 99 bucks. Then after you were done using it sell it for 75 to 80 bucks and come out ahead that way.
I know I had to rent a sump pump once after our first flood. Those scobies charged me 35 bucks to rent it. I found the exact same make and model on sale at a retail hardware store for like 24.95, and later another one for only 19.99 at a discount store.
I had a second cousin who bought an existing tool rental place. He had a huge business because he was much cheaper than any of the competition. His rule of thumb was, a one day rental should be 1/4 the price of the unit. A two or three day rental should be 1/3 the price, and a weekly rental 1/2 the price, of what he paid for for the items. Because of his super low daily and 2 & 3 day rental rates, contractors flocked to his store. Also because he seemed to always have new equipment.
Although it really depended on the item itself as to how many usages it had, he sold to other rural rental places at 1/2 the price he paid for something. In many cases, an item may have only been used 5 to 7 times, other items up to 30 times before he sold them and bought new. Or looking at it another way, if it no longer looked like brand new, he would sell the item.
But there were some things, usually larger equipment items, he wouldn't sell until they had been used for over 6 months up to a year. I think he kept the bobcats and small tractors for around a year.
He became a millionaire within about 5 years of owning the place, then just had a manager handle it for him for about 3 years before he sold the store and everything in it for a couple million, actually an undisclosed amount of money, but it left him sitting pretty at the age of 50.
All I know about farming is that I am very glad that I was born in the city. Every single farmer I talked to had to work very hard for little return. But then, the camaraderie among the farming neighbors just doesn't exist in the city. I can easily understand why the two groups of people evolved into separate social classes. They have very little in common other than being human beings.
There was a rental shop up in the old neighborhood. I had a need for their services a couple times when I was cutting down trees in my mini forest. I got to be fairly good at felling a tree, but there were times when the chain saw would become wedged in the tree trunk and could not be removed. I have bent more than a couple guide bars in these situations and learned how to sharpen my own chains out of self-defense. The times when my saw could not be removed I had to go to the rental shop and get one of theirs to rescue my own tool. A couple times I did that proved to be disappointing. They always started the saw before I took it just to prove it could start. There were no other guarantees. LOL On two occasions that's all the saw did. Just start. One ran for about three minutes then stopped dead. I had to wait for it to cool off before I got another three minutes. The second time was something similar but did not give me a second chance. It died never to start again. I ended up using a hand saw to save my Stihl saw from an early demise. And when I told the guy about my experience, he was sympathetic and apologized. No refunds however. They were still in business when I left town, but I don't know why.
I did a web search for the type glaziers hammer he had, didn't find one. Then there is a good chance he made it himself too. But back then, there were several out there. Heck, I even had one for a while.
Grandpa had to have made a lot of money to build all the greenhouse, boiler room, and buy all the other equipment we had on our property. Had the company not been diluted the way it was through division to heirs, perhaps it could have still grown.
I rented a scissors lift once. The guy raised and lowered it for us and showed us how to set it up and use it.
We towed it to the job site, moved it into place, lowered the feet, placed only six bundles of shingles on it, and we couldn't get it to budge upward one iota. Took the shingles off and tried again, no luck. We were not far from the rental place so I called the guy and said I must have missed one of the instructions. How do you get it to go up. He went through the set up routine with me on the phone. the legs were down and locked as they should be. He had me check a couple of things to see if a pin or safety switch wasn't closed. Nope, they were all closed. He said to bring it back and he would look at it there.
We towed it back, right to the spot where we got if from, thinking he would let us take another one.
No such luck. He came out and tested it and it went up just like it did before we towed it to the job site.
And he didn't even put the safety legs down first. I told him to put the safety legs down and try it then.
So we pulled it out a bit to have room to do that, and sure enough, when the legs were down and secured, that thing would budge one inch. He played around with it for about half an hour or so and couldn't figure it out either.
But luck of the Irish, another person just pulled in with one to return that was a size larger than this one. He let us take it, no extra charge, but we had already lost half a day of work because of it.
After that incident, I just made a roller table I could set on the ladder and use a rope to pull it up the ladder, rather than carry the shingles up the ladder.
Normally, if I did a roof, I had the deliver set to rooftop delivery. But you just can't do that on some houses.
When I did renovation houses, I just paid a roofing company to do the roof. Cost more but a lot less headaches, hi hi.
That uplifting story reminded me of the days I worked under high pressure. The computers I administered were used in and around the production lines for various purposes; mostly to log events and the stats that go with them. Even back in the good old days computers did not work perfectly and we would get some rather frantic calls for help at times. Whenever a server, or two, would need to be rebooted to restore service, that almost always involve an irate phone call from the production manager, and sometimes his boss. We were told in no uncertain terms how much money we were responsible for the factory losing due to the production lines being shut down. Computers were a lot slower back then, and servers are not desktops. It sometimes took the better part of an hour to restart a system, and that was after a lot of time was spent locating the problem. It boiled down to a battle of budgets. The factory lost money during down times and they needed somebody to blame that on. Well the support people never reimbursed the factory as far as I know. I can't tell you how stressful it is to try and troubleshoot a misbehaved computer when six people are standing in back of you waiting for you to find the fix. LOL I didn't get as bothered as most guys because I knew I was doing my best. It was, however, difficult to convince the observers of that fact.
I hear ya big time Yogi. Remember, I used to do chip level repair on video games, pin balls, and gaming machines.
Many times I had to make a repair in a dark tavern, or the game room in a mall, with everyone standing around wanting to play that game. The taverns were the worst due to poor light, and all the drunks hovering to see the insides of the machine and what I was doing. If it was just a power transistor, or something fairly simple, I would fix it there rather than bring the machine back to the shop. Especially if it was one that was recently cleaned and needed no other service for another month or so.
It was a lot easier to fix machines back in the early electronic days, because each group of items had their own circuit board, besides the main board. So we could just swap out a board and be up and running. But as the games got more sophisticated, everything was handled on the main board, and since it held the game itself, there was no swapping it out. And every game had a different board then too.
I also had my share of working on the old mechanical pin balls, namely those used for gambling purposes. Compared to the electronic machines, they were actually fairly easy to repair. They also had no flippers. When you shot the ball, you hoped it landed in a hole you needed it to land in. And since they were used for illegal gambling, those switches better be working perfect in every hole, hi hi.
You may be familiar with that type of pin ball. You kept feeding it nickels one after the other to build up the odds.
When I was growing up, nearly every tavern had one or two of these types of machines, with a BIG SIGN that says, NOT USED FOR GAMBLING. But if you knew the owner of the place, that's exactly why those machines were they, and the house paid the winners, SECRETLY, hi hi.
