![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Who ya' gonna call?
Mar. 28th, 2020 08:41 amIt's all very well to tell us to go home and stay there. But what if critical appliances, mod-cons and infrastructure within that home are malfunctioning? What if your smart home develops dementia?
There's corvid19 and then there was Corbeil '16, when we bought a snazzy new multi-thousand dollar induction-top stove from a well-known appliance store in the Ottawa area. It had to be shipped from Montreal and when it arrived, two of the four top hotplates were not working. We also had to replace most of our stovetop cookware, including our kettle and espresso maker, because they were incompatible with induction stovetops. What followed was weeks and even months of refused service calls, long periods of hold and awaiting callbacks on Whirlpool's 1-800 helpline, denials and blame-the-victim episodes and incompetence on the part of service people, store employees and others, even though I and even my somewhat more temperamental partner were assiduous about keeping our cool while being assertive and persistent. There were, I'll concede, some people in there who showed some humanity. We eventually got our four functional burners. Then the oven part malfunctioned. Once we got that working, we realized that it still needed a cool-down period of - get this - a couple of hours. In other words, if you baked lasagna for supper, turned off the oven while you enjoyed your meal, then decided to bake a cake or cookies or muffins for dessert or school lunches for the week ahead, you literally couldn't turn the oven on again. When you touched the keypad, instead of beeping on or beeping out the temperature you wanted, all you'd get would be a recalcitrant "beebeebeebeep!" of protest. Then nothing. As I recall, it was perhaps two to four months from the time of purchase to the point where everything was working normally. Imagine something like that with the added tensions of Covid 19!
We're only two weeks into the extraordinary measures that have taken effect in this area since Coronavirus hit. As things escalate, it's inevitable that hardware wars and their refugees will too. Think of all the things we rely on on a regular basis. The stove. The fridge. The washer and dryer. For many of us, the microwave and the dishwasher too. Things that are relatively portable and relatively inexpensive may be less problematic - perhaps you can buy a new one and have it delivered. Perhaps the installation is a simple matter of plugging something in. But what happens when more is required?
Then there are actual parts of a building. The elevator. The furnace and the HVAC system and what's often called the "building envelope". A few years before our woes with the stove, we had a problem with our furnace. We simply couldn't get the heat up many mornings. If you pressed the red reset button on the furnace, it would come on for perhaps 10 or 15 seconds. Then nothing. A second reset would be to no avail. Thank goodness for furnace protection plans. Petrocan were wonderful about coming out on service calls, sometimes as late as 9PM, sometimes at 8AM on a Sunday morning. The issues were eventually resolved (I seem to recall some mention of a "tiger loop" although I don't think that was the eventual solution) but interestingly during the next heating season, the service aspects got contracted out to Signature Home Heating, while Petro Canada restricted itself to fuel delivery.
Are these "just" First World problems I'm talking about here? Yes, they probably are. But they are definitely matters we will have to think about and provide for in the next few months.
There's corvid19 and then there was Corbeil '16, when we bought a snazzy new multi-thousand dollar induction-top stove from a well-known appliance store in the Ottawa area. It had to be shipped from Montreal and when it arrived, two of the four top hotplates were not working. We also had to replace most of our stovetop cookware, including our kettle and espresso maker, because they were incompatible with induction stovetops. What followed was weeks and even months of refused service calls, long periods of hold and awaiting callbacks on Whirlpool's 1-800 helpline, denials and blame-the-victim episodes and incompetence on the part of service people, store employees and others, even though I and even my somewhat more temperamental partner were assiduous about keeping our cool while being assertive and persistent. There were, I'll concede, some people in there who showed some humanity. We eventually got our four functional burners. Then the oven part malfunctioned. Once we got that working, we realized that it still needed a cool-down period of - get this - a couple of hours. In other words, if you baked lasagna for supper, turned off the oven while you enjoyed your meal, then decided to bake a cake or cookies or muffins for dessert or school lunches for the week ahead, you literally couldn't turn the oven on again. When you touched the keypad, instead of beeping on or beeping out the temperature you wanted, all you'd get would be a recalcitrant "beebeebeebeep!" of protest. Then nothing. As I recall, it was perhaps two to four months from the time of purchase to the point where everything was working normally. Imagine something like that with the added tensions of Covid 19!
We're only two weeks into the extraordinary measures that have taken effect in this area since Coronavirus hit. As things escalate, it's inevitable that hardware wars and their refugees will too. Think of all the things we rely on on a regular basis. The stove. The fridge. The washer and dryer. For many of us, the microwave and the dishwasher too. Things that are relatively portable and relatively inexpensive may be less problematic - perhaps you can buy a new one and have it delivered. Perhaps the installation is a simple matter of plugging something in. But what happens when more is required?
Then there are actual parts of a building. The elevator. The furnace and the HVAC system and what's often called the "building envelope". A few years before our woes with the stove, we had a problem with our furnace. We simply couldn't get the heat up many mornings. If you pressed the red reset button on the furnace, it would come on for perhaps 10 or 15 seconds. Then nothing. A second reset would be to no avail. Thank goodness for furnace protection plans. Petrocan were wonderful about coming out on service calls, sometimes as late as 9PM, sometimes at 8AM on a Sunday morning. The issues were eventually resolved (I seem to recall some mention of a "tiger loop" although I don't think that was the eventual solution) but interestingly during the next heating season, the service aspects got contracted out to Signature Home Heating, while Petro Canada restricted itself to fuel delivery.
Are these "just" First World problems I'm talking about here? Yes, they probably are. But they are definitely matters we will have to think about and provide for in the next few months.
