Technology jinx (by alaric)
On Sunday, we were due to drive back from Essex (stopping off to pick up Minnie)... but while driving back to Sarah's parent's place that morning, I noticed that the brakes were really really feeble. As in, the pedal would go all the way to the floor without much resistance until the last part, and the car would come to a gentle stop rather than screeching to a halt.
When we got out, we saw that the rear wheels were all covered in an oily liquid that had emerged from the axle. Bah.
So we borrowed Sarah's mother's car for the journey home. It's a bit smaller than ours, and we had a lot of stuff, so it was a bit of a squeeze!
Then on Tuesday, we went out to pick up more cat litter from Stayte Services in Stroud, and as I was parking in their car park, the car stalled.
Which is an odd thing for an automatic transmission to do.
It wouldn't start again.
After a bit of sitting there groaning with our heads in our hands, it did start again, but quickly stalled once more. I began to surmise that letting the engine cool down had helped, so we left it a while, started it up, and this time I kept the revs high so it wouldn't stall again, and reversed it into a parking space. In case the problem was due to something in the fuel line, I left the engine running (with Sarah watching over it) while I went in and purchased, but it had stalled again by the time I returned. It started again after a cooling period, then I had a nervous and fraught drive home, trying to keep the revs up in slow traffic and so on. It's been fine since, though - I suspect it was just overheating in some way.
But then Wednesday morning, I got up to find the ADSL was down. So I used dialup to check for emails, and to complain to the ISP. The fridges and freezers were all running their compressors at once, and Sarah complained that some of the (flourescent) lights weren't working; and the UPS kept switching to battery mode. Checking the logs revealed that the mains voltage was around 170v instead of the usual 240v; and before long it cut out entirely, so I dragged the generator out and started it up to run the computers and the fridges and freezers - which, given enough voltage to run their compressors properly, were soon at a decent temperature, and the compressors shut off again.
The power came back, but I stayed on the generator for a while, until I was sure it was OK.
Interestingly, when the power came back and the ADSL router powered back up (it wasn't on the generator), it managed to obtain a link immediately; perhaps it was only failing because it was running on a reduced voltage, and its power supply was thus failing to provide proper power to the thing in such a way that made it unable to get a proper link. I'd expect a switched-mode power supply to still provide clean power in such situations (the computers were all quite happy on 170v), but you never know what corners might be cut in cheap equipment!
Either way, right now, I'm feeling a bit cursed...
Thu 27th Jul 2006 9:43 am 
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By Charlee, Fri 28th Jul 2006 @ 12:45 pm
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