Proving Josh's Point (in a Polar Vortex)

a creative writing edition (#14)

This is paywalled, so housekeeping first.

Lots of pictures in this post, so your email client may not handle it well. You can also read it at the Substack website.

This is the fourteenth edition of a creative writing feature for paid subscribers, who are also able to comment on this post (and most posts). If you would like a paid subscription but can’t afford it, send an email to hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and I’ll hook you up with a free year.

Context: since I started this feature, I usually put weird or interesting (or potentially interesting, anyway) little stories here. It feels like the “creative writing” construct frees me from needing to do a proper introduction, thesis, supporting point, supporting point, conclusion, etc., structure.

That’s all this is — a story of a small adventure in a polar vortex.

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Murphy Was Wiser Than Socrates…

“I know that I know nothing.” —Socrates

“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong—and at the worst possible time.” —Murphy’s Law

…And My Friend Josh? Wiser Than Murphy.

My friend Josh Slocum is host of the Disaffected Podcast and writes a related Substack. He’s a fabulous human being, wicked smart and hilarious. He is my role model for personal responsibility. I’d trust him with my life, my unlocked phone, or a list of my passwords.

One of the ways that “privilege” is a thing is surely friend privilege, and I am privileged to call him my friend.

Josh has a regular rant, one I’ve heard many times, about modern over-reliance on electronics. He wrote about it just ten days ago, in fact.

I got my first late-model car a couple of months ago, and for the first time was faced with things like a backup camera, having my car tell me the speed limit and alert me to lane markers, and the other ways that late-model cars do some of the driving for us.

When Josh taught me how to drive in snow, he explained how over-reliance on such things would degrade my driving skills over time. Yes, my hearing makes the backup camera a special boon to me, but it’s still very important to physically turn my head and look, every time, so that I never lose that habit.

Likewise, it was one thing to have the car alert me to lane markers, but I should not allow the setting where it would move the wheel. I and I alone should be in charge of the car.

We’ve also discussed, at length, the way that modern washing machines are overly computerized and feature, like most electronic gadgets, planned obsolescence. Josh went to great lengths to secure for his home an older, used washing machine that would last.

I had an adventure this morning that proved the wisdom of his position.

The Polar Vortex

Last night, when I went outside to warm up my car, the temperature was -22 degrees, Fahrenheit. The windchill was -49 degrees. I staggered all the way to my car, trying to not be blown off course by ferocious winds.

I was wearing two pairs of thermal underwear, jeans, two pairs of socks, two short-sleeved shirts, one long-sleeved shirt, an oversized hoodie, gloves, mittens, the hood of the hoodie, a scarf over my face, thick winter boots, and a hat.

My boots and mittens had been warmed up for thirty minutes with electric hand warmers, on high, inside them before I put them on to go outside. (The electric hand warmers, by the way, are fabulous and happen to be 50% off today.)

The wind was so ferocious that my teeth were chattering and I had goosebumps all over my body before I got to my car. I added a third set of thermal underwear before I returned to my car to go to my appointment.

After several months of barely-above-freezing, barely-any-snowfall, we are finally having a real New England winter.

The Epic Tale of the Heater in My Apartment

My apartment is about half the top floor of a very old Victorian mansion. The couple who own the house are older, and remodeled part of their house into a rental unit as retirement income. They are not bad people, by any means, but the husband has one character defect that affects everything.

He is a penny pincher to the point of making asinine decisions. “Penny wise and pound foolish” was surely coined with him, or someone exactly like him, in mind.

I moved into the apartment in August 2021. When the gas company came to turn on the gas so I could have hot water, they notified him that the heater didn’t pass inspection and he’d have to replace it.

That sounds simple enough, right?

Heh.

I’ve asked a couple of people I know who are landlords, and their answers were unanimous. If you’re a landlord, and you find out in August that you have to buy a new heater, first you get on your knees and thank whatever deity you believe in. Then you rush to buy one as quickly as possible, since that’s the time of year when they will be the cheapest.

At the end of September, when it started to get a little chilly, I asked him to let me know when he’d be by to install the new heater, so I could be ready for the interruption, as I work from home.

He said, “Oh. I guess I should be thinking about that.”

The next nine weeks were spent watching one of the most farcical series of unimaginably stupid events I’ve ever witnessed.

Instead of buying a new heater, he went to Craigslist for a used one.

I re-arranged my work schedule to allow for the office/living room to be occupied by workmen to install it.

The first one worked for two days.

I re-arranged my work schedule some more.

The second one worked for about ten hours.

Then he found someone an eight-hour drive away who “re-conditioned” old heating units.

He drove there, bought a “re-conditioned” unit, and drove back.

I re-arranged my work schedule yet again.

This one worked most of the time, but would periodically just shut off.

In order to start working again, it had to be unplugged and plugged back in.

Which wasn’t a huge big deal, given that I work from home, until it started happening during the night.

I would wake up and be able to see my breath.

In the middle of this insanity, some dear friends sent me a radiator heating unit so that, if this bullshit continued, at least I wouldn’t freeze to death.

In a capitulation to my anxiety disorder, after I saw how well it worked, I bought an extra one. A backup to the backup, as it were.

The number of times I’ve seen them in my closet and resented myself for being paranoid is…well, I was going to say “a countable infinity.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one.

I used one for a few days in the middle of the Kafkaesque nightmare of my landlord being a tightwad, and it worked very well. One in the kitchen, on high, and in the bedroom, on low, turned out to be perfect. A high electricity bill, but I didn’t freeze while I waited on my landlord to get his shit together.

When he came to look at the third dead used heater, my landlord yelled at me as he was leaving:

“I am getting damn sick and tired of spending money for no reason!”

I froze, staring at him. What the fuck, huh?

He glared at me as if I had personally sabotaged each heating unit just to cost him as much money as possible, and then left, slamming the door.

He drove back to the guy eight hours away to return the third one and…..pick up the fourth used unit.

I re-arranged my work schedule again, flatly terrified that this would never be resolved. He would simply go through used heating units forever, and I would never know from one minute to the next if my apartment would have heat.

I had started exploring moving somewhere else, but this was not as simple a matter as it sounds.

First, it was early in my new job, so I had a short employment history, and my credit score wasn’t very high yet. It wasn’t terrible, but a 620 with four months of employment, up against people with longer employment histories and a credit score of 750, was no contest. I emphasized the ways that I’m an ideal tenant—a single woman with no kids and no pets, a diagnosed-OCD-neat-freak—but the two years worth of tax returns showing middle class income plus the excellent credit always won.

Second, my area has a major housing crisis. Apartments are brutally difficult to get and it’s not unheard of for potential tenants to go to ridiculous extremes, like making video introductions to try to “wow” landlords, or paying multiple application fees to multiple companies in the hopes of getting just one unit.

When the fourth used unit didn’t work at all, the idea of just buying a goddamn new one seemingly still didn’t even occur to him.

This Kafka tale had started during the last week of September.

It was now almost Thanksgiving.

He mentioned casually, in telling me that he would go back to the guy to return that one and get another one, that he was going to go stay with his adult daughter in Florida for awhile. He would leave in about two weeks, and be gone until February.

I almost panicked. Stuttering, I said something like, “Uh, um, ok, but, uh, please, please make sure you leave me the name and number of whoever’s going to be responsible for things while you’re gone. I won’t want to interrupt you at your daughter’s, but I have to be able to reach you. I haven’t had consistent heat yet this winter. It’s going to be below 0 a lot of the time that you’re gone, and if the next used heater is just like the first four, it’s not going to last all winter.”

That, and that alone, was what made him go buy a brand-new heater.

If I had to guess, based on what I’ve seen online trying to get a rough estimate, between traveling costs and used units that didn’t work, he spent about three times as much as necessary. If he’d just bought a new heater in August, it would have been so much cheaper that his total cost might’ve been only 15-20% of what he ended up spending on the new heater. Yes, he finally bought one, and it was finally installed, early in December 2021.

The Worst Possible Time

The low temperature last night was -28 degrees. Mountaintops a couple of hours from me had an overnight windchill of -100. This is a legit polar vortex.

Even with a good heating unit, parts of my apartment are frightfully cold. When I took some clothing out of the under-the-bed drawers that serve as my dresser, they felt like they’d been stored in a refrigerator.

This would be the worst possible time for something to go wrong with the heater.

This morning, the heating unit started making an odd beeping sound, an alarm every five minutes or so, and the filter light was blinking.

I got out the manual, which instructed me to turn the unit off, let it cool, remove the filter, clean it, and replace it.

I tried to do this, scrupulously following the instructions. I used a can of compressed air and water, and got the filter perfectly clean.

Then I went to put it back. The filter fits so neatly into its slot that one would think putting it back would be as simple as removing it, right?

There's a trick to it — a trick not mentioned in the manual.

Failing to understand the trick, when I let go of the filter, it slipped deeply into the unit, crooked, far beyond my reach.

I didn’t call my landlord. My best guess, based on his past pattern, would be that he would fix it by hiring a one-armed dwarf to sing a song to the crooked filter and hope it became sentient and climbed out of its own accord.

Calling the landlord is a last fucking resort. Always.

Instead, I called the handyman who assembled my standing desks and other furniture, and who installs and removes the window AC unit for me each June.

He answered his phone.

From the hospital bed where he was awaiting surgery for a broken leg.

Appalled, I apologized for bothering him, but he insisted I tell him what was wrong. (He knew I’d never call him early on a Saturday morning without texting first unless it was a big deal.)

I did, and he suggested using a wire clothes hanger to try to fish the filter out.

Josh, Put Your Drink Down Before You Read Further :-)

I went to the closet, where I learned that I do not have a single wire hanger.

Not one.

I never consciously decided to only own plastic hangers.

Seriously, I didn’t.

Toxic Masculinity to the Rescue

My handyman called a handy friend while I was wheeling out the radiator heater. (In just a few minutes, it had gotten noticeably colder in my apartment.)

A lovely, kind man facilitated getting me some help from his hospital bed. Another lovely, kind man drove 45 minutes at the crack of dawn on a Saturday, with temperatures well below zero, to get the filter out.

It was quite a tricky task. The wire hanger he brought with him didn’t work, so he ended up partially disassembling the unit to get to it. It took awhile.

Thank the baby Jesus for toxic masculinity, yeah?

Josh Is Wiser Than Murphy

When my savior put the filter back in, the unit immediately started beeping and flashing the filter light again.

He took it out, mystified.

I’m an OCD neat freak. My apartment would rarely need more than half an hour to be fit to serve as a theatre for open-heart surgery. (Not hyperbole.)

Nonetheless, we cleaned it all again. Compressed air, Clorox wipes. The heating unit was pristine, with not a speck of dust.

The filter light flashed and the filter alarm beeped.

The rescuer handyman assured me that it was “just an electric problem; the sensor thinks it’s seeing something that it isn’t really seeing. But when this goes on long enough, it’s going to throw an error code and shut down, so you really need to tell your landlord.”

Just an electric problem.

Nothing is actually wrong with the heating unit.

An overly sensitive electronic component is committing a Type 1 error.

Murphy knew that what can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.

Josh knows exactly what will go wrong—some wholly unnecessary piece of electronic dependence creating a fake problem to make fake work for a technology designed to need it. Planned obsolescence.

Josh is wiser than Murphy. (Seriously, listen to his show.)

With A Little Help From My Friends

Having checked everything and verified it’s all working perfectly, my savior left, only letting me pay him his normal rate, despite the emergency call-out during a frozen hell.

Being deaf, I just popped my hearing aids out to ignore the beeping. 😂😂😂

The radiator heater my friends sent will keep my apartment warm if the worst happens—if the overactive sensor kicks back on, shuts the unit down, and my landlord has to spend months doing everything possible to not have it fixed—perhaps hiring a retired, drunken former poker champion from the local ex-con population to utilize hot-wiring skills he learned in prison? Whatever it may be, he will definitely, if this occurs, in his attempt to save money in the moment, spend significantly more than it would cost to just have it fixed by a proper Rinnai technician the first time.

The Cure For All Electronic Bullshit

My savior left with my profuse thanks.

I unplugged it for ten minutes and plugged it back in, figuring it couldn’t hurt to try.

So far, so good. The filter light hasn’t come back on.

My savior checked on me while I was writing this.

The Lesson In All This

Since I got my middle-class job—I’ve written about my experiences of poverty, and then no longer being poor, here—one of my biggest struggles has been trying to find some balance with regard to contingency plans.

I love contingency plans.

I love emergency funds.

I like having an emergency fund for my emergency fund.

I have enough non-perishable food, toiletries, etc., in my small apartment to last six or seven weeks, longer if I’m careful.

In a perfect world, I’d have an underground bunker with enough food, medicine, and supplies to last a couple of years. And another one, in case that one was somehow unavailable.

There’s a balance to be found, between prudence and capitulating to my anxiety disorder. Where that balance is? Hell if I know.

I’ve told people about my emergency food stash and had quite a few of them look at me like I had announced I was a doomsday prepper gearing up to wait out the Antichrist and the tribulation. Others looked at me in confusion—why did I think this was noteworthy? What sane person wouldn’t have six weeks of food, just in case?

But I appeal to the most easily justified case—the food stash—because there are so many other, much less justifiable ways that my anxiety disorder seems to run my life.

I work on them, but it’s an ongoing issue. It might always be.

It is very, very rare for me to have an experience that makes me feel better about one of the ways I’m screwed up.

The only reason that this didn’t turn into a panic-driven nightmare, a hellish horror of trying to live in a polar vortex without heat, is that my friends had sent me a contingency plan, and then I made a contingency plan for that contingency plan.

The radiator heaters, of which I relied on one for a couple of hours and would’ve wheeled the other one out if my savior hadn’t been able to solve the problem in just a few hours, were salvation itself.

I spend most of my life, nearly all of my time doing anything other than mathematics, feeling incompetent….at best.

For once, I was prepared.

And it feels great.

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Commentary: it’s fairly rare for me to end up feeling much better about something that I’ve put a great deal of energy into resenting about myself. I wrote this partly to have a record, so I could remind myself in the future, and partly just to enjoy telling the story.

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