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mile 155
Friday, September 28 2018
I drove the Subaru to work again today, watching the odometer creeping up with every mile without the check engine light ever coming on. By the time I parked outside the brick building housing my office, the car was on mile 139 since the last CEL-triggering OBD code.
Yesterday I'd sent an email to the head honcho asking for a meeting about transitioning to fulltime. The original plan was that I would work hourly and then, if things worked out, I would be hired full time after two or three weeks. But this was my fourth week. I'd heard that if one doesn't make meetings with the head honcho, one will tend to stay in whatever position they are in indefinitely. I didn't want that to happen to me. But the head honcho never responded. When I'd told Gretchen yesterday, she'd insisted that I go back to looking for work, that this was bullshit. So I actually applied for a job just before diaspora happy hour.
But today at some point, the head honcho stopped by my desk and told me he'd be having the meeting I wanted. So maybe it wasn't bullshit, though things are a little weird around that place. Perhaps the problem is that everyone there writes code and nobody really is there for their people skills.
[REDACTED]
When the meeting with the head honcho finally happened, it took place upstairs in his spacious office, part of which he rents to an independent web developer. There are lots of plants up there in the south-facing window, and I commented how nice they were. The head honcho had a few orchids, and he told me that the key to keeping them alive was consistency. After that initial banter, we talked some about the workplace and my work in it. He said perhaps one of the developers wasn't communicating with me as much as he should be, but I wasn't about casting blame on any one person. I said communication itself might be a bit of a problem in the office, and that even banter would help, since it tends to return to workplace subjects anyway. I could've gone on to note that nobody had ever sat down and showed me really anything here, that I'd had to pieces things together like a detective.
When eventually we got to the matter at hand, the head honcho didn't offer me a serious low-ball like he implied he normally would, but in the range I would've preferred, he said that would've been higher than the actual person I reported to. So we settled on a figure several thousand more per year than I'd been earning at Mercy For Animals. If I only end up working forty hour weeks and get good health insurance for me and Gretchen, that will be worth over a thousand a month better than MFA right there.
When the meeting was over, I felt a little conflicted about the result. On the one hand, I had job stability. But on the other, maybe Gretchen would be upset because she would perceive that I didn't fight enough for a better salary. After an email exchange with her, though, I felt better about it.
Later in the day when I helped with the solving of a data problem, I was actually feeling a bit more integrated into the team.
On the drive home this evening, I kept monitoring the car's odometer and check engine light. That light finally came on as I crossed the new John Gill bridge over the Esopus on Wynkoop 155 miles since the last CEL light. That wasn't too bad; with a few tweaks to my resistor and capacitor hack, perhaps the CEL could be made to never come on.
As I climbed Dug Hill Road past a cyclist, I heard a weird rhythmic percussion overtop the Nightwish I was listening to. Was that in the music? I turned it down and could still hear it. Something sounded like it was caught in the wheel, because it went faster when I drove faster. I made it into the driveway and immediately checked the error codes with the OBD2 reader. Astoundingly, there were nine codes! In a worst case scenario, there are usually only two codes. What the fuck had happened?
I opened the hood and immediate saw what the problem was. The cable from the oxygen sensor that I've been hacking had somehow draped onto the front passenger-side axle as it rotated and gotten caught in the rubber boot around a constant-velocity (CV) joint. There it had become tangled and torn off, leaving foot-long bare wires from the oxygen sensor itself. Worst of all, this had torn open the rubber boot, causing grease to come out and exposing the CV joint inside. Was I going to have to replace that now? Bloody hell!
On the web, I quickly found a YouTube video of how to mend a torn rubber CV boot using zip ties, grease, and a piece of rubber bicycle innertube. Such a fix, it said, could be expected to last several years. That was really all I needed.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180928 feedback
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