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minor EV charger crisis
Tuesday, July 22 2025
When I went out to the Chevy Bolt this morning, I found that the charger I'd plugged it into overnight hadn't charged it at all, and it had only had 50 miles of range in its battery. That might be enough to get to work and back, but under some conditions it might not. So what had happened? I'd noticed a weird clicking from the charger body and a refusal to charge last week, but had gotten it to work with a second try. This time, though, apparently, I hadn't noticed the failure to charge. So I plugged it in again to see what would happen. It took a few tries to get it to work. Sometimes it would click and register a cryptic error ("CP") on the screen of the charger, and other times it would fail more silently or claim to time out. Once I had it working, I let it go for maybe ten minutes, enough time to add about five miles of range.
When I arrived at work, I drove to the side and back of the factory building looking for an exterior power outlet but could see nothing. Eventually I saw Jimmy, one of the guys who works back there, and asked if there were any outlets and he said there was only one, but it was in a space that had to be clear today for some sort of testing. So I went back into the factory, a massive noisy space where only a few guys work, including the king of the lunchroom court, who has come to like me despite himself. I explained my problem at home with my charger and asked if I could use an outlet from inside to charge my car so I'd have enough juice to make it back home. He said he could, but he wanted me to get the CEO's approval first for some reason. So I went back to my desk and composed an email making the request.
Not long after that, I got called on the company's intercom, which I can never hear over my headphones and was told to call an extension number, but I do not have a phone on my desk. So I went downstairs to the office of the director of operations, where she, the CEO, the project manager, and Jimmy were all sitting around. They were talking and joking in that way that makes the culture at the company seem fun. The CEO asked about my car charging issue, and I explained the whole thing. He then asked, seemingly not entirely in jest, how much I should pay to charge my car. "$3?" I replied, which was probably a little more than the actual price of the electricity I would be taking. At this, the CEO seemed to realize such nickel and diming wasn't a good look and said that all I had to do in return was to "break" the "balls" of the king of the lunchroom court "three times." "Oh, I'm running a surplus breaking his balls!" I replied. By then the king was there and he shook my hand, indicating that this was a deal. It was clear, though, that the CEO didn't want to routinely be providing charging for employees' electric cars. (Supposedly that vegan contract worker whom I've yet to meet and whom I remind the CEO of occasionally charges his electric car at the factory.) "Don't make a habit of it," he grumbled, again semi-jokingly. This was how I managed to put nearly 30 miles of range back in my battery throughout my workday.
I had a couple breakthroughs with my work-issued laptop today, finally getting that in-house tool (which is partially broken, undocumented, poorly understood by my colleagues, and misleadingly labeled) to migrate a database into my local Oracle XE environment. Once I'd done that, I had all sorts of new powers, which allowed me to finally make real progress understanding how a convoluted reporting system generates receipts.
On the way home at the end of the day, I stopped in at MyTown in Stone Ridge, mostly to buy a very expensive ($19/jar) sauerkraut that Gretchen loves. While there, I also got bagels, cherries, frozen burritos, and pasta.
This evening I'd be meeting Gretchen, Lynn, and Gregg for dinner, this time at an Asian restaurant on Albany Avenue called Miso. Gretchen was out at the time and would be going to the restaurant directly from her pilates class. As for Dina, she'd arrived with Gretchen last night after I'd gone to bed and had left this morning to pick up her son from the Jewish leftie summer camp he always goes to in the Hudson Valley (despite being a resident of Tel Aviv). I don't know where they'd gone after that, but it wasn't back to Hurley.
Before going out for dinner, I took Charlotte for a walk up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, where I gathered some more chanterelles.
Gretchen tells me we've eaten at Miso before, but I don't remember it. They specialize in sushi, so all I ordered was three different vegan sushi rolls, though I also had some of Gretchen's miso soup (it was unexpectedly delicious, something miso soup seldom is). Much of our dinner conversation concerned how irritated Gretchen was by Dina's always being late (something she apparently isn't when picking up her kids, suggesting she has some control over it). We also talked about Sri Lanka, but not too much. We didn't hear much about what was going on with Lynn and Gregg other than that soon they will be spending two and a half weeks in Europe. Among the things they will do will be seeing our friends Kelly and Brian at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh and eating socca at a place we'd been to in Nice, France. The topic of my dissatisfaction with my job came up several times, with Gretchen trying to get Gregg to apply his lucrative psychoanalyst skills to the problem of why I'm not looking more actively for another job. Fortunately we were getting up to leave the restaurant at that point, so nothing much came of it.
Back at the house, I was able to charge the Bolt without difficulty. Some water trickled out of the bulky unit that plugs into the car from the place where the cable enters it, suggesting that a seal or gasket had failed there, allowing rainwater to enter. It seems probable that this water had something to do with the charging unreliability, and that fixing it will merely require some combination of better places to hang the cord when it is not in use and the application of a small amount of silicone caulk.
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