Tuesday, December 25, 2007

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen


Christmas morning. The television isn't working. Bah humbug.

Actually, the television is working fine; there's something wrong with the DishNet connection and the soonest they can get a technician here is Thursday. I guess he's coming from India.

The tech support that Maximillian managed to get on the phone speculated that it might be something in the connection inside the junction circuit box located on the wall outside of the garage. So Max had to try his manly man on it, delivering a few well-placed whacks, which, of course, had no effect. Or no healing effect. Returning from the garage, Max told me he thinks that maybe a little later, "Once it warms up a little and the condensation evaporates, it might fix the problem." Or, at least it might have, before the "well placed whacks" knocked something loose or broke something in the fine integrated circuitry.

After I fixed 'the look' on him (which he swears has a full orchestral track of the collective sighs of women from time immemorial chanting, "these idiot men, these idiot men, are id-i-ot id-i-ot id-i-ots"), he defends his fix-it skills by reminding me how our nation's nuclear missile arsenal are maintained:

Back in the late 1960s, a friend who was in the Air Force ROTC, graduated and was put in charge of a minuteman missile silo in a western state. He recounted that when performing periodic maintenance tests on the controlling electronics, they would fail about 40% of the time. He said that usually what they would do would be to pull the suspected circuit board out of the rack, drop it on the cement floor, and kick it a few times. After plugging it back into the rack, he said, "It would usually work."

So you might say that our country's national security depended on a well-placed kick.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a good luck.

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