A Second Memo to our Furnace

To:  Household Furnace

From: Rob & Karen

Date: December 14, 2009

Re:   Furnace Fan Retirement

It has come to our attention that you again ceased your labours yesterday evening, due to the sudden and unannounced retirement of the furnace fan.  This failure to continue your expected work was without advance notice and without permission to do so.   This caused undue distress to a number of people, for a variety of reasons.

1)  The manner in which you ceased functioning caused burning odors to permeate throughout the house.  As members of this household have a great fear of fires, this led to some alarm.

2) Overnight guests were in residence, and were now subject to the burning odors, and the possibility of being too cold to sleep.  Thankfully, the weather was not as cold last night as it was this past Friday, and through the night temperatues did not dip any lower than normally programmed.

3) As one of our overnight guests is an excellent general handy-man, he did examine your interior, and possibly risked one or more of his digits in the process - a great cause for alarm for all but the general handy-man.

4) Once you had begun your time off, you left mixed messages about your whereabouts and reasons for not functioning.  This led to further distress as to the real cause for your failure to heat our home.

We would like to inform you that we had considered retracting the first memo we sent you last week, in light of the fact that we were rather remiss in providing you with the environment you need to perform your tasks.  However, given that you took more unscheduled, unexpected and unauthorized time off, we have decided not to retract the first notice, and ask that you now consider this your second written notice.

Thank you.

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Yes, dear readers, our furnace went on hiatus again last night.  We arrived home somewhat past the dinner hour, as we'd been to B., to witness little Matthew's baptism.  Rob's parents were not far behind us, as they stayed the night.  Upon our arrival home, I turned up the furnace, and everything was fine, and the house warmed up delightfully.  However, as we were eating a rather late dinner, Rob's Mom and I noticed a burning odor, like what you smell when you first turn your furnace on each fall.    As the furnace had now been running for an hour, this was clearly not the situation.  We also noticed that the furnace fan was no longer running.  Rob and his dad investigated, and thought things seemed a little toasty in there, and the fan was definitely not starting.  They turned the whole kit 'n' kaboodle off for a while, to allow it to cool.  When they turned it back on (with Dad poking various digits/screwdrivers and the like into the furnace fan), the fan did start, but there was no heat, and they also reported a little flashing red light.  This was reminiscent of Friday's behaviour.  However, this made sense to me, since on Friday Pete had reported that the safety-catch had been stuck on "open", he had forced it closed, and had plans to come replace it this week.    Given that things had again gotten a little toasty in there (this time since the fan wouldn't start), the safety-catch was again stuck in "open", and no heat would be generated.

Rob called Pete this morning, and he came around lunch time.   His examination determined that our furnace fan, after close to 7 years of near-continuous faithful service, had suddenly opted for retirement. Pete procured a new furnace fan, and replaced it, as well as the safety-catch, and we now have heat again!

As for Andrew and his family?  The last report is they were still waiting :) ... and may now actually be without heat, but that Ian was diligently working to rectify that situation!