Intuitively obvious

The weather is starting to annoy me.

April is not supposed to be a month for snow. Or 30-degree nights. Yeah, I know, I'm in the mountains. In Pennsylvania. Ski resorts surround me. But still.

On the other hand, I was more annoyed an hour ago. And last night, my mood was downright hostile. Toward an inanimate object, fortunately. And maybe its designers.

One of the reasons for the relatively thin-on-the-ground posts lately has been mechanical. I've been averaging one or two breakdowns a week for the past month or so. The climax occurred this week, when my time off was up (or so I thought). I called in to learn the status of the truck I was supposed to take out, and was told--

1—it was in the shop,
2—there wasn't much telling when it would be out,
3—meanwhile, I had been assigned another truck
4—but it was in the shop, too,
5—and there wasn't much telling when it would be out, either.

A day or so later my dispatcher lost patience and found a third truck to assign me to. One of the later models. Which means it's equipped with a bunk heater. The night looked to be a bit chilly, so I spent a little while figuring out the controls, turned it on, and curled up for the night.

I woke up shivering.

It never did a thing. Heck of a note.

But, being a good employee, I bucked up and drove another day. That night, I looked at the snow falling on the hood and played with the bunk heater some more. No joy.

Finally I gave it up and called a friend to vent before sleeping.. Said friend listened sympathetically, then said “Hmm” and pulled up Google. After several minutes of typing in various keywords, he decided there were no manuals online for operating the thing. But he did find a manual for installing it. And partway through the schematics and instructions on what tools you needed, he found a note:

WARNING: Before using the auxiliary heater, Let the truck run with the heater turned all the way up.

Turns out the bunk heater has a heater core that's connected to the truck engine's heater system. And it uses some of that coolant to “store the heat” it's generating with its burner. So if you don't run the engine with the heat all the way up, the bunk heater won't have any coolant in its heater core. And a safety switch will keep it from coming on at all.

But you knew that already, didn't you? Doesn't everybody?

No matter. I'm warm now. No complaints.