Copy/Paste

Last week a technician from Isaac Heating and Air-Conditioning, my HVAC contractor, came out to fiddle my tankless water-heater.
“HVAC” is heating-ventilation-air-conditioning.
A tankless water-heater is just that. No hot-water holding-tank.
Instead, water gets circulated over a gas flame as it passes through, and heats almost instantaneously, 120 degrees in my case.
A tankless is on demand. Water is not heated then stored in a holding-tank.
Isaac installed the tankless. As originally designed, our house had a tankless water-heater. But it was Swedish, and very hard to get parts.
Beyond that it had a pilot, which blew out on windy days. How many times did I relight that pilot?
We ended up getting a tank-type water-heater, 40 gallons.
That tankless was too much trouble.
I’ve been in this house 26 years. During that time we had two tank-type water-heaters.
That second tank-type was about to fail, and our gas-company was offering a rebate on tankless water-heaters, 250 smackaroos.
So we bit, although that tankless cost a fortune — way more than a tank-type.
Supposedly a tankless saves money. I don’t know if it does. You’re not preheating water and storing it.
It only works when you draw hot water.
And of course, in the shower you don’t run out of hot water after 10 minutes.
My tankless, a Rinnai (Japanese) is about the size of a small microwave, and mounts to an outside cellar wall.
It’s eight years old. It would work a while, then cut out.
It displayed an error-code saying the exhaust vent was blocked.
Whatever: no hot water.
I’d go down-cellar and reset it. Back to hot water.
Isaac technicians had been here a couple times.
Once they decided a flame-sensor was overheating, which didn’t make sense, since it has no connection to a blocked exhaust-vent.
So Isaac came a third time, same technician as previous.
The hot-water demand of my shower is not as heavy as my washing-machine, which would trip the tankless.
The technician got it to trip again, so poked around. He determined the finned coil the water passes through above the flame was corroded, so partially blocked the exhaust-vent.
A thermister is above that coil, and would overheat since exhaust air was partially blocked.
Viola! An explanation that made sense.
The repair was to remove the corrosion from the water-coil. That was done last week, mainly with vinegar.
Back in business, I guess. No recent resets.
The repair cost me about $150; not covered by my annual service contract.
The technician and I started jawing as I cut a check on this computer.
He said he’d e-mail me the service-ticket, and there was a survey i could fill in. “If you don’t wanna do that survey, you can always call Isaac.”
I allowed I had a stroke 22 years ago.
As a result I have slight aphasia, which translates to difficulty making phonecalls.
“I’d rather use the written word,” i said.
“It’s amazing how we improvise around various detriments,” he said.
“Right!” I thought. I’d never thought of that before.
I copy/paste a lot more than the average person, because I’d rather do that than type myself. Because of the stroke I have sloppy keyboarding.
“When I hafta type in my e-mail address, I might get it on the first try,” I said. “Usually I make at least one mistake. I have to look for mistypes.”
“Is that inability to identify keys?” he asked.
“No, just hitting the wrong keys by mistake,” I said.
“And you can be sure I don’t use Microsoft Word®,” I said.
“That punishes stroke-survivors. Hit the wrong key by mistake and your entire document gets zapped.
“Why thank you, Bill!” Start over.
“I have Word on this machine, because it can do tricks my regular word-processor can’t, but I hardly use it.”
“The word-processor I use is Apple’s Pages; it doesn’t punish you for having had a stroke.”
So I have hundreds of Pages files I can copy/paste into Word, for example. Ask Word to make a mailing-label for me, and I do it from a Pages address — which I copy/paste into Word.
At the Messenger newspaper I had similar: a desktop-folder called “Grady’s Junk; Dunna-toucha.” (See Grady explanation top-right.)
“Dunna-toucha” because the Messenger ‘pyooter-guru liked to clean up your computer desktop.
I also did a Senior Calendar at the Messenger; a calendar of events for senior-citizens.
I never threw out the previous calendar. I’d just overwrite last week’s calendar, since a lot was the same, especially headings.
That way I wasn’t typing the entire calendar from scratch, which would have taken four-five times as long with my mistypes.
“It’s amazing what workarounds we develop,” he said.

• My wife and I designed our house, but a contractor built it for us. My wife died almost four years ago.
• The “Messenger” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over ten years ago. Best job I ever had — I worked there almost 10 years (over 11 if you count my time as a post-stroke unpaid intern [I had a stroke October 26, 1993, from which I recovered fairly well]). (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city nearby where I live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” —It’s about 14 miles away.)
• “Grady” was my nickname at the Messenger newspaper. See blurb top right.