A cold wave arrived and the temperature suddenly dropped. The house felt almost like a freezer. Especially when I got up at night, I shivered violently. I turned on the heater, but the flame would not ignite. The next day, I hurried to call the gas company for help and asked them to send someone to repair it.
A van with the gas-company logo stopped at the door. The repairman arrived at the appointed time. He touched here, turned something there, and fiddled with it for a while. As a layman, I could not see what he was doing. Suddenly—poof!—the flame roared to life.
I wanted to know what had been wrong, so in my pidgin English I asked, “Please, what was the reason?”
He looked at me, made a couple of marks in his notebook, handed me a small heater instruction booklet, and left without saying a word.
We had heat again and the whole family was happy. My wife is most afraid of cold and wanted the temperature higher. I dislike too much heat and wanted it lower. Naturally there was some arguing back and forth, and finally we compromised on a middle temperature.
One day, two days—everything was fine.
But a few days later, I felt the bedcovers becoming cold at night. My wife kept pressing closer to my side. I got up to look. The heater had gone out. I pushed the thermostat one way and then the other, but the little pilot flame did not move at all. There was nothing to do but wrap ourselves in blankets and wait for morning.
The next day, I hurried to call the gas company again. Another repairman came. He turned things with a wrench, poked around with a metal rod, switched things on and off. Still the flame would not respond. For more than twenty minutes he tried everything he knew, but that tiny spark remained hidden.
He shrugged.
“This furnace is too old. I can’t do anything with it. You need a specialist.”
Now I became anxious. Winter had only begun. Without heat, how could we endure the long cold months ahead?
I immediately hauled out the thick Chinese Business telephone directory and began looking for appliance repair companies.
First call.
“What model is your heater?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand these things.”
“Is the heater underneath the house or upstairs?”
“Under the house…”
“We don’t repair that kind.”
Second call.
“What model is the heater?”
“It’s the kind under the house. We have a basement. A person can stand and walk down there…”
“That kind of furnace is decades old. We don’t repair it.”
The third and fourth calls were the same. They said this old type of furnace was no longer manufactured and parts were difficult to find. They advised me to replace it. Including installation labor, a new one would cost only a little over a thousand dollars.
I called several more places. Same answer. It looked as though I would have to buy a new furnace.
But when I looked at the narrow hallway, it did not seem suitable for installation. Putting it in the living room would be in the way. And I kept thinking: the heater had worked for so many years. A few days earlier, the repairman had been able to ignite it. Could it simply be a bad electrical connection? And where would that bad connection be?
I went down into the basement. By the faint light of a flashlight, I tugged on wires, pressed the connection points, tapped the metal casing outside, then fiddled with something.
Suddenly—whoomph! The flame rushed along the pipe and caught.
Looking at that roaring fire, “my heart blossomed with joy” was exactly the right expression for how happy I felt.
A repair company where I had earlier left a message called back. I told them the heater was now running but that I was not confident about it and hoped they could inspect it.
“Inspection fee: forty-five dollars.”
I thought, forty-five dollars is forty-five dollars. If they could find another problem, all the better.
Half an hour later, a Chinese man wearing work clothes with pockets arrived. The moment he saw that the furnace was running, irritation appeared on his face.
“Give me twenty dollars.” His tone was short and hard.
“Aren’t you going downstairs to inspect it?”
“No need.”
He held out his hand.
I had never met anyone with that kind of attitude. Perhaps it was partly my fault for sounding uncertain when I returned the call. Since he had come all this way, I gave him twenty dollars as travel money and let it go.
I found electrical tape myself, carefully wrapped the wire connections, and fastened the wires to a post so the vibration when the burner ignited would not loosen them again.
The heater worked, and I saved more than a thousand dollars.
A layman like me had somehow repaired the furnace. You could call it “a blind cat running into a dead mouse,” but there was also something inevitable about it. The repairmen were unwilling to go into the basement to inspect the system, so naturally they could not find the problem. I went down, observed, felt around, and finally understood that the fault was a loose electrical connection. It was exactly like the saying: “If you do not enter the tiger’s den, how can you get the tiger cub?”
So no matter what you are doing, if you can discover the underlying pattern of things and the connections between them, the problem becomes easier to solve.
Winter has come again this year. I looked at the thermostat.
Ha-ha—the heater is still working just fine!