Most places around the world have figured out some sort of auto-sorting technique to identify locals from tourists and tourists from expats. Personally, I love Kenya’s method the best. If you go to Kenya for the first time, it’s guaranteed someone is going to sell you something with the word “Jambo” on it within the first twenty four hours. Jambo simply means “hello” in Swahili. But a white guy wearing a Jambo tee around is the clearest possible way of saying, “I’m an American tourist!” Thus, everyone knows to interact with you accordingly.
We need some sort of sorting/identifying system like this for getting assistance online or through call centers. If I’m a sixty-five-year-old troglodyte trying to get help with my Direct TV setup, I need a straightforward manner of declaring my utter tourist status. (Don’t ask me if my optical hookup is PCM stereo or Dolby Digital 2.1 stereo.) But if I’m a handy, middle-aged guy trying to get some leads on why my ductless mini-split is unevenly distributing heat among the multi-zone handlers in my house, I need a method to declare my expat status. (ie. I know what a condenser is.)
I installed a mini-split system for some friends summer before last. For those of you unawares, these are sorta like the things on the walls in hotels. They provide heat and cooling without the need for metal ducting to move the air around. For certain situations (like for any of you poor souls with ceiling heat installed in the sixties), these systems are great.
The system I installed has never worked perfectly. I’m handy. I’m not HANDY. You know, it might take me a few tries to get it right. Anyway, I finally collected enough data on the system to call in and see if I could get a clue from the service department on why one room was staying 10 degrees colder than the thermostat and another room was staying 10 degrees warmer.
A few days later I got an email. The gal asked me to collect more specific data about temperatures immediately above and below the units and temperature readings from across the room. I gathered all of that and sent it back a few days later. Back and forth we went for a couple weeks until eventually she recommended that I weather strip the sliding glass door in the dining room.
Okay. If I had needed some tips on basic household energy efficiency, I would have enrolled in a course at the local community center. I had contacted the service department of this particular brand of HVAC equipment because I needed help diagnosing a piece of said equipment.
I emailed back politely asking for more specific technical assistance with their mini-split system. The gal emailed back directly saying there was nothing wrong with their system or it would be displaying an error code. Okay, fine. I can accept the problem was and is with the installment (or in other words with the installer).
I emailed once more asking if there was anything I could have done wrong that would be causing the described symptoms (while politely reminding her that a lack of weather stripping won’t cause a unit to overheat a room to 80 degrees). Within 10 minutes she responded back suggesting maybe the electrical leads got crossed between the 12k unit in the living room and the 9k unit in the bedroom.
I don’t know, perhaps she felt it more insulting to suggest that I could have wired the zones incorrectly than to suggest I was being nitpicky about the temperature in the living room (which was too cold simply due to a drafty house). I confirmed with her that shifting the wires around wouldn’t damage any of the handlers. After that, it took about thirty minutes to crack the condenser unit open, swap the wires, run it through its reset cycle, and wait for everything to kick back on. It turned out that this was precisely the problem. The brain had thought the smaller unit was the larger unit and vice versa. Bingo bango problem solved.
The frustrating thing was that I had spent two weeks gathering temperature data for a customer care professional who had made the assumption straight away that I was a total tourist requiring her to exhaust the standard litany of “did you try unplugging it and plugging it back in” responses before blowing me off.
Maybe next time I have to make a call or send in a ticket like this I’ll start it off by saying something like “I’m no Jambo,” or “I’m a total Jambo here.” In time, maybe that could become a thing. Maybe.
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