Bad Day
When your day starts at 5 am with a loud beeping sound coming from inside your home, you know it’s going to be a bad day…
Kim heard it first and got out of bed to check. She came back and woke me to say that the oven was beeping and flashing “F1″. She hit the “Clear” button and it stopped. However, when your gas oven starts beeping out of the blue you want to figure out what’s wrong. Enter Jay.
I fished the manual out of the junk drawer and quickly discovered that F1 is a fault code and the oven needs servicing. Gee, thanks for the hot tip. The internet was much more informative and I learned this oven has a defect where the control touch-pad dies every couple of years. This beeping is its death cry. As I was researching the problem, the oven started beeping again and again even after I cleared the fault.
The obvious next step was to shut the oven off. But, the circuit breaker with the oven also included the dining room and the room with the computer and router. Hmm. Luckily, the beeping frequency was falling off and I didn’t have to shut half the house down.
Without the incessant beeping, we could now concentrate on important things like the fact that our oven was breaking and Shabbat and, more importantly, Passover were coming and a working oven was critical. So, when our landlady informed us that she couldn’t find any oven repair men (women? professionals?) to come out until Tuesday, we nearly freaked. When she told us they’d have to unplug the control panel membrane (the touch pad itself) from the clock unit and wait two days to properly diagnose the problem, we reached for the valium.
Long story, short, I managed to disconnect the membrane on Saturday evening and the repair man should be able to replace the defective part on Tuesday in the nick of time. Phew.
Now, who designs an interface that continually rings the alarm even after you’ve acknowledged the problem? And why does it have to beep so loud when it’s just the touchpad that’s failing? Come on.