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A season for broken things

[Today’s run: 3.5 miles]

The radio station transmitter died (mostly) on Saturday, as I mentioned before.

Today our washing machine went.  We were happy to get a man right out to look at it and he declared it a loss.  We have a Sears Home Warranty which we started a year ago, the last time we had washer problems.  The repair man used to work for Sears and he said they should replace it.  Later, the lady on the phone seemed to be trying to dodge that.  But we will wait and see what they do.

And then, at work we had a network switch die which had all of my users kicked off of their usual work for a couple of hours while we figured it out and worked around it.  That story had a more-or-less happy ending with a fix before the end of the business day and no data lost.

I was doing some shopping and data gathering for the transmitter.  I can get the most likely part for $150 and replace it myself.  No guarantee it will do the job.  The factory will repair it for an estimated $400-$900.  Or they are happy to give us $900 “credit” toward a new one ($2100).  Other vendor’s products are $2800-$5300.  I have no idea what we are going to do.  If I had the money I would buy a mid-priced new one and the $150 part.  With luck we could fix the old one and have it on the shelf for the next outage.

 

One reply on “A season for broken things”

A coworker of mine has worked w Sears home warranty on a dishwasher. The people who you actually see, in person, say yes and the people safely distant on the phone say no. I think it’s the same w the Internet company guy who connects the wires in person vs. the customer service phone people.

For him, the ultimate answer was yes but several visits and back ordered parts. I, myself, prefer the olden days when I’d take the part to a parts place and they rifle through huge catalogs that looked like New York City phone books and order the part, then you’d get it and install it yourself.

Good luck!

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