Pig-Swill & Chinese Electronics

Wednesday 2^nd May 2012

I’m afraid I’ve decided to postpone Today until Tomorrow…

That’s a rather drastic step, which I hope doesn’t inconvenience too many people unduly, but I have my reasons.

In just two months, the barren sand around the house has sprouted bright green grass

I arrived back in Tesselaarsdal on Tuesday, which was “Workers’ Day” or May Day, depending on your particular cultural affliction. I had hoped to sort out my Debit Card and buy a refrigerator on the way – probably in that order – but since it was Workers’ Day, very few workers were doing anything of the kind…

I stopped at the Spar shop to buy some non-perishable food, then set out on the last leg of the journey “Home”..

Which was when I discovered that the hidden immobiliser switch on the Opel had lost it’s push-button since the last stop to buy some snacks… Luckily, I could get going again by dint of some informed prodding with a small screwdriver.

I was undecided as to whether to take the “long” way home via Shaw’s Pass and call in at Stephen & Sandy on my way home, or to brave the very slightly shorter but usually much rougher direct route. The decision was made for me by a series of large black and yellow signs announcing “Shaw’s Pass Closed – DETOUR 22 Km”. The first turn-off to Tesselaarsdal was now clearly the only turn-off, adorned with huge “STOP” signs and bollards across the R320 to Hermanus. A large sign proclaimed “DETOUR 22 Km” above an arrow pointing down the Tesselaarsdal road. Clearly, work had started on the long-awaited tarring of the Hemel-en-Aarde-Valley section of the road to Hermanus. I suspect that the Roads Department will also take the opportunity to straighten Shaw’s Pass out of existence.

Although I was pleased to see the tidy interior of my cabin at last, I didn’t feel the normal elation at being back at Boggy Pond. I suppose I was just too tired, dazed and confused by weeks of uncertainty, crisis management and the resulting lack of sleep. I joked to Christa that everybody in the Film business seems to have overdosed on either Stupid Pills or Panic Pills.

Jeffery was clearing the dead saplings out of the woods in a desultory fashion and lugging them down to the clearing in front of the house for burning as soon as the rains settle in. He was his usual incoherently chatty self for a while, but he soon realised I was brain-dead and went back to work. Steve popped in a bit later to say Hi, but he’d been out all day and thought it wise not to be late for supper, so he didn’t stay long. I decided that I would spend an hour or two re-loading software on the kick-ass laptop then get to bed early.

Yeah right…

To test the FTP Client I went onto one of our Audition sites – and discovered that somebody had just uploaded some Call Backs from Cape Town that I had not been told about. The clips were un-edited, so I spent some time downloading them and trying to tidy them up before deciding that if the producers were happy to show a major American network a Call Back they themselves had shot on a Handycam in a production office, they wouldn’t be too fussed with some untidy Ins & Outs, so I simply renamed them sensibly and linked them as they were.

I would send off the usual upload notice and get to sleep at last – which is when I discovered that I could no longer send email.

Some fiddling led me to suspect that the access code had been changed while I was away, so since the temperature had dropped to about 9C, I decided to fill the hot water bottle and hit the sack – which is when I discovered that my hot water bottle had disappeared… or perhaps I stashed it in the workshop during the sweltering summer.

I filled one of Jeff’s 2 litre Coke bottles with hot water and went to bed, not caring that the hot water had now somewhat bastardised Coke’s jealously guarded Trade Mark shape…

I woke up fairly late, just after seven, to the sound of the Afrikaans radio station I listen to when  down here. RSG (Radio Sonder Grense, or Radio Without Borders) is by far the best radio station in the country, in my opinion. With a discussion on the demise of Ethics in the background, I once more tried to send email, without success. I needed to fetch the pickup from Steve’s, so decided that I could perhaps copy the details from his computer while I was there.

I’ve decided to buy a small refrigerator, rather than keep borrowing Gerardt’s, so after a cup of tea with Steve and Sandy during which we tried not to discuss the depressing news of the day, I headed into town.

Something was clearly wrong with the pickup –  the engine ran roughly or seemed to cut out completely every so often. I put it down to water in the fuel, since it has been standing outside for two months. All our fuel has a high proportion of alcohol in it, and since alcohol is hygroscopic, water can collect in the float chamber when the engine is not run for some time. The problem should have disappeared after a few kilometres as the dirty fuel was used up, but it didn’t. I noticed that the motor tended to die as soon as I hit a particularly bumpy section of the road – the rev-counter would flick to zero a split-second before complete loss of power and I could hear the ignition relay clattering away, suggesting an electrical problem. I stopped and did a few obvious things like cleaning the contacts on the ignition relay and pushed on, since I was now more than half-way to Caledon.

First stop was at Standard Bank, to get my new Debit Card sorted out. For years I have used the same card to make purchases on both my Company and my personal accounts – it is simply a matter of saying “Cheque” or “Savings” to the vendor. Since I was given the new “Chip Card”, everything has been debited to my Company account. Although I can sort that out by showing personal purchases as income to me, I prefer to keep everything separate and not have to make unnecessary explanations to the Revenue Service.

Of course I tried to get this sorted in Johannesburg, but was faced with “attitude” from the young “consultant”, who disappeared for fifteen minutes to consult the “Senior Personal Banking Relationship Consultant”. When she returned, I was assured that the problem really lay with out of date Vendor software.

Yeah right! Pick & Pay? Woollies? Spar? Engen, Shell, BP and Caltex? I decided to leave the solution to the small branch in Caledon.

The pleasant, helpful young woman at the Enquiries counter explained that I now had to have a card for each account since the introduction of the new “smart card” with an embedded microchip. Seems un-smart to me, but there you go, blame progress. Or the level of fraud in South Africa.

With a bright blue bank card added to the hoard of plastic in my wallet, I set off to find an affordable refrigerator. I considered buying something a little larger than the bar fridge I had been borrowing. A small freezer compartment would allow me to “buy in bulk and Save!” and it could later go into Boggy Mansion or the guest house. Hmm, a good idea while it lasted. I discovered that fridges seem to come in two sizes – “small” and “huge”. Prices also come in two grades – “Ouch” and “Eina Bliksem!” Eventually I settled on a black and satin-finished Kelvinator from Lewis Stores – an easy decision since it was the only small fridge in town.

Of course, the brand new Debit card didn’t work… so Scriptwright had to foot the bill – I was certainly not going to pay even a day’s interest to Mastercard.

Having muscled the fridg-ette onto the pickup, I set off home. The Bank was now closed and I didn’t feel like picking a fight with a helpful young lady anyway.

As I approached the three large Stop signs, bollards in the road and supersized Detour notice with the arrow pointing left, a man in a bright blue overall scrambled out of the ditch, placed himself  bravely in harms way in the middle of the road, and waved a red flag at me. When he was sure of eye-contact, he gesticulated rather desperately that I was to ignore the stop sign, turn left, and proceed down the dirt road to Tesselaarsdal.

Of course I complied without question – wouldn’t want the poor fellow stressed out by a traffic jam. As I crested the dusty rise, I saw him shuffle back to the shade of the Stop sign to gather his strength for the next crisis.

I had barely left the very short spur of tar off the main road when I realised that I had my own impending crisis – the pickup was jibbing and bucking as if in death throes. I struggled on to a downhill section so that I could bump-start if necessary and stopped to investigate, leaving the engine running while I prodded and jiggled at various electrical connectors in the engine bay. I spotted a chunky connector the size of a matchbox with three disproportionately thin wires coming out of it hanging from the wiring harness attached to the engine. It was flapping about with the vibration, which could not be good for the measly little wires. I touched it and was rewarded – if that’s the right word – by the motor cutting out. Two of the wires had just broken completely, very close to the plastic moulding. I had not had time to recover my basic set of travelling tools from the workshop, so I didn’t even have a pocket-knife!

A two-ton truck approached, slowed down and stopped. I recognised the bulldozer mechanic I had hired to clear the property when I first arrived. He needed only a quick look to agree that I would need some tools and offered to take me home to collect them. He had a farm-worker with him in the cab already, so I hopped onto the back – and immediately got the answer to my as yet un-asked question about what kind of farming he was doing. I huddled down out of the wind with three barrels of pig-swill.

David dropped me at Steve’s, where I had left the little Opel, and after collecting some tools and useful light flex, we headed back to the pickup.

Joining the broken wires was impossible, so I eventually just cut the plug off and used the flex to bridge across to the pins in the socket.

The pickup ran sweetly all the way home, but when Stephen had parked the Opel behind the cabin, he informed me that the alternator warning light had lit up during the trip back…

Of course Thursday morning was spent repairing the pickup. The broken wires led to an engine-speed sensor for the fuel-injection computer – without engine-speed information, the computer would obviously “fail safe” and kill the motor. I simply cut the remaining socket off and replaced the joint with a lightweight connector-block from my electrical scrap-box. Luckily I make a habit of drawing a diagram before tackling an unfamiliar piece of equipment. In every other vehicle I have ever worked on, wires on either side of a connector are always colour-coded the same way. It seems that every connector on this vehicle has different wire colours on either side! I wonder if Chinese logic is fundamentally different from that of the West?

I wasn’t too worried when I discovered that the little Opel runabout had shed it’s alternator belt, since I had a spare in the boot.

Yeah right!

The spare is about three fingers too long.

So is the spare I bought today!  (Friday 4^th May)

I can only conclude that the spares catalogue compilers don’t like talking to the designers.

Solving that little problem will have to wait – I’m determined to do some work on the land before I head into town again!

The cleared area next to the cabin is now almost a lawn