Ah, we were entering the wonderful world of Error Messages. Now, if you’re new to new appliances, you might think that Error Messages was an actor back when movies were in black and white and well-made, instead of slapdash and in color like they are now. No, that was Errol Flynn, not Error Messages. And besides, you were thinking of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

More to the point, error messages are a byproduct of software, in the same way that tootsie rolls are the byproduct of cats. There are sensors in you pellet stove, and your car, and your coffee maker, and your IV drip at the abattoir hospital, and pretty much anything else electronic they can think of. Your car used to function. It had three dials on the dashboard that told you, well, something, I only looked at the gas gauge. Anyway, when your car was broken you’d have it towed to the garage and sort of turn into Mel Blanc:

“It goes galonka, galonka, galonka when I turn the key, and then it makes a noise like a gerbil in distress.”

“That’s pretty weird. I’ve never fixed anything like that before,” the mechanic says while scratching his head with a wrench.

“No, you don’t understand. It makes those noises when it’s running OK. It just won’t start now.”

Well, now you get error messages. You get them whether the item is working properly or not. Your car is purring like a kitten, but the dashboard is lit up like a drunk on New Year’s. It’s spangled with icons that must make some sort of sense if you speak metric, I guess, but they don’t look like anything I recognize. Your triangle is herniated. Your ziggurat is palpitating. Your ghostbuster is flummoxed. Stuff like that. Of course when the car actually won’t work, the whole thing goes dead, and there are no error messages, and you’re back to telling a mechanic, “It wish I could get it to go galonka, galonka, galonka, again…”

So we had gone through a daunting set of challenges to get the pellet stove installed, not the least of which was finding money to buy all that stuff. We dutifully followed the directions for installation. It was deflating to press the button and get nothing for the effort. It was even more deflating than New England footballs to get weird error messages instead of real help.

You see, there are only like four error messages available on a pellet stove. They’re given inspiring names like: E1, E2, E3, and E4 rendered in 1970s digital watch fonts. You have to look up what each one means in the Chinglish dictionary you threw away with the box. Each one has to cover a lot of ground, as you can imagine, being only four of them. Each one reads like a very vague laundry list. For instance, our pellet stove was deader than Scrooge’s doornails, but lit up like a Christmas tree with error messages. The error message suggested:

• Your moon might not yet be in the seventh house
• Your air intake might be blocked by a wildebeest that was sucked into its maw. It’s unlikely, but I’d check if I were you
• You might have forgotten to plug the unit in
• Error messages don’t appear unless it’s plugged in, so make sure it’s plugged in to read the last message
• Don’t put firewood in the pellet stove hopper
• Use only approved pellets in your stove. You may have to wait for white smoke to appear from the chimney of the college of cardinals before they select a pellet stove pope to approve your brand
• Jupiter isn’t aligned with Mars. Align your Jupiter with a Martian wrench (not supplied)
• Shit’s wack, yo

It goes on like that at some length. I gave up, and sat down and gave it a long think. I have a superior thinker-upper, you know, having been raised on Dr. Suess books before they were bowdlerized.

Let’s see. This was a floor model at the Harrow Stockpile. That means an endless stream of people who stopped reading books in the sixth grade because their lips got real tired had been futzing around with this unit, until they got bored and bought another gun safe. What would they do? Why, they’d open and close the swinging door to the burn chamber enough to bend the hinge pin (I had it re-welded a few years later), and they’d open the hopper door on top, look in, see nothing but sheet metal, and slam it shut.

I opened the hopper door. There was a switch under the lid that is supposed to keep the auger in the bottom of the pellet hopper from turning if the hopper door was open. The manufacturers and designers envisioned a person dumb enough to open the lid, winnow their hand through 120 pounds of wood pellets, and reach far enough into the stove to get their finger caught in a giant screw that turns slower than a blue-hair with their blinker on. That’s not a bad bet, actually. There was a little wand sticking out of the switch, just a delicate little band of flexible steel with a bumper on the end that gets pushed down when the hopper is closed. It trips the switch to tell the machine that the owner is not currently up to his armpit in the hopper, and it’s safe to proceed.

The wand was bent. I bent it back, closed the hopper door, pressed the button, and land sakes, the beast roared to life.

[To be continued. Thanks for reading and commenting, and recommending Sippican Cottage to your friends. You can also support Sippican Cottage by using our Ko-Fi tip jar. Many thanks to Stuart for his recent generous contribution. It’s much appreciated]