The day had started off badly. Yesterday I had been all fired up to go to the Steelworks Center of the West museum in Pueblo, Colorado, but for a number of reasons it didn’t happen. Today I felt tired, in shock, and like I just wanted to eat chocolate. This was largely because of technology problems.
We are at Oak Haven, our boardinghouse for traveling nurses in Canon City, Colorado. When I got here, I noticed the internet was barely working. I went to Spectrum, and they told me I had old equipment, so they gave me new equipment to swap it out for. I managed to do this successfully, and set up a new network and password, as required, plus set up a Roku Guest Account on the TV, through which I could log into our DirecTV Streaming account at home, without the expensive box. It had the same cool interface, and I even managed to rearrange the app tiles so that Mike would not be irritated by having to scroll down. I was on Cloud Nine!
Next I was deflated to realize that every one of the six televisions at Oak Haven would need to be reconnected to this new network. But I managed to do that too, which involved writing out instructions, texting them to the nurses, asking them if they wanted to do it, or would like me to, and so on.
Then at 9 pm, I realized with horror that the Nest thermostat is also connected to the internet, and might not work properly without being connected to the new network. This was cause for panic on my part, since we had gotten a bad review due to the temperature, but I had finally adjusted the temperature to a perfect range, and was determined to keep it there, and avoid any further problems.
I googled how to connect a Nest thermostat to a new network, but my efforts were not working. So I called Google. The person helping me barely spoke English, of course. I would not hold this against anyone, except that it greatly interferes when you are trying to explain the subtleties of your situation. I stayed on the phone with her for at least 30 minutes, getting nowhere. Finally I realized that the thermostat was in fact working, and the internet connection is only so that I can control it remotely, which I normally do from home in San Diego. But since I was here with the thermostat, and this was not an immediate concern, I went to bed.
So this morning I woke up, and we had planned the museum visit. However I felt in a state of shock over all this tech stuff and some other matters. I decided that I really did need some chocolate to start off my day – specifically a hot fudge sundae. So I went to my favorite ice cream store, “You Scream,” which was supposed to open at 11 am. It was 11:05, and the store was not open, nor was there any sign of anyone onsite.
That’s the disadvantage of being in a small town like Canon City. There is much less of a “business efficiency” vibe, and more of a “I’ll do what I damn feel like” vibe. Though if I asked this business owner what was going on, I’m sure he would apologize and say that he was at the hospital with his mother, or something similarly unavoidable and virtuous. I called the store’s number and left a message, stating that I was at the store at 11:05 and had not found anyone there. Plus it said on the phone recording that the store was open “every day from 11 to 8,” while it said on the door that it was closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and I wished I knew when it was open.
So I decided to get an ice cream bar at the gas station. I got a cookies & cream ice cream bar, and it was so hard that I literally could not bite into it. I have never had this experience with an ice cream bar before. So I laid it on its wrapper on my car seat, and drove home. By the time I got home, it was perfect, and I ate it, parked out front. I also remembered that Sonic has hot fudge sundaes. I could barely believe I was doing this, but I decided to turn around, go to Sonic, and get a hot fudge sundae! So I did this and felt a lot more satisfied. When I got home, Mike said to me, “You came home and then left … where did you go?” He had seen me out the window … busted. So I had to admit to him what I’d done … ouch.
So we did go to the museum, the fascinating Steelworks Center of the West, set right next to the huge Colorado Fuel and Iron Company plant that used to cover over 500 acres, and had an interesting and inspiring visit.
We came back home, and now it was time to tackle the Nest Thermostat. I called Google and got another technician who could barely speak English and was even more out-to-lunch than the last one. Mike was watching a semifinals baseball game, and I didn’t want to disturb him. But as this technician tried to get me to do more and more things that were labor intensive and didn’t make any sense, and I found myself loudly snarling at him within earshot of one of the nurses, I realized it was time to ask Mike for help.
Normally I try to stay pretty quiet around Oak Haven, as many of the nurses work the night shift, and anyone could be asleep at any time. But feeling ready to snap by this point, I yelled up the stairs, “Mike, I need your help!” From the way Mike bolted out the bedroom door, I could tell that he must think the house was on fire. He ran downstairs, and I tried to cover my phone as I yelled in rage, “Please talk to this guy before I kill him!” My infuriated brain was aware that I could not kill someone over the phone, and I was trying to think of something more fitting to say, but couldn’t quite find it. Mike is much more patient than I am with people whom I consider to be idiots, so he took over talking to the guy. Meanwhile I was again googling what to do, and starting to get a better idea. I told Mike to just hang up, that we would do better on our own. And no, I didn’t leave any negative feedback, even though his help was worse than nothing.
Have any of you ever used a Nest thermostat? You might NOT WANT TO. I was showing Mike how the thermostat was not responding to swipes, taps, or anything else. I was wondering if it was broken. Mike, who rescues me from some predicament on pretty much a daily basis, finally figured out that “tapping” a Nest thermostat means you must tap it, not on its round screen, but on a specific location on its edge, just to the right of the top, at precisely 2 o’clock, if we are using the clock analogy. Of course this is not written anywhere, nor will any technician tell you this. But this was the main key to solving everything.
I had to disconnect the thermostat from the Google Home app, on my phone, plus navigate, through taps and swipes on the thermostat itself, to the Settings screen, and thence to the Account screen, and disconnect it there as well. It was quite the scene, literally taking two of us to manage to tap and swipe this infernal device to get it disconnected, while yelling at each other in panic over one thing or another. Well, I was the only one doing any yelling. I have been through too much pain over this wretched device, such as having to take a photo of how all the wires are connected … having to read the miniscule serial number to the Google technician, which I couldn’t have done to save my life, even after taking a photo and enlarging it, which made the numbers too blurry. I finally knocked on the door of one of the nurses, and she was able to do it … miracle. Anyway, after hours of finally getting it to navigate to the settings menu, only to have it jump back to the temperatures menu, time after time after time … I was frazzled to the breaking point.
Then to connect it again, we had to take it off the wall and photograph its QR code, and follow a bunch more steps. But it finally got reconnected to the WiFi! Victory! Now all I have to do is reprogram all of the schedules and temperatures, sigh.
On the positive side, the Google Home app does work amazingly. That was a steep learning curve too, but once I finally got the hang of it, it is so cool that I became semi-obsessed with monitoring the temperature at Oak Haven. I googled what hotels set their thermostats at, after the bad review, and finally realized that no, we are not like a home where we try to save money by using the AC as little as possible. We are like a hotel, where people expect to be pampered, and I damn well better get used to paying $300 + monthly electricity bills.
So I set the range to 68-72 degrees, which feels pretty perfect. On the Nest app I can see a circle with the current temperature at Oak Haven, and what range the temperature is set at. Best of all, I can see a bar graph of what hours the furnace (red bars) or AC (blue bars) have been running, on a daily or weekly basis. And for a somewhat obsessive lover of lists and graphs like myself, that is very satisfying.