Gremlins

I got my truck back from the shop today and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. No alarms were displayed and the brake pedal no longer feels soft. They told me that there is a computer in there that is supposed to track things like this, and it had no record of it. They said that, if it does it again, to bring it in with alarms blaring and don't turn the engine off so they can see what it's doing. When something like this happened in the paper mill, we would attribute it to "gremlins". I seem to remember there was a movie out at the time with that title, which probably inspired the idea, but I never saw it. Maybe Old Dog's hypothesis about that strange kid isn't so far off the mark. Could he have been a gremlin in disguise?

This reminds me of the time when my electric clamp truck caught fire. (A clamp truck is like a fork truck, but with clamps instead of forks.) I was picking up a stack of rolled paper that was highly flammable, so I quickly released my load, backed away from it, jumped off the truck, and grabbed the fire extinguisher that every truck carried, but the fire extinguished spontaneously before I could use it. I drove the truck to the mechanic's shop, told them about it, and went on break. When I came back, they told me there was nothing wrong with the truck and that I must have imagined the incident. So I went back to work, and the same thing happened again. I drove the truck back to the shop, and the mechanics still couldn't find anything wrong with it. When it happened the third time, I noticed that the fire went out as soon as I released my grip on the load of paper. I parked in a relatively safe spot away from the paper storage area, pulled the lever that controlled the clamps, and identified the problem. There was a hydraulic leak that sprayed hot oil on the electric motor when I closed the clamps and ceased to do so when I released the lever. I then drove the truck back to the shop in flames, released the lever, and jumped off the truck. It was kind of risky, but not as risky as it looked. The mechanics were not pleased, but at least they no longer accused me of making the problem up.

I seem to remember that we had those Regulator clocks at Sawyer Elementary, but I don't remember if they were in all the rooms. Maybe, as they wore out, they were replaced with the newer types that we had at Gage Park. I think the minutes advanced one by one like with the newer models, but there was also a visible pendulum and the tick-tock sound that Old Dog mentioned.

I never noticed that double spacing thing before, or heard tell of it either. I don't know whether or not it's a practice that I want to adopt, I'll have to think about it.