I'm Awake

It's after midnight.
I have an 8am meeting with India (5:30pm their time) tomorrow.
Had an incident today with the new pellet stove.

(Yes. Those are supposed to be horns and a tail.)

I'm not very good at these sort of things, so I'm not looking forward to the phone call.

I came home at 5 today. As soon as I opened the door, I could feel the heat - in the basement. I ran to the stove and found the fan blowing at full power. There was some error code on the controller screen. I moved through the menu and set it to Off (which I thought it was). The screen displayed "Startup" and the fan kept blowing. Inside I could see some part glowing red. The Empty Hopper icon was also displayed. I opened the lid and sure enough the hopper was empty. Nearly 40lbs of pellets gone!

A little while later I put more pellets in - just to see. The part inside was still glowing red. The thermostat upstairs read 87 degrees - poor animals - good thing some windows were left open.

It was about forty-five minutes after I got home and I heard the tinkle tinkle tinkle of pellets falling into the burn box. WTF!?!? Sure enough it was dropping pellets and that part was still red. There wasn't any flame, the fan had quit, but something was happening. The thing was still OFF!

The whole house was hot.

Eventually I unplugged the thing. Eventually I got curious and plugged it back in. I started scrolling through the menus. It has a programmable thermostat, so I started scrolling through the options. This is what I found.

255°F ARE YOU FN KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!

This is the factory default.
Today is Monday.
I have not touched any of the temperatures anywhere in this program.
I had it turned OFF.

I can't sleep, because I don't like these kinds of phone calls.
I can't sleep, because I'm thinking about all the horrible things that could have happened.
I can't sleep, because 255 shouldn't be a fucking option! What kind of moron programmed this thing?

This is what I do. This is how I make a living. I write code that doesn't fuck with peoples lives. I get paid to make sure the code I write gets someones job done, done well and they can sleep at night. What kind of fuck-nut allowed this program to exist? Do they have any idea what kind of damage this could have done? What if I had the air conditioning on? What if I didn't have windows open? What if my whole fucking house burned down?

And it's not like I have kids that tampered with it (another reason 255 shouldn't be an option). It came this way from the factory.

Am I over-reacting?

The max. consumption of this thing is 7lbs an hour. I had nearly 40lbs in the hopper. It ran for nearly 6 hours at full blast. If I came home at 5, then it ran out of pellets at around 4pm. I was told it handles the lack of pellets by quietly shutting itself off. There was a part in there that was still red at 6pm. That doesn't sound like shut-off to me. Now it thinks the hopper is empty, when I've put a good 10lbs of pellets in there. It's running (again) when it's off. What happened? What did it break? Can I trust this thing?

The shop (which I don't currently blame for this) kept telling me how "smart" this thing was. How automatic it was. "Simply dump in pellets, set a temperature and let it go." From the beginning I wondered if it would out-smart itself. It hasn't even been a week. Programs and machines are only as smart as the people that build and test them (i.e. 54:14 PM?).

I'm really annoyed. I need another drink. I need to go to bed.

- b