Work today ended up being a tad more stressful than usual due to the all to common lack of requirements coupled with well defined timelines. I only mention that to help frame my mood when my truck hiccupped on my way home. Probably in the same manner that individuals who live next to train tracks eventually become accustomed to the daily wheels on rails, I pretty much have the rhythm of my truck’s engine tucked deep in the subconscious. I would be interested in getting some feedback from someone in the train situation, but the microsecond my truck produced a sound that didn’t fit the standard cadence… it jumped up and took front and center in my thoughts. I somehow managed to instantly block out the non-related sound – no more radio, no more buzz of surrounding cars nothing… just the sound from my engine. It was matched up now, the pistons were firing in sync, the drive shaft was spinning under my seat… this lasted for a few minutes and then it happened again.
Now I was alarmed – traveling 65 mph on a highway and something was different. Then again, and again… the truck started losing power and a lightning bolt with two parens “)!(” – replace ! with a visual of a lightning bolt. For some reason my eyes jerked over to the odometer… 8004 miles. Yes, 8,004 miles. My internal thermometer just reached BOIL level. I pulled off to the side, shut the engine off and restarted it to see if it was consistent – probably not the best thing to do, but my software engineering training took over and I wanted to make sure it was repeatable (if you’re in the business, you know a repeatable problem is a fixable problem, an intermittent problem is a late night filled with high doses of caffeine). After a few minutes the light came on – bad in the sense I am stuck on a highway, but good in the sense that I can explain and demonstrate the problem – I have never been very good at convincing a serviceman to fix a problem defined as “it hiccupped while going down the road but doesn’t do it now.. fix it please”.
So I ask, what does a red lightning bolt inside two backward parens mean to you? To me it means heat lightening and it’s time to get in before it rains. Translated into car terms… IT DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING TO ME other than SOMETHING IS WRONG, which I had already gathered by my own observance a mile down the road. Thanks Dodge Ram 1500 4X4 Big Horn Club Cab Hemi display designer. Your insightful and clever design has provided me with absolutely zero assistance beyond the color red which does leverage the universal response of stopping.. except for bulls I guess. Now I have to reach over, dig out the owner’s manual which for the ram is about 3″ high, 6″ wide and no less than 2″ thick. With the index of no use (couldn’t find the entry of “red lightning bolt”), I spent about 10 minutes to locate a picture with a line and number pointing to the symbol in question. 4 pages later I find the number and there it is…. the answer to my problem and hopefully the guidance I needed – Electronic Throttle Control (ETC). Ah, the ETC was bad, what else could that symbol have been…. further description basically said if it is blinking (which it was) then the engine is probably hesitating (yeah, I know that already) and ……. It must be towed to repair – for those that care, if it was not blinking, I could still drive it directly to the dealership.
With the mercury spurting out of my internal thermometer, I called my wife, who called the dealership who told us we had to call a road service 800 number. This she did and was promptly told a tow truck would be dispatched and be there in 1.5 hours. And there I sat for 1.5 hours with the green glow of the number 8004 firmly etched into my brain. Gratefully, my wife showed up to help me pass the time. To his credit, the individual did arrive about 10 minutes earlier than informed and was quick and efficient in getting the Dodge Ram 1500 4X4 Big Horn Club Cab Hemi with 8004 miles dead on the side of the road onto the flatbed truck and hauled away.
Oddly enough, the interesting part of this whole thing occurred as my wife was driving me home. We received a call from Daimler Chrysler asking us to take a survey based on our recent experience. It takes a little less than 1.5 hours to get a tow truck to us, but the survey comes 6 minutes after the tow truck pulls away. This appeared to be an automated survey that my wife immediately jumped on and said she would love to complete a survey regarding the recent incident. They started with the expected questions [how long in minutes to respond, was it professional etc.] and ended with the crown jewel … “Based on your experience with this call, how likely are you to purchase another Daimler Chrysler product” Guess what our response was, more importantly, and the intriguing part to me is what other answer would they ever expect to get – your Daimler Chrysler product has just failed requiring you to contact a road service in order to come retrieve your failed Daimler Chrysler product so you can get your Diamler Chrysler product (with 8004 miles) repaired… and now they want to know if I would remember this incident when considering buying another Daimler Chrysler truck (say for instance a Dodge Ram 1500 4X4 Big Horn Club Cab Hemi).
I would love to see the aggregated responses (survey was automated over the phone so they only have a number for a response). I have an image of a cliff graph somewhere around the 1 or 2 mark. I can visualize it now… The highly paid Chrysler business intelligence guru tapping at his computer to create complex outer joins to mesh with 20 years of datamart cubes producing splendid graphs to put on artistically mesmerizing powerpoint backgrounds “with circles and arrows and a paragraph on [the back] of each one” which are plotted on color wax printers to be pasted on foamboard to sit on trendy little easels in executive boardrooms in order to provide a high velocity response to the executive decision maker’s questions on insights into the voice of the customer resulting in man months of work to think up clever corporate mission statements for employees to align their individual SMART Goals that allow them to efficiently develop business intelligence systems based on service oriented architectures on highly available systems capable of on demand computing capacity to reduce ad-hoc report generation spikes resulting from business analysts trying to determine if a crappy product quality impacted the future purchasing decisions of their former customers.
… but then again, I could be of the minority opinion here (although I kind of doubt it)
