Nine o'clock, and the rig is quiet in the way a new place is quiet — not settled, just not yet loud. rswfire turns the camera on Oliver first, because Oliver is the thing happening. The cat has been at it for thirty minutes: pawing at the floor around his bowl, scraping at nothing, trying to bury food that is sitting in the open on a surface that will not cooperate. I will throw it in the trash for you I promise, or you could just finish eating it — you usually do. Behind him the interior is staged rather than arranged, belongings pulled into the middle of the floor because the slides had to come in, and everything that lives in a slide's path has to go somewhere when it does.
The explanation comes in a minute, he says, and then it comes. His father had been by earlier. They had gone through the electrical together, tracing a failure, and what they found in the walls of a machine he had just paid a great deal of money for was a wire that had broken at some point and been spliced back together and taped — not taped well, not taped professionally, taped the way you tape something you do not expect anyone to see. He says the whole thing looked awful. He says it is unacceptable, and then he says the harder thing underneath it, which is that he does not have the skill to fix that, and does not know who he would trust to. Not no one can, but I don't know what kind of mechanic you could hand this to and believe them. The wires look brittle to him. He states plainly that this will be a problem at some point.
The fault itself resolved through a door he had been told not to open. Somewhere in the walkthrough, the tech who handed him the rig had pointed at an access panel and said that area was for them — for the techs, not for owners. He and his father worked the problem down to that panel, opened it, and found a fuse. That was all it was. The fuse was replaced and the system came back. He reports this without triumph, as a fact that sits alongside the taped splice: the compartment declared off-limits contained the answer to a failure in his own dwelling, on his own night, with no tech present.
He apologizes twice for sounding negative, and both times keeps going anyway. This industry is awful. It's shocking how much they just disrespect us. His actual objection is not that the product failed — it is that profit and workmanship were treated as if they could not coexist. Surely they can profit off these things and give us a nice product, you would think. Then: rant over.
The tour continues. The rig is parked and leveled on pyramid blocks, which he likes — he calls them bricks, then blocks, and admits he is not sure which — and he says he will try to show them tomorrow because it looks really nice. No furnace tonight; a ceramic heater on low instead. The same heater trips a breaker in his house on high no matter which outlet he uses, and it tripped once today here too, so he shut things down on the house side and it has been holding since. It is heat that works only because he is on shore power. He notes the condition rather than complaining about it: won't be able to anywhere else.
Oliver goes behind the curtain. rswfire breaks off mid-sentence — thought he might be going after Bailey, he was earlier — and then, no, Oliver is simply destroying the curtain, because that is what he does. The curtains went up today and they hang a little lower than they should. He has no sewing skills. His mother does, and she is going to fix them, and he does not think she will have to do much, they are pretty close. Two parents in one evening, each holding a piece of the build.
What he takes from the mess on the floor is procedural. Getting the slides in was not fun, and it was worse than it needed to be, because he has been carrying things into the rig faster than he has been assigning them places. Organize right away — that is the lesson he draws aloud, and he starts pulling the staged belongings back out to begin doing it. Then he points at a wall and describes what is not there yet: the Blue Iti and solar gear on one side, a custom desk he will build on the other. That's basically it. I think it's a good setup for us.
The apology returns one more time at the end, and this time he names the cause exactly — he is tired, he did not sleep well last night, he is ready for bed. He expects to sleep better tonight, because the curtains are up and the heater is running. He asks the cats if they want to say good night to everybody, answers for them, and notes that once the lights go off he has no idea what they will do. Then: talk to you guys tomorrow.