Chapter 11- Rain, and a Man With No Tools

It rained on the Lampang leg the way it rains in Thailand in August, which is to say that at twenty past two in the afternoon the sky went the colour of an old bruise and then it rained harder than either of them had seen it rain anywhere.

They stopped under a shelter at a roadside stall with about eleven other motorcycles and waited forty minutes, which is what everybody does and which is the correct thing to do.

What happened afterwards

The machine started, ran for perhaps four kilometres, and then began cutting out intermittently, which on a road with trucks on it is a considerably more frightening symptom than it sounds.

Theo got it onto the verge, waited, tried again, got another three kilometres, and repeated that twice before reaching a small town whose name he has written down and cannot pronounce.

Then he plugged in, in a covered car park, with the engine off.

What the screen said

One stored fault, in an ignition-related circuit, of the kind whose wording describes a circuit rather than a component.

Which is the same wording that has appeared in four previous books and which means the same thing every time. A circuit reported as faulty covers a chafed wire, a corroded pin, an unseated connector, a film of water across two contacts, and a dead component, because from the computer's position at the far end of the wire those are indistinguishable.

Theo had a strong suspicion, given that it had appeared eleven minutes after forty minutes of standing in a downpour, and he did not act on it.

It was not his motorcycle. That rule has not changed in five countries and it does not get relaxed because a rider is wet and a long way from the hostel.

Aran

The shop was a shopfront with three motorcycles in pieces on the floor and a man in his fifties called Aran Petcharat sitting on a plastic stool.

He had no diagnostic equipment of any kind. Theo did not see a single electronic instrument in the building.

What he did have was thirty years of that specific model, in that specific climate, and a completely settled view about what happens to it when it stands in heavy rain.

He took the panel off in about ninety seconds, looked at three places, found water inside a connector at the second one, blew it out, dried it, put a smear of grease on it, clipped it back, and started the machine.

Twenty minutes, including the tea.

What each of them actually contributed

Theo has thought about this exchange more than any other in five books, because it is the clearest demonstration of what a diagnostic tool is and is not.

The screen told him which circuit. It could not tell him where on that circuit, what was wrong with it, or what to do about it.

Aran knew where, what and how, and did not need a screen because he had seen the same failure on the same model several hundred times and knew the three places to look.

Neither of those is the whole job. A rider with a screen and no experience knows a circuit and can do nothing. A mechanic with experience and no screen finds it by working through a familiar list, which he did, quickly, and would have done just as quickly without Theo having read anything at all.

The honest position is that on that afternoon, on that machine, in that town, the scanner contributed almost nothing. Aran would have found it in twenty minutes regardless.

Where the reading did earn its place

Not in the repair. In two other places, both of which mattered.

The first was on the verge, seven kilometres earlier, where a reading told Theo that the fault was in an ignition circuit rather than something in the fuel system or the drive, which is what told him it was reasonable to ride slowly to a town rather than stopping and arranging recovery.

The second was afterwards. He photographed the fault before Aran touched anything and photographed the machine again after, showing the fault cleared and nothing new, and he sent both to Nok in Bangkok that evening with a description of what had happened and what had been done.

Which meant that when the machine went back nine days later, a repair performed by a stranger in a town neither of them could name was documented, dated, explained and already known about by the owner.

On a rental with no paperwork of any kind, that is the entire value.

What it cost

Aran charged an amount that Theo describes as embarrassing to write down, and refused a tip twice before accepting one on the third attempt on the grounds that it was for his nephew.

Mia filmed the whole repair with permission, and it is the second most watched thing they published from Thailand, and the comments are almost entirely people saying that this is what they were actually worried about and nobody ever shows it.

What They Learned

Water bridging contacts inside a connector produces a circuit fault, and the wording of the code covers water, corrosion, a loose plug and a dead part equally.

Do not investigate or repair anything on a machine you have rented, even when you are wet and confident and a long way from anywhere.

A screen tells you which circuit. Experience tells you where on it, what is wrong and what to do. Neither is the whole job and the second one is usually faster.

The reading earns its place in deciding whether it is reasonable to ride on, and in documenting a repair performed by a stranger on somebody else's machine.

Photograph before and after, and tell the owner the same day. On an informal rental that record is the only record that will ever exist.

This curated preview is provided for personal reading. Copyright remains with Nobo Astoria.