Unfinished Business
Chapter 33 : Finding Problems in the Ship
August 2273
It was well known that the Enterprise had not really been ready to set out when it had been yanked out of dry dock and sent after the intruder. It had been no joke when Scotty had said she needed a shake-down cruise. And as the weeks turned into months, the list of things that were found, and fixed as well as possible, became longer and longer.
The engines had not been tuned to each other. And so there developed vibrations, which shook the whole ship. Spock assisted Scotty in developing the equations that enabled the engineering crew to fine tune the engines and eliminate the vibrations, making everyone breath easier, but then it was discovered that they had lost considerable power. No one was quite sure why. Much more research was needed, before a solution was found that both restored power, and prevented the vibrations.
There was a problem with the showers. Some would only give cold water. No one wanted a freezing shower every morning. It took three long weeks to fix that one and probably would have taken longer, if the captain's shower hadn't been one of the affected ones.
Some of the replicators only wanted to dispense liquid food, and not in a container, either. They had to be reprogramed from scratch. This took the services of one of the computer lab technicians full-time for two weeks. In the meantime, the affected replicators had signs hung on them, which people kept ignoring. The cleaning staff did not think it was funny.
Certain corridors had light panels that blinked in complicated patterns and seemed to respond to voice signals. This was only corrected when it was discovered that the control circuits had somehow been replaced with very old components used to power holiday lights that blinked in patterns according to the carol that was being played. There was no understanding how this could have happened, and it required extensive rewiring, which took three electricians four weeks to complete.
One of the cooks opened one of the large freezers and disappeared. It took the rest of the staff three hours to realize what had happened. And then they were afraid to go in after him. Medical and engineering cooperated to save his life, and then that freezer had to be disassembled and rebuilt. And still the staff refused to use it.
One of the wall panels in the turbolift shaft began to sing. In Klingon. This was unnerving to the people riding in the turbolift for some reason. It took four people two days to solve that one.
Someone had misjudged the size of the shuttles. The marks on the shuttle bay floor were improperly positioned, as was soon discovered when one of the new pilots missed his mark entirely and skidded across the floor, narrowing missing a crew working on another shuttle. The entire floor had to be remeasured and repainted, after completely removing the original marks, of course.
A whole section of floor panels had to be replaced when it was discovered that the paint used on them was corroding the boot soles of everyone who walked on it. And then the boots had to be repaired. Of course.
A whole shipment of medical supplies was found to be mis-labeled. Bones cursed over that one for a month, while trying to figure out what everything actually was and getting it all re-labeled and properly stored.
When Stores began issuing replacement uniforms, it was discovered that some of them were mis-sized. There was nothing to do but have people try them on until the correct size was determined, and manually remark them. This took a whole selection of people in all the standard sizes two weeks to complete.
Someone complained of a sickly sweet smell, which took four people three days to track down. They had to wear respirators to clean out the contaminated Jeffries tube.
Cracks were discovered in some of the support beams, and engineering crawled over the whole ship with specialized sounding equipment, re-welding wherever they found problems. That took almost a month. And then all those places had to be repainted, as well.
Some of the air-circulating pumps where found to be installed backwards, blowing air away from the crew quarters, instead of into them. Fortunately, no one suffocated before this was corrected.
At some point, people began to react to all the problems with laughter. It was a way of relieving the stress. Spock did not entirely understand it, but he accepted it, even though he did not join in. Not until the night when the captain's quarters were flooded with the strong smell of skunk, that is. For some reason, this struck him as exceedingly funny. Nyota quite agreed with him.