Question about scheduling rain

Good evening everyone :)

This is my first time post. Pleased to meet you all :) I'm new to Torque programming, so I'm probably making an obvious mistake here and not realizing it. Here's what I'm trying to accomplish: upon loading my mission, I want an object that schedules rain to start and stop at random times. What I originally wanted was for the object to be created and initialized from the start without any user input, but I'm not sure how to do that, because even if I script a new object to be created, I would have to have some way of calling the schedule function on that object. I don't know how to do that, because as far as I know, datablocks can't call functions, correct?

So I made a RainScheduler trigger, which, upon entry, schedules for a new Rain object to be created. In the function that creates the rain, another function is scheduled to delete the Rain object. So far, the rain is created and starts fine, but my echo message that says "scheduler entered" never shows up, and the function that destroys the rain never gets entered. Here's the weird thing: if I take out the code where I create the rain and recompile, the rain still shows up! Shouldn't it have not appeared if I took it out?

So my questions are:
1) How can I create an object on startup that automatically calls a function?
2) If my rain creator function creates the rain, but the echo message that should show up upon function entry doesn't show up, how is the rain being created?
3) Why does the rain show up even when I take that datablock out?

Please forgive me if I'm asking a dumb question or missing something totally obvious. Thank you kindly :)

Here's my code:

$raintriggered = false;
datablock TriggerData(RainScheduler)
{
tickPeriodMS = 4000;
};

function RainScheduler::onEnterTrigger( %this, %trigger, %obj )
{
if(!$raintriggered)
{
$raintriggered = true;
echo("rain scheduled."); //this message does show up, and a few seconds later rain starts
schedule(4000, 0, "startRain");
}

}


function startRain()
{
echo("rain scheduler entered."); //this message never shows up in the console
%raining = new Precipitation(rain) { //this rain object is created successfully
position = "460.193 -544.339 143.145";
rotation = "1 0 0 0";
scale = "1 1 1";
nameTag = "rain";
dataBlock = "HeavyRain";
minSpeed = "1.5";
maxSpeed = "2";
minMass = "0.75";
maxMass = "0.85";
maxTurbulence = "0.1";
turbulenceSpeed = "0.2";
rotateWithCamVel = "1";
useTurbulence = "0";
numDrops = "5000";
boxWidth = "200";
boxHeight = "100";
doCollision = "1";
};

schedule(100000, 0, "endRain", %raining);
}

function endRain(%raining)
{
%raining.delete();
schedule(4000, 0, "startRain");

}

function RainScheduler::onLeaveTrigger( %this, %trigger, %obj )
{

}

function RainScheduler::onTickTrigger(%this, %trigger)
{

}