Here’s to the pros
Dwellings are organic. Houses, apartments, condominiums – they are living, breathing entities. Neglected and under-nourished they can die before their time. Still, with just minimal care they get sick, and need doctors and nurses – the tradesmen and technicians whose skills you only think you possess until you take the top from the toilet tank, or the shroud from the central air conditioning unit.
You are reminded of your limits when spring arrives in Arkansas, pushing the daytime thermometer into the seventies, perhaps the low eighties, then returning the overnight mercury to temperatures that require only a sheet and grandma’s light quilt. But there is no cool air coming from the vents, no air period. Instead there is a hum, a basso profundo demand for attention coming from the metal box on the cement slab just outside the master bedroom wall.
So you go outside and stare at the big blue cube, as if staring at it will somehow nurse it back to health. Sort of like the guy with car trouble: He pulls to the side of the road and raises the hood and ponders the mechanisms, because that’s what men think they should do, no matter that only one in 20,000 can distinguish a fan belt from an air filter.
“You know, it’s a little warm in here,” says the HVAC guy. (Um, yeah, that’s why we called…) He’s the house’s respiratory therapist, and lets you know that, whatever may be wrong with its lungs or bronchia or diaphragm, you are lucky the ailment presented now, before summer, when it gets really hot, and the calls for help start pouring in. It could be days before he could make it over, and in the meantime, you’d need a hotel room, or two or three fans. And in his experience, those oscillating fans do the job better than those overhead babies.
Yes, you agree; there is nothing better than luck, nothing whatsoever.
Step Two in the diagnosis – Step One is to confirm that it is, yes, warm in here – is to toy with the thermostat, on and off, on and off, cool to heat, heat back to cool, turn the temperature dial up and down, back up, repeat. Satisfied that it was still a little warm in there, and that on-and-off and up-anddown weren’t making it any less warm in there, “Where’s your unit?”
Through the wall you can hear the metallic ziiiiiiiiiiiip of the battery powered socket pistol as it ziiiiiiiiiiiips the cover from the apparatus and, after a few minutes, the compulsion to go outside and stand alongside the tech, as if to somehow assist him, becomes irresistible. “Bad?” you ask. He grunts. Translation: I’m busy. Go back inside. Where you belong. So you go back inside. Where you belong.
Fifteen minutes later he’s at the door, offering for your inspection a – something. You don’t know what you are inspecting. It is essentially two-dimensional, about 10 inches by eight, dotted with multi-colored little blips that resemble pharmaceutical capsules. “Circuit board’s fried,” the tech intones. “Happens to a lot of ‘em. You’re lucky that’s all we got to deal with.” Yep, lucky again. And even luckier, because “I think I got one in the truck.” He did. And now you have cool air, and an invoice (“We take cash or check, whatever’s good for you”) for a couple hundred bucks. Cheap, since it is noon and already 72 degrees, and the sun is out.
A day later, no kidding, a different doctor is making a house call, because not one but two of your bathtubs are taking an hour to drain, and that stuff you get at the grocery or hardware store, the stuff that you’re cautioned to avoid getting on your skin and flat warned against getting in your eyes – that stuff hasn’t done a bit of good. Nor has a plunger, nor that six-foot wire “snake” that you pretended to know how to use.
The pros set about their work. Before long, up from the drain of Bathtub #1 comes two razor heads, the kind that snap on and off. And – this is the tub the grands used – a couple matchbox cars. A wad of plastic loofah. The screw top from a diet soda (go figure). Job done.
Bathtub #2 is stubborn, sneers at the multiple yards of steel intended to recover, or dislodge, whatever is blocking the drain. But then success, because “Whatever it was, it was organic,” the doctor says. “I put some Jeffrey Dahmer down the drain…”
Jeffrey Dahmer was the guy… Never mind.
House problems? Admit you don’t know what to do. And be nice to, and grateful for, the people who do know.