The Saga of Repairmen

Oh, the tales one can tell when unknown persons prowl about the premises!

So it was last week that we had the HVAC/furnace man here for the system's twice-yearly cleaning and maintenance.

Alas, the young lad who exited the company vehicle was not the person we were expecting. We'd been expecting a fellow named Chris, or at least Jeff, both of whom had serviced our system multiple times.

But now we had young Owen, who, it turned out, was also the son of the owner of the company.

I greeted him when he arrived, for my husband was in the bedroom still in his skivvies and not yet dressed for much of anything. I showed him where the furnace was, pointed to the heat pump, and expected not to hear from him again until he was done.

My husband, meanwhile, decided to do as he normally does and dress in the kitchen. This requires sitting down at the kitchen table to put his suspenders on his pants.

And so it was that he was sitting in the chair, legs splayed apart and his privates sort of showing. Well, not sort of. They were in full view, actually, only I did not know this. I was at the refrigerator and suddenly the door from the garage burst open and there stood young Owen, some sort of device in hand, and his eyes suddenly opened wide with a tinge of horror.

I swiftly realized what he was looking at and tried to move in front of him to block his view of my husband in his underwear. The young man in question backed out of the room in a hurry. I went out after him, closing the door. "What do you need?" I asked. He said he needed to check the thermostat to make sure it was sending out the appropriate air speed or some such. I asked if he could do something else for a few minutes and not come into the house.

He rapidly agreed.

I went back into the kitchen and told my husband to get himself dressed. This he did, and then he went out and chatted with young Owen as if nothing untoward had happened. The young man eventually made his way to the thermostat and checked whatever he needed to check, finished up his servicing, and was on his way.

And then today, we had someone come to look at the washing machine.

I have a Speed Queen. These are supposed to be commercial-grade washing machines and come highly recommended. When we bought ours, it had a 10-year warranty that's still in effect. 

The pump on it died on January 22, the night my father passed away. We came home from a sad evening to find the washing machine stopped with a full load of soggy clothes.

Fortunately, the man I called the next morning heard the plea in my voice when I told him my father had passed away and I needed my washing machine fixed, and he came straight away. He replaced the pump and all was well.

Except it wasn't. 

The washing machine began to make a racket on the spin cycle, and this grew worse and worse. I mentioned it to my husband several times, but it wasn't until the day he put on his new hearing aids that he said, "What is wrong with that washing machine. Call the man!"

So, I called the same man I'd dealt with in January, and he came on September 1. He said the machine needed new bearings, and he would fix it, and then he never returned. Calls to him went unanswered.

I gave up on him and called the appliance store from which I'd purchased the machine, explained my predicament, and they said they'd send out a repairman from a different company.

This fellow came today, made the same diagnosis, and promised to have it fixed within about a week's time, or as soon as he could get the parts.

While he was here, I asked him about the timer on the dryer. It has for years, literally, been spongy and when I put the knob on certain cycles it simply refused to turn on when I hit the start button. I would have to fiddle with it until it finally decided to work.

The repairman, whose name was Rob, said he couldn't fix the dryer (that would require a separate trip even though he was standing right there), but he pulled the knob off of the machine. "This is broken," he said, showing us where the knob was cracked. "It's not connecting, that's why you can't get it to start properly."

Then he simply removed the knob off of the alarm button, which I seldom use anyway, onto the timer button shaft on the dryer, and all was well.

And I and my husband both felt very stupid for never having considered that the problem with the dryer might not have been the timer after all.