“That repair truck has been parked outside your house every week since you moved in,” said my neighbor Mona.
She leaned closer, smiling wickedly.
“Are you having an affair with the G.E. repairman?”
This remark was extremely upsetting to me, as you can imagine. For three months I’d been wasting my time going through the usual channels to get everything working in my brand-new kitchen. Nobody had been neighborly enough (until now) to let me in on the secret of smooth-running appliances.
Even so, I doubted I could follow such a drastic prescription for good service. Especially since the repairman bore an uncanny resemblance to Jack Nicholson, an actor I’ve never liked much.
I remembered the time I told him I was tired of having one appliance fixed only to have another one break down. I said to this guy, “What exactly is the problem here?”
Next thing I knew, I was a bit player in The Shining.
“The PROBLEM?” He extracted himself from the dishwasher and slowly got to his feet. Once vertical, he tilted his head back and squinted down his nose at me.
“You wanna KNOW what the PROBLEM is?”
“Well, uh, yeah,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what the PROBLEM is. The PROBLEM is the bozos who built this house wouldn’t know correct appliance installation from a hole in their tool belts.”
He swiveled his head around and looked at me sideways. Even his profile looked like Jack Nicholson.
“The PROBLEM is,” he continued, “that I have to repair all the damage done by the knuckle draggers who built this castle. The PROBLEM is you buyin’ in to the idea of brand-new homeownership, brand-new appliances, and brand-SPANKIN’-new one-year service contracts, not thinkin’ you’d actually NEED ’em.”
I listened attentively to this explanation, waiting for the moment when he’d pick up his cordless drill and say “heeeere’s Johnny!” to the refrigerator.
Instead he gestured at our walls like he knew exactly what else was going wrong in our new home, like how the stair carpeting had come off three times already. Or how if we turned on the lights in the hallway, the lights went out in the family room.
Or how our shower drain plugged up the first time we used it because it was crammed with pieces of kitchen tile, roof shingles, and trash from a couple of Burger King lunches.
Or how I had so little water pressure in my kitchen that when I wanted to cook spaghetti for dinner I had to start filling the noodle pot at lunchtime.
Or how our builder planted street trees that were looking so sickly a neighbor hired a specialist to save them. (The specialist said that in order for trees to thrive, they have to be taken OUT of the pots before they’re planted.)
The list went on forever, but the repairman was waiting for me, tilting his head back again a la Jack Nicholson.
I could see right up his nose.
Nope. There was no way I’d have an affair with this guy.
Now, maybe if G.E. could send me somebody who looked like Tom Hanks…