Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Penance
Have you ever noticed that members of certain professions seem to make an extra effort to heap as much guilt as possible into every transaction? There are, for instance, some doctors who apparently still believe that illness is a punishment for sin, and must always imply that if you had done five more ab crunches or made your appointment five minutes earlier, you would not be suffering from five stab wounds to your back. Dentists, too, operate on this principle, hemming and hawing over your tartar buildup and showing you pictures of gummy Appalachian smiles until you agree that you will, by god, floss every minute of every day until the day you die if it will only buy you some silence. This weekend, however, it was the air conditioning repairman who insisted on treating me as though he had just caught me slaughtering a family of Croatian immigrants.
“So, what’s the problem here?” he asked.
“Uh, I don’t know... it’s not working,” I answered helpfully. “I mean, it hasn’t been, uh, putting out cold air.”
My engineering knowledge is clearly impressive.
“But how did it happen?” he pressed further. “Did you try to do something to it? Were you running it really high or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” I defensively replied, sounding as guilty as the sleazy wife-beating husband from a Lifetime movie. “We just tried to turn it on like a month ago, and we noticed it wasn’t working.”
“Uh huh.” His skepticism was obvious. “Well, you know, the fan’s not even working now. I don’t know how that would happen.”
“Huh.” I said, racking my brain for some way to prove how much I genuinely loved and cared for the fan, but eventually deciding just to make a break for it. “Well, I’ll just let you work here.”
But I wasn’t going to get off that easily.
“Okay, well, I can fix this, but you’ve got to understand that you can’t have it be sixty degrees in here all the time. This unit isn’t built to handle that kind of stress.”
I briefly considered seeing if his unit could handle the stress of several sudden strikes from a monkey wrench, but finally concluded that this would be too risky, as I could not afford to lose the only repairman I had met who had a sufficient grasp of the English language to avoid communicating through a series of grunts and clicking sounds. So I simply went about my business and let him go about his. Of course, it’s been about thirty degrees in Chicago ever since then, so I can’t really be sure that he actually fixed anything, but I sure am grateful for all the important lessons I got to learn along the way.
Have you ever noticed that members of certain professions seem to make an extra effort to heap as much guilt as possible into every transaction? There are, for instance, some doctors who apparently still believe that illness is a punishment for sin, and must always imply that if you had done five more ab crunches or made your appointment five minutes earlier, you would not be suffering from five stab wounds to your back. Dentists, too, operate on this principle, hemming and hawing over your tartar buildup and showing you pictures of gummy Appalachian smiles until you agree that you will, by god, floss every minute of every day until the day you die if it will only buy you some silence. This weekend, however, it was the air conditioning repairman who insisted on treating me as though he had just caught me slaughtering a family of Croatian immigrants.
“So, what’s the problem here?” he asked.
“Uh, I don’t know... it’s not working,” I answered helpfully. “I mean, it hasn’t been, uh, putting out cold air.”
My engineering knowledge is clearly impressive.
“But how did it happen?” he pressed further. “Did you try to do something to it? Were you running it really high or something?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” I defensively replied, sounding as guilty as the sleazy wife-beating husband from a Lifetime movie. “We just tried to turn it on like a month ago, and we noticed it wasn’t working.”
“Uh huh.” His skepticism was obvious. “Well, you know, the fan’s not even working now. I don’t know how that would happen.”
“Huh.” I said, racking my brain for some way to prove how much I genuinely loved and cared for the fan, but eventually deciding just to make a break for it. “Well, I’ll just let you work here.”
But I wasn’t going to get off that easily.
“Okay, well, I can fix this, but you’ve got to understand that you can’t have it be sixty degrees in here all the time. This unit isn’t built to handle that kind of stress.”
I briefly considered seeing if his unit could handle the stress of several sudden strikes from a monkey wrench, but finally concluded that this would be too risky, as I could not afford to lose the only repairman I had met who had a sufficient grasp of the English language to avoid communicating through a series of grunts and clicking sounds. So I simply went about my business and let him go about his. Of course, it’s been about thirty degrees in Chicago ever since then, so I can’t really be sure that he actually fixed anything, but I sure am grateful for all the important lessons I got to learn along the way.
