Meet the Crew

We’ve had a different sort of week, with the heating and air conditioning installers tromping up and down the basement stairs, and much banging and drilling and hammering going on in the depths. Let’s meet the crew:

There was Phil, a 40-ish stocky guy with immense forearms, who knew what he was about and was proud of his work. Turns out he grew up in Manhattan (that would be New York, not Kansas) on 102nd Street, as he said, “Between the rich people and the poor people.” He talked a little about his hobby: “flying” World War I airplanes on the Internet. Apparently there is a whole group of people who are into this, and they sometimes meet down in Dayton, Ohio at an air base and they continue their virtual flying there.

Jonathan is a twenty something, hearing impaired, tall guy who reminded Kathy of her own sons, so she became Mom, and related to him that way. He has been at this work for three years and though he was the junior partner, he was quite competent. I have a feeling he gets most of the dirty work, such as lying in the crawlspace with the spiders and the mice. He hopes to move to North Carolina at some point.

We met Phil and Jonathan first, and on one day Phil stayed in the shop and a guy named John came out to work with Jonathan. John was probably in his late thirties, since he said he had been doing this work for fourteen years. He was rather over solicitous in explaining what they were doing, a sort of Cliff Claven if you will, but not a bad guy altogether.

I noticed that there was a lot of up and down the basement stairs as they came up for tools and materials. I wouldn’t last five minutes in that job with my arthritic knees.

In the backyard the condenser wound up in my rose bushes, but that’s OK. One of them died last year and I didn’t get around to replacing it, so there was a perfect opening for the apparatus. Then I just enlarged the flower bed around the condenser and put a bunch of pansies (Kathy’s favorite) in there. She looked at my work today and said it looks like a shrine to our air conditioner.

So now the job is finished. We have a new furnace and air conditioning. After having these guys tromping around the house all week, it turns out we’re going to miss them. But that’s OK, we’ll still think of them every time the AC kicks in this summer. Mmmm. Nice.