The Revenge of Larry Lightbulb
Jul. 29th, 2008 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
If you need anything small done to your house around here, there's no point calling a builder or a certified electrician. They're all out building unoccupied lakefront McMansions for rich down-staters. They won't even look at a small fix-it job, and if they did it would cost you a couple house payments to have them do it.
So you go to work and ask if someone there "knows somebody." And after tracing through more contacts and cut-outs than you'd find in an East German spy ring, you'll eventually find your handyman.
Interesting people, these handymen. They drift into town, usually on their motorcycle, and help patch your roof. Then a few months later, maybe they help replace a water heater. A week or two later you try to find them to replace a window, and they've moved on, never to be seen again.
I hired a couple of these guys to put plasterboard over the cheap paper ceiling tiles in the hallway. They did a good job, put the board up, put the lights back up, everything worked just fine.
A couple weeks ago one of the hall lights failed. The punchline is that I traced the problem to the light fixture itself. Taking that down, I found it had been attached to the house wiring by twisting the wires together by hand, and then wrapping them in tape. Duct tape. Which had now dried, as duct tape will, and had fallen off.
Le sigh.
So you go to work and ask if someone there "knows somebody." And after tracing through more contacts and cut-outs than you'd find in an East German spy ring, you'll eventually find your handyman.
Interesting people, these handymen. They drift into town, usually on their motorcycle, and help patch your roof. Then a few months later, maybe they help replace a water heater. A week or two later you try to find them to replace a window, and they've moved on, never to be seen again.
I hired a couple of these guys to put plasterboard over the cheap paper ceiling tiles in the hallway. They did a good job, put the board up, put the lights back up, everything worked just fine.
A couple weeks ago one of the hall lights failed. The punchline is that I traced the problem to the light fixture itself. Taking that down, I found it had been attached to the house wiring by twisting the wires together by hand, and then wrapping them in tape. Duct tape. Which had now dried, as duct tape will, and had fallen off.
Le sigh.
