Not a Great Beginning

The chim­ney guys arrived at 10:49. I was on the phone with the land­lord’s wife at the time, because she’d called to see if they were done yet.

These guys look SO YOUNG. I mean, I would­n’t mind see­ing them pump­ing my gas or flip­ping my burgers—but they’re sup­posed to be installing some­thing that, if it goes wrong, could lead to the house burn­ing down. And 11 months of incom­pe­tence from peo­ple in their pro­fes­sion leads me to be wary, anyway.

The first kid got out of the van and walked past me with­out say­ing a word, head­ing around to the side of the house with a tape mea­sure. The sec­ond kid sat in the van for a few min­utes (and as loud as I could hear the music out­side the van, I don’t think he was sit­ting there hav­ing a phone or radio con­ver­sa­tion), then got out and perk­i­ly said “Hi, how are you this morn­ing?” I said, “Well, I’m a lit­tle grumpy since my day is near­ly three hours off sched­ule now.” He looked shocked that I’d men­tioned their tar­di­ness and said “Oh.” Then walked around the house. 

They’re mak­ing lots of noise now, which I think is relat­ed to pulling out the defec­tive pipes in the chim­ney. Their con­ver­sa­tion comes through great, though. “There ain’t no (some­thing some­thing) or five shots nei­ther. Who put this fuck­er in?”