Chernobyl Blues

While I was at the day job yesterday, it occurred to me that I might not have left the water trickling in the bathroom sink when I left, so I called my girl to ask her to check to make sure that our pipes hadn’t frozen again. “Oh, we’ve got water,” she told me, “but what we don’t have is heat. The furnace isn’t working.”

“Goddammit! Our landlord is a fucking unreliable alcoholic!” I shouted.

“We own the place, Rob,” she said, “You’re the landlord.”

“…I hate being right all the time.”

I was home a very fast twenty minutes later; your accountant may tell you that a home is a good investment, but listen to your Internet drinking buddy Rob: sports cars and radar detectors always pay off.

Sure enough, the furnace wasn’t working, so I began my usual diagnostic regimen for machinery that I don’t know much about:

1. Turn it off and turn it back on.
2. Curse at it when it still doesn’t work despite increasingly-fervent prayers to any god that might help you out (Obscure gods are best, because they probably haven’t been pinged in a while, so maybe they’ll pitch in just in return for the attention. Plus, their names often sound obscene on their own, which helps the cursing. You hear me Quirinus, you motherfucker?).
3. Goto 1.

That process took about four beers and got me nowhere, so it was time to call in the pros. I never had to call an HVAC service before, so I opened the yellow pages and dialed up the first name that looked trustworthy to me.

“James Beam and Sons Plumbing and Heating; can I help you?”

I told him my problem in as much detail as I could (“My fucking furnace is broken. Yes, I turned it off and turned it back on! What do I think the problem is? Well, I’ve got it narrowed down to the furnace. Which I believe is broken.”). He asked me to put the phone up to the furnace, which I did, and he told me that just based on the sound he thought he knew what the problem was. However, he said that while he could help me out, he was at a bar and he’d already had a couple of beers.

“Mr. Beam,” I said, “I, too, have had a few beers. And frankly, if you can work on the furnace without blowing up the house, I don’t care if you’ve been booting Chinese skag. Hell, if you can get this thing working again before every pipe in my house freezes up like Lindsey Lohan trying to compute the tip on a bar bill that ends with an odd number, I’ll give you beer.” He arrived twenty minutes later. Always nice to meet a kindred spirit.

He fixed the problem within only two beers, and he was patient as I hung over his shoulder and asked questions while he worked (“Jesus Christ! Do I smell gas? Oh, sorry; that’s me.”). The repairs cost a hundred and fifty bucks, so I guess I know how he can afford the heroin.

He told me that the problem was that one of the water lines into the furnace had become clogged, which prevented the ignition motor from starting. Which, to me, raises the question: Why the fuck is there a water line going into my furnace? I’m not a chemist, but I’ve been told that water is perhaps not the most conducive substance to introduce into combustion. Does the furnace require cooling? Is it nuclear? If it is, it doesn’t worry me, because I’ve sat above atomic piles in the bathroom every Saturday and Sunday morning since I was nineteen and I feel great, but I’d like to know.

On the plus side, in the six weeks we’ve lived here, we’ve had to bring out an electrician, a plumber and a heating technician, so I think we’ve finished the trilogy of home ownership woes, and we’ve been lucky to find good professionals out of the phone book. Of course, as a Star Wars fan, I know how a perfect trilogy can go sideways on you if you get complacent, so drop me a line if you preemptively recommend a good Jedi for me.

[tags]furnace, HVAC, home ownership, I should have rented this fucking place, dark humor[/tags]