I was sitting upstairs in the extra room that doubles as an office slash craft room working on an abstract for my literature class when the doorbell rang. I knew it was the maintenance guy coming to check on our furnace.
He's an older guy, who is always dressed like a cowboy and has a strong rural accent. He is the epitome of the Logan man to me. He's been here before looking at our fan, or the vertical slats of the blinds of our sliding glass door, or the faucet in the tub. He is always quick and efficient, and seems to know just what to do.
He gives a cursory glance to the thermostat to make sure I'm not just an idiot who can't turn it on, and then heads up to look at the furnace. He's got a brand new filter under his arm. I wonder could it have been just the filter?
He sets to work right away, unscrewing the covers on the front of the furnace, and I hover uselessly in the hallway, watching. As I watch him deftly reaching into the furnace to unscrew this piece, or pull out that sensor, I feel a little panicky. "Don't take that out!" I want to say, "in case you can't get it back in!" But he has no such misgivings.
In the awkward silence of his operation, I realize how dependent I am on his skills. Without his intervention, my family and I would have suffered a very uncomfortable winter. While I sat intellectualizing an argument for a paper analyzing a novel, the life-sustaining skills this man possesses slap me in the face. I hear in his cowboy voice a malediction of my own career goals. He seems to drawl "What you don't know could clog every single intake on this furnace - heck, on all the furnaces in this complex. What you don't know would make you freeze to death. What have you got on me?" And I have no answer for him.
As he finishes up, he gets conversational about the furnace. "It's a pretty simple little furnace, but it gets the job done," he says. It's as if he was reading my thoughts and was rubbing it in.
"It doesn't seem too simple to me," I say, good-naturedly.
He has the patience to give me the run-down of why it wasn't working. He tells me enough to satisfy my curiosity. He adds "they have so many safety features, it doesn't take a whole lot to stop it from working. But I guess it's better than blowing yourself up!"
That I can understand and appreciate.
