Every man has gotten “the call”. This happens when you leave town for a trip. The phone rings and folks back home explain how civilization has gone off the rails in your brief absence. In theory, a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. In practice, a week long absence creates mayhem.
"How's the business trip dear? You'll never guess what happened today..."
Your kid has joined a cult, the dog is on fire, and German tanks have amassed on the border. Dastardly mechanical devices use your absence to wreak havoc; the car won’t start, is leaking from every component and was stolen, the lawnmower fell through the roof, the dog ate the remote and CNN comes on every time he barks. Things stranger than fiction happen with alarming regularity.
When you get “the call” you’re supposed to do… what? You cannot extract the cat from a tree in Baltimore when you’re in a hotel in Wichita. You’re doomed. I hate travel!
One January I got “the call”. The furnace had died. I did what any guy 600 miles from a broken device can do, I used my magic fairy wand to fix it nothing.
However I’m never one to let a disaster go to waste. These are the chronicles of the learning experience that is the saga that inspired the book that will be the movie of “The Furnace: One Man’s Struggle”.
I have yet to figure out what field it is that I emanate which keeps these appliances in check.
If I am anywhere beyond “convenient to fix it” distance, MrsZ will invariably let me know that something has either let the magic smoke out, or kept it in, or started making “a funny noise”.
Usually these end up being relatively minor corrections. If, however, something decides to go T-U while I’m around, it will do it in a massive and spectacular way. Right now, I’m trying to figure out just how much of the second bath we would like to replace, since we are tearing out most of the floor in the process of undoing damage caused by a leaking supply valve…
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