All of you close, personal friends of mine know I have few enemies in life. Yes, I have a low tolerance for fools, but rarely do I have an individual so evil and malicious that they are put to the enemies list. As a matter of fact, this list is a list of one.
Ahab had Moby Dick. Popeye had Brutus. And I? I have the Furnace.
It isn't this furnace in particular, really. I guess I could lump them all into one group: Furnace. As in Muggles, or Rappers, or Republicans. They are the Furnace Mafia. Because my relationship with this group didn't start with the bastard one down in my basement...
It started off with the furnace in my first condo. It would perennially go out every winter, usually on a Friday night after I'd come home from a night out 'round midnight. On a night when temps were in the 20 degree range. I could set my calendar on that damn thing. And because I had a small place with a furnace in a tiny room off the kitchen, it would sound like a freight train was rolling through my living room every time it fired up. So, after spending a few nights with my oven door open for heat, I looked forward to moving to a newer home with Mr. Gravity. And a newer, less problematic furnace (so I thought).
The first winter we moved in here, the furnace stopped working on a December afternoon one Saturday. Turns out, the belt on the motor completely seized up. But, because I do occasionally learn from my experiences, I do have the furnace insurance from the local gas company. So for a nominal monthly fee, they are on call to fix the damn thing. This visit, the repairman was here for 3 hours banging on it with a mallet to get the belt off and ended up having to come back in the morning to finish the job. If not for the insurance, the repair would have cost me over $800.
Since that time, the furnace likes to go out once a year. I think it's some sort of contract with the Furnace Union that follows people like me wherever I reside. So, we've had bad starters; dirty igniters; and the latest one, some bad ignitor wires that weren't sparking the pilot light. Of course this last example, the Furnace exacted some revenge on Mr. Gravity by burning off half his right eyebrow and singeing off some hair. There is a rare moment that makes you want to both laugh and cry, but hearing a large boom in the basement and then seeing your husband wander up with a dazed look and smoke coming from his head is DEFINATELY one of them.
Don't be a victim of the Furnace Mafia. Protect yourself. Get a radiator.
-K
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3 comments:
I feel your pain, although not with a furnace but every any other household thing you can think of.(you know, sewer...hot water tank...dishwasher...) It never fails, at the worst possible time something can and will go wrong. I think next October I'm going to go into hibernation until January so I won't have to deal with any of it.
Furnaces are the nemesis of winter existence.
So I'm curious: when Mr. Gravity came upstairs, did he (like The Old Man from "A Christmas Story") weave a tapestry of obscenity that, as far as you know, is still hanging over Lake Michigan today?
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