Milan Kundera wrote about the unbearable lightness of being, but today Laura’s going to write about the unbearable kindness of plumbers, something she should have done a year ago when she was first on the receiving end of this plumbing company’s unbearable kindness. She never thought she’d actually be branting about plumbers and boilers and toilets, but somehow it just seems like the right thing to do. She hopes that after you read this brant you’ll agree.
A year ago, during the whole breast reconstruction recovery ordeal, lots of things went wrong. The kind of things, of course, that were “minor” in comparison to her surgery, but which were expensive or disappointing or a pain in the ass or completely annoying nonetheless. In fact, so many things went wrong that she truly started to feel like she was in the middle of one of those domino displays where one domino falls and the rest keep falling and falling and falling.
Laura can barely remember all the shitty things that happened or the order in which they happened but suffice it to say, in a nutshell, that things really sucked. There was the constant trouble with and expensive repair of both cars (they eventually got rid of one and didn’t replace it), and the fact that the option on Piece of Work, Laura’s fourth novel, expired and was not renewed, despite the fact that she and Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding had become NBFs over the years through email and a few visits in New York. Laura feels like there’s about 80 other sucky things that happened and right in the middle of all of them the boiler died. Right in the middle of January during a really big cold snap.
It’s probably Laura’s fault that the boiler died, or partly her fault, since no one had ever told her that you’re supposed to call someone every year to come and look at your boiler. Laura never even really knew what a boiler was or where it was so of course she never knew that there was someone to call to maintain it, much less that this area of home maintenance actually had a name - HVAC — heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. Which is to say two and a half years had passed since they’d bought the house from a woman who had taken amazing care of things, so by the time Laura finally called an HVAC company (at the suggestion of a neighbor) to try to get to the bottom of why their natural gas bills were almost $700 a month the boiler was on its last legs. And then it actually died while the repairman was trying to repair it.
Laura was called down to the basement by the HVAC guy who showed her, with a hand mirror and a flashlight, how the flame inside the boiler was going out and how decayed everything in there was, and despite the fact that she really had no idea what she was looking at and how a boiler worked (example: did a boiler actually boil anything?) she tried to act interested both to be polite and to atone for her lack of interest in the boiler, which is what had gotten her into this HVAC mess in the first place.
Bending over, nodding her head and pretending she understood the dire condition of the hulking old boiler, all of a sudden the boiler hissed and spit. The flame went out, the HVAC guy gasped, and away went the flashlight and the hand mirror. It was time for him to deliver the bad news:
Laura needed a new boiler.
Laura certainly knew this sucked — that needing a new boiler and having no heat until she got one sucked — big time — but she had no idea just how much until a few hours later when the HVAC guy had called his boss and then his boss had called some really good plumbers. That’s when Tom Berger arrived and started to work in the freezing cold of their basement putting in a new boiler and fixing some other heating problems around the house.
The reason Laura’s writing about Tom and about Tom’s boss, Dennis Foley, is that the boiler was going to cost a small fortune. It was going to cost so much money that Laura actually had to call her money person to sell some sort of retirement thing so that she could give them half of what the whole thing was going to end up costing so that they would be able to start working. Laura assumed that she was somehow going to have to come up with the rest of the money — the rest of the 5 figure figure — by the time they finished and she had no idea how she was going to do that.
But Tom did all the work and then Dennis came to take a look at things to make sure everything was in perfect working order and it was then that they informed her that she could set up a payment plan and that she wasn’t going to have to sell a kidney to pay off the balance of the boiler. Laura was grateful and surprised — they didn’t know her from Adam and owed her nothing in the way of accommodating her financial issues.
It would have been enough if their niceness had stopped there, but it didn’t. Laura and Brendan, ever the ignoramus-homeowners, occasionally call Tom to come over and help them with something — like, understanding why the thermostat control pad isn’t working (it needed new batteries!!!) or why there’s a hissing sound in one of the pipes in the basement. One of the times they called Tom he wondered how their first-floor toilet was doing and whether or not it was still on it’s last legs. Laura said it was — they’d discussed replacing it but Laura felt bad enough about the huge plumbing-bill she already had on lay-away and declined — and Tom joked about whether or not he should bring one over the next day.
Sure enough though, the next day, when Tom came over to take a look at the hissing pipe in the basement while Laura was out, he brought with him a new toilet, and hours later after Laura came home and wandered into the first-floor bathroom she saw it — gleaming white, perfectly stable (the old one moved and shifted and made a really scary sound everytime someone sat down on it) and quite attractive. When Laura mentioned how oddly comfortable the toilet was, Tom mentioned that it was a special toilet — a
“Comfort Height™ toilet, which means that the height of the toilet bowl (with seat) stands at the same height as a standard chair for maximum comfort and ease when sitting down or standing up. Tom informed Laura that these toilets meet all the requirements for the
Americans With Disabilities Act, and in fact used to be marketed as handicapped-accessible toilets. But they didn’t sell as much until they were renamed.
Laura couldn’t get over Tom’s kindness, or the matter-of-fact way he said that they’d just put it on the tab, and she really feels like they have a friend in Tom, someone concerned about their plumbing issues and antipating their every need. He’s like their own personal Plumbing Angel and they feel very lucky to have met him and Dennis.
