When I started this job, I was 23. Now I'm 28, and I have a fair amount of experience. I love my job. What I do serves a purpose. It's not like I'm saving the world or anything, but I do think what we do helps the community.
It helps people.
There's nothing worse than having your already busy life disrupted by an unexpected repair that you can't do yourself.
That's where I come in. (My name’s Connor by the way.)
Most times, when people call needing work done, it's an emergency. Maybe their water heater busted and left them with a mess in the middle of the night. Maybe their roof is leaking and it's raining like cats and dogs. Emergency work. We do a lot of that.
Now, I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you that things can get weird quickly when you start opening up walls and floors in people's homes. I could write a book on all the strange things we've found over the years.
In fact, that's why I'm here.
My girlfriend thinks that people would want to know about this particular kind of weirdness, so she told me to write them all down and post the stories here. So, here goes.
When I first started, I wasn't a foreman. I was a helper. My boss (more like my supervisor/ trainer) was an older guy named Sam. At the time, Sam was probably in his late 40’s or so and he’d been doing this kind of work his whole adult life, and then some. When I was hired, I had a small amount of experience, but nothing that would hold a candle to ol’ Sam, so working under him and learning everything he was willing to teach me was a huge bonus in my opinion.
Everything was going great in regards to the job, until Sam and I got a work order for a car stuck in a garage.
This thing that happened basically made me quit. Cold turkey. I didn’t come to work for 2 days afterwards because I was so freaked out. Sam covered for me though. Ultimately, I kept my job, but at the time, I wasn’t sure that being a handyman was my calling anymore.
This lady named Sally (not her real name, but it’ll do), called our office and told the secretary, Maria, that she was in a world of crazy and that she didn’t rightly know who the hell to call about the issue she was having. Maria thought it was a prank at first, but the lady was nearly crying and hysterical, so she gave me and Sam the work order, wished us luck and sent us on our way.
Now, all that damn work order said was: “car stuck in garage”. So naturally, Sam and me thought the door was jammed. But that wasn’t it. When we got there, Sally answered the door in a business suit. She greeted us and in the same breath, let out a blood curdling holler for her son to hurry up. She told us she was late for work and getting her son to school, but her car was stuck in the garage. Sam tried to calm her down as we followed her to her garage door, (which opened just fine with her remote.) And then we saw it.
The cement garage floor might as well have been quicksand, because every tire of this woman’s car was halfway submerged in rock hard concrete. It was like the concrete turned back into mix for a few minutes, long enough for her car to sink into it a couple feet, then solidified again like nothing ever happened. It was unnatural, because even if the concrete were freshly poured, (which it definitely wasn’t), nobody would dig that deep to pour concrete.
Sam’s eyes were wide as hell. He didn’t know what to say and neither did I. I mean, a car halfway submerged in hard cement is disturbing, but that wasn’t the part that made me quit. The part that made me quit was that Sally’s son was not late that day. In fact, the kid was early. Apparently, he’d gone into the garage and had been standing at the passenger’s side of the SUV when the garage floor turned to sludge and sucked him under. The top of the poor kid’s head was just barely visible above the cement floor and one of his arms was sticking out where he’d tried to pull himself out of the sludge. The kid suffocated in the cement. I will never forget the scream that came from Sally when she saw her little boy.
They had to use a jackhammer to remove the car and the kid. It was not pretty. It was on the news, but they didn’t go into what really happened to that kid. I had to answer questions when the police came and so did Sam. I think the cops thought the whole thing was outrageous.
I know I did.
The worst thing about it? I can’t for the life of me decide on a reasonable explanation for what happened in that garage. I know some people would say that it was a freak accident, pay your respects, remember the dead and move on, but how can I truly move past it if I can't understand how it happened in the first place?
I guess I’ll never know. Maybe I don't really want to.
Well, that's all I'm going to post for today. I wonder if other handymen have issues with weird ass stuff or if it's just my area.
-Connor
