Two points about Southerners. One, if you ask a Southerner why something happened and the Southerner starts his sentence with “Well…”, be prepared for a long story. Two, if you ask a Southerner how something happened and the Southerner says, “You see, what had happen was was this..” be prepared for an Homeric tale of epic proportions.
This is to prepare you for the story of how I fell through my ceiling.
Well, you see what had happen was was this.
We have a yearly air conditioning issue at this house every summer. Like all air conditioners, it has a demon inside it that waits until the hottest months of the year to go out. One year, it went out in late July and it was about 400 degrees in the shade. Then it takes the repair people a week to get here because in this country we do not teach the value of hard work and not enough people go into the heating and air profession. Enough with the Peace Corps, we need young people to join the HVAC Corps so they can fix our air conditioners without a two month wait! I blame Obama.
On this particular day, my wife, whose inner thermometer is out of whack due to her CANCER maintenance drug Tamoxifen noticed the air conditioner was not working. While we are thankful for Tamoxifen, the side effect is it turns my wife into a walking, talking hot flash. When I say, my wife is “hot”, I mean it literally. Air Conditioning is a must.
The good news is we have a maintenance contract with an HVAC company and they will see us as soon as possible. The bad news is ASAP was the next day, which is good news if you had any experience with trying to get an air conditioner fixed. The technician would be there around 5:00.
The technician didn’t come until 10:00. Fortunately, it was going to be an easy fix. The unit was low on Freon. Here is where the story takes a turn for the worst.
For some reason known only to God, the HVAC unit in my house is located in the attic. There are a few plywood boards that allow you to get to the unit, but that is all. The rest of the attic is filled with insulation that is “blown” in. The technician had to go up into the attic to check on it. Our cat, Gracie, who is 16 years old, had never been in the attic, decided that this would be a good time to investigate the attic.
I must admit I panicked because I could see the cat eating the insulation and dying causing the whole house to stink. I got my wife and we decided upon an action which was our first mistake: trying to reason with the cat.
We went up into the attic and begged her to come to us. Didn’t work. Yelled at her to come us. Didn’t work. We got some food and tried that. Didn’t work. If you have any experience at all with cats, this should come as no surprise.
I was to the point where I was going to suggest just letting her investigate and when the technician left just close the attic and she’ll cry to come out.
However, I was closer to edge of the plywood flooring than I thought, slipped and I stepped backwards on to the actual sheetrock. Sheetrock does not hold as much weight as you think it would. Soon, in slow motion, I might add, my legs broke through the sheetrock. I was able to grab on to some beams and half of my body was in the attic with other half dangling in the air. I saw I was about five feet from the floor so I just let go thinking I would land on my feet. I didn’t. I landed on my gluteus maximus.
There is no way to fall through a ceiling in a dignified manner. I broke the sheetrock in two pieces and I was sitting in a ton of insulation. Obviously, my wife was concerned that I had hurt myself. When I assured her I was fine (this sounds like a cliché but I only got a scratch), we started cleaning the mess up.
The technician was putting Freon in the outside unit and came in the house. I do not have the words to describe the look on his face when he saw what I had done. His last call of the day and the owner falls through the ceiling. (“I should have studied auto repair”). He was gracious enough to put back the broken sheetrock up as of an interim repair. He also helped us get Gracie out the attic. (By the way, Gracie didn’t seem a bit concerned.)
I learned two things. One: I learned God does have a voice and he sounds like Kenny Rogers. After I had gotten over my fall, I just kept hearing, “I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in”.
Two: people will start calling you Clark Griswold.
The story has a happy ending. I have a friend that is a handyman and by the end of the week the ceiling was repaired. If you want to know why I didn’t repair it myself, well, you see, what would've happen was I would somehow set the house on fire. But that is another story.
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