By Jerry Zezima
How many newspaper columnists does it take to change a lightbulb? If the columnist is yours truly, the answer is zero.
That’s why, after proving to be too dim to perform this simple task, I gave up and called Kevin the Electrician.
Kevin had been over recently to help install our new central air-conditioning system.
“It’s 130 degrees in your attic,” he said after working up there to put in a fan needed to cool down the AC so it could work without overheating.
“You worked without overheating,” I told Kevin, who had to go through the roof — literally — to do the job.
“I was sweating because I’m afraid of heights,” he confessed.
“Me, too,” I said. “I used to go up on the roof to clean the gutters. I figured that’s where I would end up. But I finally wised up and got gutter guards.”
“You have to remember not to look down,” said Kevin, adding that he once did a job in the attic of a house where he found two large bags of money.
“How much was in them?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “But the bags must have belonged to a little girl because the writing on them said, ‘Susie.’ I guess they were left behind by the family that sold the house. I told the woman who had just bought it that she should contact the sellers to return the money to the little girl, but the woman said, ‘No, the money is mine now.’ And she had a maid, so she wasn’t poor. I believe in karma, so I hope she loses a lot of money someday.”
“Then she couldn’t afford to pay you,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kevin replied. “I’m never going back there.”
The worst customers, he said, are the do-it-yourselfers who think they know what they’re doing.
“It must come as a shock when they realize they don’t,” I remarked.
“That’s when they call me,” said Kevin, who has been zapped a couple of times himself.
He once got hit with 180 volts on his pinkie, which is still scarred.
“The big one,” said Kevin, who’s 63 and has been in the business for 41 years, “was when I got hit with 480 volts. My blood was boiling. I thought, ‘This is the end.’ The doctors were amazed that I survived. They said, ‘That’s the guy who almost fried himself.’ ”
Another time, he almost knocked himself out when he was hit in the head by the whirling blade of a ceiling fan.
“I turned the fan off and told the homeowner not to turn it on,” Kevin recalled. “Out of habit, she did. I turned around and got hit right in the temple. I was seeing stars.”
“That almost happened to me when I tried to change a lightbulb in the kitchen the other night,” I said.
“Didn’t you turn off the fan?” he asked.
“I forgot,” I replied weakly.
“What happened with the bulb?” Kevin wondered.
“I took the old one out and put the new one in, but it didn’t go on,” I said. “When I was unscrewing the new bulb, it went on. I screwed it in again, but it went off.”
Kevin gave the bulb a twist. It went on.
“You’re using a 2800 kelvin LED bulb,” he said.
“Kelvin? I thought you were Kevin,” I said.
“It’s a different color than the other bulbs,” he continued.
“This is why you get paid the big bucks,” I said, even though Kevin’s rates are very reasonable and I don’t have bags of money in my attic.
“Next time you have trouble changing a lightbulb, call me,” he said. “And make sure you turn the fan off.”
Copyright 2024 by Jerry Zezima
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