Hot and cold running Serin

In which our Hero kills one of his computers and it doesn’t even rate a mention in how his day went

I honestly didn’t know that much about Freddie Mercury when he died. In my defense, he was a few hundred years newer than most of my favourite artists of my early life, and it was only a Sunday night comedy show that really lured me away from talk radio to the morning show fare through inertia. But Wayne’s World returned Bohemian Rhapsody to the airwaves near me, and that made me curious and I discovered my awe of Freddie Mercury.

All of which is to say there’s this song that Freddie did with David Bowie, called “Under Pressure.” Which is to say, in catching up with someone about how things were going, I had the opportunity to actually briefly take in the scope of the damage. Just as I was settling in for a nice quiet mid-life crisis, we lost my uncle, we had to deal with the family obligations that came with that, we shipped my parents off to their vacations, and then leapt right into my mother’s health crisis.

And then this morning, as I’m halfway down my driveway and looking for preschoolers to use for traction in the snow, my phone rang and a female voice answered my Hello?.

“Hello, I’m C from [Canadian and US chain that I have occasionally done business with].”

Good morning, I said.

Given the rash of people calling expecting me to know what they were talking about, I figured I’d let her continue. She stayed silent, and I kept thinking about why someone might be calling me from [Chain]

“I think I may have the wrong number” she said, just as I remembered that there’s another relationship with [Chain].

Wait, actually, you probably don’t. Are you looking for [Dad]?

“Yes! For a moment I thought I misdialed!”

I’m sorry, he had to take care of an errand, on the other side of the world, so his phone is forwarded to me for a little bit. I can take a message and pass it on, he’s reachable.

“Well, I’m calling about the property [my dad owns and manages] at [address]. The heat is out.”

It was cold enough outside that my heart made a glassy clank as it fell to the driveway and bounced under the car.

Now, here’s a quick course on risk assessment.

First, you figure out the likelihood of an issue occurring. For example, my father is away and I’m holding the fort for him, my mother is recovering from a health issue, work is being douchebaggy again, so logically the probability of a new problem that I know nothing about is high. (Of course, since the problem has already occurred, we know the probability is 100%, but I’m not going to overlook the indignity in my analysis)

Next you figure out the impact of the problem. The heating is not working, so it’s probably cold. It’s first thing in the morning, so it’s actually warmer now than it has been for the last few hours. “Warmer” is about -20C (-5F). So, the impact is somewhere between “damn-” and “fucking-” cold.

Adding it up: High probability + high impact = critical issue that someone had better look into soon.

Yep. Okay then.

So there I was, running late for work after settling my mother for the morning, idling the car in the middle of the driveway as I did a quick situation assessment, identifying that someone should do something about it and then, only then, did the sinking feeling really take hold.

Because there was someone who had the task of figuring this out. Me.

But not to panic, my father is a relatively organized man, who left me a wallet card he’d made for himself but copied for me, with contact numbers for all the places he could be reached overseas, his cell phone, and, best of all, all of the contractors he had for working on his property.

Huzzah, I’m saved! (More people need to Huzzah. It may be antiquated, but it’s a jolly good time to say, wouldn’t you agree old boy, er, Gentle Reader? Pip pip.)

I tell C that I’ll notify my father and one of us will arrange for action and get back to her. I go inside and dig up the card from my wallet. I go down the list of contacts:

Electrical guy… Nope

Concrete guy… Nope

Plumbing guy… Nope

Roofing guy… Nope

Accountant… Nope

My grandmother? Nope, and oh crap, I’m out of contractors to call. There’s no contractor for heating. Do I even know where we keep our phonebook?!

Not to fear, I’m a smart guy. My dad didn’t list the heating contractor because it’s either already on the list or because he completely forgot.

Heating could be related to electric but a call to that contractor was a dud, he doesn’t do that.

Well, my dad did talk a lot about the plumbing guy, what the hell, maybe he’ll know who my dad uses and I call. And it rings. And rings. So leave a message.

But wait, the world is small, the internet is big! I’ll just call my dad and ask. He always has his cell phone. And I dial. And it… rings once. Only once. And then there’s a long, drawn, silence….. before a cheerful voice tells me that somehow my father has gone “out of the area of coverage.”

Seriously? The one time in three weeks I can’t reach him is today?!!

So now we go old school.

Back in the old days, for us Old World immigrant stock, before cell phones were everywhere, “phoning someone” worked like this: You (Everybody who didn’t have a relative with a phone) called that one neighbor who had a phone, shout their identies down the line, and then hang up to avoid the insane long distance costs while that poor neighbor, whose only sin was to get a little ahead of the pack and get a phone, would send someone who would jog to the intended callee house, collect someone there, and then the two of them would jog back to the neighbor’s house that had the phone, and then they’d sit and wait the rest of the 10-to-15 minutes before we would call back, hopefully finding our intended target waiting for us, (which was so much better than “They’re not back yet”)

With so many houses having some land coverage, we can mostly call directly now. And if not, we can call cell phones. And if not, we can still use that network. My mom called her brother who called my dad’s brother who found my dad who called us. Whereupon we discovered that my dad hadn’t gone anywhere, his battery had just died.

And I discovered that the heating guy *IS* the plumber. “But you have to keep calling him. He doesn’t get up very early.”

(sigh)

Anyway, the rest of my morning was simpler, just updating the client at the property and making sure the contractor actually went out to fix it. So aside from being in, you know, my own meetings all day, I kept having to run out and answer the phone, just in case of the unlikely event that the unknown number is the client. Or the plumber needing authorization to buy parts (not that I’d fail to approve, I need the damn place fixed). Or my mother trapped under the weight of an absurdly large muffin that she’d decided to make that day. (I’m making that up. Her muffins are normal-sized. And anyway, she’deat her way out of that and then be laughing to tears as she tried to explain what had happened.)

All of which is just background. Because the entry is really just about sudden awareness of the extent of the stresses I’m under, and the fact that I stayed up till 1:30 in the morning just listening to Nocturne sleep in one ear, and Queen at Wembley Stadium in the other.

Flipping around the internet learning about him, I discovered that he did an opera solo record with a Spanish soprana, and I’m very curious to hear it. Because Freddie’s voice is still breathtaking.

‘Cause love’s such an old-fashioned word
and love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
Under pressure
Pressure
 —Queen w/ David Bowie