We spent the past weekend in the city dealing with a problem that arose on Friday following the replacement of a hot water heater at our Ross Barnett Reservoir house where my daughter lives. Seems that one of the crew replacing the attic heater lifted a gold wedding band at some point amidst all the up and down of the stairs and back and forth by her dressing room.
Not much was accomplished in the ring retrieval department, even with the sheriff’s department involved, other than the reassurance that it was likely pawned somewhere in the inner city of Jackson where that type thing occurs on a regular basis. I suppose we all live and learn even after we’re old enough to have already learned better.
I would like to say it won’t happen again, but when someone sets their sights on taking something that wasn’t theirs to begin with, they’ll find a way. I will say that we are going to do our very best to prevent the same from happening, even though that house is aging more quickly than I would like and hired out repairs are becoming needed more frequently.
Unfortunately since wife, Danny, and I don’t live there anymore it is much more difficult to take care of little things that come up. Like this water heater issue.
It all started three weeks ago when the gas company, unannounced, replaced the meter which is on a side of the house no one sees other than the meter readers themselves. The kind folks doing the replacement did leave a door hanger on the front door advising the gas had been turned off, but my daughter seldom uses the front door since the carport and kitchen entrance are in the rear.
The meter swap-out had been done on a Thursday, I think, and she went out of town on Friday so she still had hot water for a shower even though it was not as hot as it usually is. By the time she found the door hanger and took a cold shower before work on Monday morning life was not looking too cheery for the 25-year-old.
To make matters worse, at the time her mom and I were down at the Gulf on vacation and obviously not able to come to her aid. At that point she read the door hanger which advised to call the gas company to have them come out and relight the pilot light. She did, they did, it didn’t work. The next morning the water was still cold.
She called them back, they came back, and they said nope, not gonna happen, the knob to ignite the pilot is broken. It was a 30-plus-year-old heater after all and destined to die.
We carry a home owner’s warranty on that house and the water heater was covered, but by the time I filed the claim, had their contractor come out and investigate the problem, and get approval to replace the thing we — or she — was two weeks into cold showers. “They are not so bad anymore,” my dear daughter said.
As the story progressed it turned out that the new water heater would have to be ordered because the ones the company had in stock had been recalled due to a faulty this or that and we were then at the beginning of last week.
Friday ended up being the only day one of us could be off to allow entrance to the house for the job to be completed — 21 days of cold water later my daughter reminded me once more — and that gets us back to where we learned the valuable lesson about that ring and life in general.
There is hot water now, plus the attic is cleaned out and nicely organized and the grass even got mowed. And...and this is important...we now know the name of the company that will not be doing work at our house in the future.
Live and learn, my friends, live and learn!
