Scaring the Maintenance Man

I think we frightened a repairman today.

I called him earlier today because of the smoke alarm. It keeps beeping like it has a low battery, but we changed the battery and it’s still beeping periodically. Especially in the middle of the night.

As you can imagine, this is not very conducive to sleep. So my husband took it down during the night, and I called maintenance this morning.

We live in military housing, so we don’t have to fix these annoying little things ourselves like real homeowners. It’s quite nice. A few weeks ago the toilet started that irritating run-run-running thing, and instead of eternally jiggling the handle, or spending a weekend with toilet parts all over the bathroom going, “What the heck is THIS part for?” I just called maintenance, and a nice man in a zippered jumpsuit came and fixed it right up.

And then there was the time when sewage started bubbling up in our yard. On a Saturday. I won’t say any more about that except that I was SO glad I could make a phone call and file it under Not My Problem. All I had to do was yell, “You kids stay away from that!” a few times. (You’d think it would be intuitive to stay away from something like that, but kids are weird. They were fascinated by it. Ewwwwwwww…)

Anyways, today when the repairman arrived, all my kids were home from school and the twins were up from their nap. We also had about five neighbor kids in the house, eating our food, watching our TV, and playing on our computer. (It was raining outside.) We are talking maximum home capacity here. You can just imagine the noise level.

So as the doorbell rang, my 13-year-old was being dragged around the house on her back by her also 13-year-old friend. (I can't imagine why. Like I said, kids are weird.) I went to answer the door as the giggling pair reached the entryway. The twins heard the doorbell, stopped pressing buttons on their noisy toys, and came running, yelling, “Hello! Hello!” I said to my oldest daughter, “Please get up,” and stepped over her to open the door.

The scene that greeted the repairman was this: a teenager lying on the floor while another teenager pulled on her arms, a pair of two-year-olds peering around the door, and the sound of a large group of kids in the next room singing raucously along with the TV, “Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?” (I think we all know the answer to THAT.)

He looked a little shocked. I looked down at my daughter, still on the floor, and said, “Please get up. I really meant that.” She got up, clearing the way for the repairman to enter.

I said, “Sorry,” and told him about the problem with the smoke alarm. He gave me an explanation about how you have to press the test button after you put in the new battery. (And why would I want to do that? To make it give off that horrible sound on purpose?) Anyways, he put in a new battery and pressed something, said it would stop beeping now, and asked if we had a stepladder so he could put it back up in the hall.

I said, “We have a chair,” and went to get one from the dining room. He followed me past all the kids in the living room and looked surprised that all our dining room chairs were lying on their backs under the table. I explained that we have to do that so the twins won’t climb on the table. As if to emphasize the point, the twins went tearing past us hollering. Over in the living room a fight broke out over the chair closest to the TV. The repairman began to look like he was thinking, “I have GOT to get out of here.”

He replaced the smoke alarm quickly and explained that it would keep beeping for about ten minutes while in test mode, but that it should stop after that. Neither of us could really hear it, however, over the noise from the living room. (Which explains why we only noticed the problem in the middle of the night.)

I thanked him and he left as fast as he could. The twins followed him to the door yelling, “Bye-bye! Bye-bye!“ at the top of their lungs.

I think I heard him muttering to himself as he walked away, “Get more birth control; get more birth control…”