Looking for Ceiling Cat, from attics to foundations

For the past two to three months or so, the pain in my hands and fingertips made it virtually impossible to sit down and type. But I’m finally getting used to spending the day wrestling with tools, cutting sheet metal, pulling and bending recalcitrant panels off furnaces in order to service them.

With my current job, the first stop of the day’s a warm up, working out the kinks and pushing through the aches and pains. I do enjoy climbing up into attics and crawling under foundations, places with a gothic feel, in spite of rat turds, fiberglass insulation mixed with rodents’ crap and sometimes their decaying carcasses.

Blake was right, long is the way, and hard that leads to Ceiling Cat…

I once had to scrape off Mickey Maus’ dessicated corpse off a furnace blower it was ‘stuck’ to, almost rested my head on a mummified rat which looked like gloopy foam insulation, and breathed the stench from the bloated, whitened corpses of a bunch of rats laid in rat poison.

I could have used a cat or two at times, especially under foundations, if only for the company. Last week, I had to use another technician’s van since he’d called off sick. On my second appointment, I finished after the customers had left the house. I duly locked up everything, got back in the van and realized I’d left my clipboard with paperwork and payment on the kitchen counter. Ooops. I Walked around the house, trying windows (all locked), in a hurry in case neighbors got suspicious, until I found the doggie door in the back. I reached in and unlocked the handle, but the door refused to budge, stuck as it was in its misaligned frame.

The dog even stopped barking, cocking his head sideways “whatcha gonna do?!?”

I managed to wriggle myself through the doggie door, made it to the kitchen, grabbed my stuff and back out through the front door again… At my next and last stop, I inspected the furnace, and went to check what size filter they would need. The intake was on the ceiling, but no problem! I’d grab the ladder from -… Ooops. I’d left the ladder on the porch of the previous home. In another city...

I’ve found a couple of sayings in HVAC to be true. One is “on this job, you’re gonna bleed”. And sure enough there’s dried blood stains on our seats and steering wheels. Another expression is “get ready to s..k the day’s d..k”. As Bart Simpson put it,  sometimes “it blows and sucks at the same time, what I thought was a physical impossibility”

Oh but, this is what I look forward to, coming home to this every day, in this case, Miss Jenny on catnip…. Until…