Some time ago I called an electrician to restore the lights in our bedroom and stairway to working order. It took him five minutes to determine that he was going to need to climb up into the attic and work from there. It took him two hours to try to figure out a way to avoid doing this.
I didn't blame him. Our attic opening is roughly the size of a keyhole. Things have been collecting up there -- debris, insulation, dead animals -- for 167 years. No, I did not blame him for wanting to find some other way to fix the problem. But I wasn't paying him by the hour to avoid working.
After I followed him around for two hours, pointedly looking at my watch every few seconds, he finally resigned himself to his fate. When you determine that you must do something you don't want to do, the best thing is to rope someone else into doing it with you. So he looked at me and said solemnly , "I'm going to need your help."
"Like...handing you tools and stuff?" I said hopefully. I wasn't getting paid to go into the attic, and I fervently prayed that I would not have to.
"No, it's a bit more complicated than that," he said. He went into the bathroom, took off the cover plate from the outlet, and motioned vaguely to the wires living behind it. "I'll be fishing wire down from the attic, and I need you to pull it for me."
I looked at the network of wires in the wall. It looked like those kids' puzzles where you have to figure out which balloon the clown is holding by following the string, which is hopelessly entangled with about 159 other strings.
"Will this be painful?" I asked.
"Nah," he said. "Only if you touch the wrong wires."
Thus reassured, I was immediately inducted as an Electrician's Apprentice. I felt a great sympathy for those young men of yore who were apprenticed to, say, a master joiner and had absolutely no idea what a joiner joined, or why, and who really wanted to just watch the clouds float by.
First, I was told, the electrician was going to have to drill. I expected him to drill into wood somewhere, so you can imagine my surprise when the drill started coming through the ceiling.
I protested this as strongly as I could, given that he was up in the attic and I was down a floor. He either did not hear me or chose not to.
Sighing, I readied myself for my responsibility of watching the little network of wires and, when I saw a new wire coming down, pulling on it. Our "creative communication" went something like this:
Electrician: Do you see it?
Me, hearing only what sounded like a cat crying from afar: What?
Electrician: I SAID, DO YOU SEE THE WIRE?
Me: Oh. Yes. I see it.
Electrician: WHAT?
Me: I SAID, I SEE IT!
Electrician: Mffmd mmfdem.
Me: WHAT?
Electrician: I SAID, PULL THE WIRE!
And so it went. Interestingly, I could hear perfectly fine when something went wrong up in the attic and the electrician used a few words that I'm sure are not in the Manual of Fixing Electrical Things.
Now, lest you think this apprentice thing was a cush job, let me say that the wire was not all that easy to pull. In fact, I had to tug so hard on it that I kept expecting, at any moment, to see the electrician himself pop right through the opening. Fortunately this did not happen.
After I had pulled enough wire to completely surround the bathroom, he came down from the attic. I was disappointed when I did not receive some sort of badge for my courage and heroism, or at least a diploma for successful completion of the Electrician Apprenticeship.
He wrote up his invoice and gave it to me. I looked it over. "I don't see anything on here about the hole in the bathroom ceiling," I said. "Don't I get a credit for that? Or how about the cupboard shelf that broke when you used it to walk across the beams in the attic? Or..."
But he was already out the door, on to his next Apprentice, who I'm sure he hoped would not have an attic.
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