It now started to feel like spring. The days were feeling warmer; the cold westerly wind off the mountains was slowly being replaced by the mild easterly wind and the salty smell of the sea. Spring was a good time to be working outside and not bound to a desk in an office.
You were your own boss working outside. You would ring up in the morning and get all your work (6 morning jobs and 6 afternoon jobs) in one go. You then figured out your own ‘run’ of jobs, sometimes you could even change an afternoon job to a morning job, particularly if there were two jobs in the same street.
On this sunny spring day, I took the gamble that the customer with the afternoon job would be okay if I turned up early. I located the house and knocked on the door. While waiting, I looked around and admired the garden (the Azaleas were blooming a brilliant crimson) and smelt new paint coming from the clean exterior of this house.
The lady of the house, resplendent in her pink Ansell rubber gloves and yellow apron, opened the front door and frowned at me. I smiled at her and told her the truth that I had two jobs in this street and thought that I’d try and fix her phone this morning. The frown turned into a beaming smile as she ushered me inside.
The phone was sitting on the kitchen bench. I told her that I could see what the problem was; the phone was not plugged in. She became very serious and told me that when she did plug it into the wall, the line would go dead. While I opened the phone up, the lady went back to her ‘Spring Cleaning’.
With the cover off the phone, the problem was obvious; the circuitry of the phone was covered with soap suds. Once this amount of water gets in, the phone never recovers as electricity and water will corrode all metal parts. I put the phone back together and sort the lady out.
I asked her if she had washed up the phone before it went dead. Her reaction was quite comical. She went all wide eyed on me and assured me that no, she had not washed it up. I picked up the phone and told her I’d just go to the van and swap it for a new one. Her answer nearly knocked me over!
‘After all the trouble I had in cleaning those nooks and crannies, I’m going to get a new phone anyway’?
It turned out that she had used a sponge, dish washing liquid and a lot of elbow grease to get the phone casing sparkling clean. I suggested that next time use only mentholated spirits and an old cloth to clean the phone.
Almost one year to the day, I found myself back at the cleanest house in the world. The phone line had gone dead again. It wasn’t the phone this time (although it was exceptional clean with a faint smell of alcohol), so I had a look at where the phone plugged into the wall socket. Sure enough the socket was wet and had a sudsy residue.
I looked up at the lady who had her hand over her mouth and was giving me that wide eyed look. I couldn’t help myself, I burst out laughing and she did too. ‘You didn’t tell me what to use on the wall.’ No, I didn’t!
