Some strange guy gooped up my hole.

So we no longer have a hole in our roof, mostly due to my lovely wife, who brought home a stray roofer the other night. It's not behavior I would normally condone, but in this case she did what she had to do.

As I said in my comments on the last roofing post, the guy I originally wanted to come and look at it never showed up. I called and left a message asking him where the hell he was, but didn't get a call back. The next day he actually did call, and he explained that he and his wife were expecting a baby. Apparently, the baby-to-be had decided that maybe it wanted out. As a result, they had rushed to the hospital, where, after a few hours, the kid had decided it wasn't quite ready to hit the buffet just yet and instead wanted to hang out in the heated pool for a while longer. He told me he would definitely be up to check out the roof the next day.

The next day came and went with no roofer, and so I called and left another message. This guy then had the gall to call me from the hospital and tell me he didn't show up because his wife had a baby girl. Can you believe that shit?

So of course I told him that if he ever wanted to make anything of himself or his business, he needed to get his fucking priorities straight, because that was a good way to lose jobs right there.

I kid, I kid. I congratulated him, and he promised to stop by the next day to look at the roof, temporarily plug the hole, and work up an estimate to fix the rest of the vents. The next day also came and went, and I still had a hole in my roof. I was sympathetic, but I was thinking it was probably time to find a roofer who was getting more than an hour or two of sleep every night.

This is where my wife saves the day. She called me at work the next day and said there was a guy working on the roof there and she was pretty sure she had convinced him to come and look at our roof after he was done. I didn't ask how she worked this magic, and I'm not sure I want to know, but around 5:30 my wife pulled into the driveway followed by a guy driving a pickup truck full of ladders. He was a really nice guy, but I think he was regretting his decision when he finally got here. I could see him thinking "What the fuck did I get myself into? There's 2 feet of snow, they have a 12/12 pitch roof, it's getting dark and I'm an extra 30 miles out of my way."

I felt bad for him, so I helped him carry all his crap to the back of the house, then held the first ladder while he climbed up. When he was set, I handed up the other ladder, followed by a small stack of shingles and a 5-gallon pail of black goop.

He re-nailed the vent, put in the new shingles and gooped the hell out of everything. He did the whole job for $140. It was really just a quick fix and I realized that - I wanted to make sure that if it rained outside, it didn't rain inside.

That was when things got a little weird. As he was finishing up, the original roofer I had called pulled into the driveway. Of course, he immediately saw the truck full of ladders and didn't even get out of his truck. He just sat there for a few minutes, then backed out and drove away.

So yeah. It was awkward. We cheated on our roofer with some cheap floozy my wife picked up downtown. He came, he gave us a quick job, then he split with a handful of twenties.

I feel so dirty.

But on the other hand, it's raining tonight and our house is dry, so just call me Hugh Grant.


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