Later I'll set up a baby blog, following Brian's lead.

But here's a couple of the best:

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We came home from the hospital yesterday to a house with no heat. Not that it's as huge as it could have been; this is California. But cold enough that when our furnace repair place was closed, I went to a different HVAC company to come do the repairs right away.

Then I called my landlord.

"No," he said, "that furnace is under warranty. You have to go through the regular furnace place. Wait until Monday."

"Louis," I said, "the house is 48 degrees and I just brought home a newborn baby."

"Oh, well, but still you have to wait until Monday. You can't just call another place."

"It's forty eight degrees in the house and we have a newborn here!"

"Well, I can bring you over a portable heater."

"You've got to be joking."

"Well, I'm not going to pay for some other company to fix it. You don't expect me to pay for that, do you?"

I hadn't had much sleep. "You know, considering I just told you we have a new daughter and all you can say is how you won't arrange for her to be warm, no, I don't expect you to do anything human or decent, no."

"Oh, well, congratulations. But I'm only going to pay for half."


The repairman, on the other hand, dropped everything he was doing when he found out we had an infant and no heat, and got to our place in under half an hour. He had the heat fixed in less than twenty minutes, and showed me how to use the vaccuum cleaner to clean the filter. He congratulated us all heartily and declared Lillian to be "very very beautiful."

Then he explained how we could go back to the other repair guys and make a claim for the amount of the repaired, warrantied part.

So for every jerk in the world, there's an angel.

Or two, counting the new kid.

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- posted by Kate @ 11:49 AM