On Call

As many of you know, Gary has a job where he is constantly on call. So he has his regular phone and his work phone. This can be very annoying because he only has a limited number of pockets... but that's another story!

This little device can be a big source of frustration...

Every time anyone feels like they have an emergency they call the emergency line and it gets transferred to Gary's work phone. He always lets it go to voicemail because some of these so called "emergencies" really aren't emergencies at all. Some of the things he gets calls about make me just want to slap my forehead... but that is also another story!

The calls always seem to come when we are out doing things together. Like whenever we decide to go out of town for the weekend or whenever we want to go see a movie. I don't think Gary can remember the last night has sat through the previews at the movie. But the worst times of all that he gets calls is late at night...

Last night he got a call about a leak. He went to the apartment to look at it at around 9, and one of their rooms was basically flooded. It was such a bad leak that he ended up having to turn off all the water (which supplied the water to two buildings) and call out a 24 hour plumber. He spent about two hours there trying to help them clean it all up and fix it.

He finally was able to come home after 11. However, the work wasn't over. He had to keep answering phone calls from the plumber and from the tenants trying to work things out. It was like a very long drawn out game of phone tag.

The plumber didn't have the right size part to fix the problem, and nothing was open at 12:30 at night so it would have to wait until morning. So that meant a sleepless and stressful night for Gary followed by many angry phone calls in the morning from people wondering why they didn't have any water.

Don't worry though, everything got fixed, the water got turned back on, and the phone calls finally stopped! And someday Gary and I will be able to say toodle-oo, so long, godspeed... to that little extra member of our cell phone family.