THREE DAYS WITH MY BROTHER

Thursday:

Wednesday I wrote about running a route with fellow technician and brother Mike. We had a pleasant surprise of driving through a covered bridge near Bainbridge.
Today we are in my truck running my route and we are way up north instead of out west. No covered bridges in sight. I looked at the laptop and saw we were going way up to Atlanta Indiana. I called the number and got a relay service for the deaf. These are always difficult calls to run for obvious reasons made even more difficult due to the fact the relay service could not make contact with the customer.

I don't know sign and my handwriting is ridiculous so this can get complicated.
I jokingly asked Mike if he knew any sign language, he thought for a minute and held up his hand and I thought I was going to learn something, then he stuck out his middle finger. After over 40 years in the business that’s the extent of his knowledge of a second language. It cracked me up!

The day was going pretty smoothly and it looked like we might finish early then we ran into the water heater from hell.
It's a fairly new model with a heat pump mounted on top to assist in heating the water. What a great green idea huh?
One big draw back is it expels cold air when it runs, that may be a good thing in the summer but in the winter, not so much.
Nothing like taking the simplest piece of equipment in your house and turning it into the space shuttle, what could go wrong there?

When we got there expecting just a run of the mill in and out call, we were surprised with 3 big boxes pre-sent from the manufacturer. They were for a leaking evaporator repair. And I thought I was all through with refrigeration repair.

I took us over 3 hours to complete the job, not bad considering neither of us had ever laid a hand on one of these monsters before.
Glad Mike was with me, because it definitely was a two-man job.
Our short day was not to be, we didn't get home till after 7:00.

Friday:
So far so good, looks like a good day to wind down and hopefully get done early.
After the day me and Mike had on Wednesday we needed an easy route.

3:00 PM
The day is almost done, it's been a good three days doing the ride along with Mike. It's been close to 20 years since we have been allowed to do that, back when I was just starting out and he was showing me the ropes. Work has been slow lately and they started allowing techs to ride together again as a training aid.
Even though I've been doing this closing in on 20 years I can still learn a thing or two from the old guy.

3:30 PM

Driving down the interstate towards our last call and my eyelids are getting heavy. I notice my ride along tech, brother Mike has been awfully quiet for several miles.

Abhh, just as I thought.
Old service technicians never die they just fade away into their afternoon naps.