The Free Climbing Handyman

Originally written August 7th-

A few days ago we were having the handyman guy do some things around the house. It is interesting because here you just make a call and a guy shows up with a toolbox to repair any and all of your things around the house. That day he was putting up a towel hanger in the bathroom, a place to hang shirts to dry in the laundry room, seal a door that was allowing sand in when the wind blew, and then finally, running an internet cable from the router downstairs to one of the bedrooms upstairs.

I wasn't thinking this was going to happen the way it did. Maybe it would be run inside the house, along a wall or maybe inside the wall. But, as Esther says, 'Here they like to make holes in things.' And that is what they did. Just drilled right through the wall and ran the cable out from the floor above. Then he came downstairs and blasted a hole through the downstairs wall. Plaster and sawdust flying all over.

But then the inevitable problem became evident. How to get the cable in the little hole from the outside. The windows in that area don't open, and you can't reach around the building to do it. So what does the guy do? He climbs out our third floor window and shimmies all the way around the side of building with his feet on a tiny ledge! He makes it around but the hole isn't big enough so we have to hand the drill out the window to him. He MacGuyver's the hole and puts the cable in. Then shimmies back around and in the window again. With a grin on his face he wipes the sweat off his brow and nods once quickly. Just another day in that guys life. We were impressed...thirty feet up without a net, and probably earning about 2 dollars a day.

A funny footnote to that story was when he went to drill from the outside, the cord to the drill came unplugged so I went to plug it back in. It had no actual plug, just two exposed wires that I had to stick in the holes of the wall outlet...I held them in while he drilled with my eyes closed just waiting to feel however many volts rocketing up through my body....but it never happened. El humdalilah!!!!