A year ago we ordered a new car with the idea of selling our used one at a good price to our missionary son to give him transportation when he was home from Thailand. Anticipating getting the new one before he came back in the spring, we pondered where to put the old car in the meantime. Now, we have a two-car garage attached to the house, but we also have it filled with a tool bench, various storage cabinets, trash barrels, dog food bins and it just didn’t seem there would be enough room for both vehicles. I suggested getting a tarp to put over it, but Russ didn’t think that would be adequate protection during winter storms and winds and instead suggested a second, one-car, detached garage which we could later use for storage. So, we had the Amish build us one. We did not have electricity run at the time because it was getting so late in the fall. Instead, we installed battery-powered motion detection lights and figured with just storing a car there, wrestling with opening the garage door by hand wouldn’t be an issue.
Then our new car didn’t come. And didn’t come. And didn’t come. And our son and his family were soon to return home, so we went to our local dealership and bought a used four-wheel drive Ford, our first second vehicle in over ten years, and parked it in the new garage. When the weather was bad, we drove it because of the four-wheel drive and also used it to keep miles down on the car that our son was getting. Eventually our new car arrived and we passed on the old one, and as spring arrived, we began to think about getting the electricity run to the new garage. (We had, of course, been raising and lowering that garage door way more than we had intended through the winter and it was time to get an electric one!)
And then the problems began. I called an electrician that had been recommended to us a few years ago and whose work we had been very pleased with. But I just got his answering machine. I left a message and waited to be called back. After not hearing from him, I tried again. Answering machine. Left message. No call back. Drove by the place and saw at least one truck there, but no one about. Kept calling earlier and earlier and finally caught him. He told me he would stop by in the afternoon on Thursday that week. He didn’t. I called him back and got the answering machine again. However, then I discovered I could message him on Facebook, so I did that. He apologized for not coming when he had said that he would, but said he had simply forgotten. So, we set a new time the following week. Then my husband got COVID and I had to call and cancel that. By now we nearly through June. After Russ recovered, I messaged him again and he finally came out, looked things over, said sure he could do it, and promised to get back to us with an estimate and also to do some small jobs in the house. We waited weeks, but we never heard from him again. I called a couple of more times and then quit. By now summer was pretty much over.
Then another electrician was recommended to us. We called, and within a few days and some calls back and forth, he came out to look things over. He told Russ he could fit us in probably in two weeks or so. More than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard from him, so we called again. His answering service is his mother with whom he does not live, and she explained he, and I think his father, were harvesting crops. They might be finished by the end of the week, she said, and we were certainly “on his list.” “On his list?” I also asked her to have him send us an estimate and she said she would. No estimate arrived. The week rolled around to Friday and I was out of patience. We had not been called with an update such as “They’re almost finished, so by next Wednesday, he’ll be out.” Nor had we gotten the estimate.
So that Friday, I called electrician number 3. Jerry Branson was obviously the one I should have called to begin with. I got his voice mail and left a message in the morning and he called me back before lunch, promising to be out the next week. So I called electrician number 2 and cancelled him. Mr. Branson was out to look at the job on Monday, they finished on Thursday (they had to wait for buried lines to be marked for them by utility companies before they could dig), and Friday they came back to replace the batteries in all of our smoke alarms for us. One week from call to everything done.
Then there was the overhead garage door. We had had the door in our attached garage repaired by a company out of a town just west of us, so I called them mid-summer. The woman who answered the phone said they would be in Paris the next Thursday and that she would call me on Wednesday to let me know about what time. The next Wednesday, when it was after 4 p.m. and she hadn’t called, I tried to call her. The office message told me that the office was closed until the following Monday! Really? There was a number to text, but I didn’t have a pen, so I had to get one and call again. That time, she answered the phone. She was in her car, she said, and didn’t have the schedule with her, but would be home in a few minutes and would call me back then to tell me when to expect the men on Thursday. She never called back. I eventually texted her and said this was her last chance. If I didn’t hear from her, we were taking our business elsewhere. She never responded.
The next day, we went to the Overhead Door Company in Terre Haute, set up a day when they would come and look at the garage, and picked out the opener we wanted. On Friday afternoon two men came to the door from the overhead door company I had called in Illinois— the ones who were supposed to have been there on Thursday. I told them too bad. We had hired someone else because their receptionist couldn’t be bothered to call me back when she said she would. Besides, I told them, we had been told they were coming on Thursday, not Friday. They looked puzzled, and left.
So, the electrical work on the garage was finished on a Thursday and the next Thursday the Overhead Door Company from Terre Haute installed the overhead door for less than what they had originally quoted us. From when I first called Jerry Branson on Friday, October 28, the electricity to the garage was all completed by Thursday November 3, and the overhead door installed and working beautifully by Thursday November 10.
I had tossed and turned many nights, all spring and summer, wondering why business people wouldn’t return their calls or come to your house when they said they were going to come, and worrying who we were going to find to come and do the work or if we even would find anyone before another winter set in. But I had forgotten some very important words from the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus tells us:
“Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?. . .Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you,” (Matthew 6:25, 26, 31-33).
It was a long and frustrating summer for me, and it need not have been. I hope that I can say now, “Lesson learned!”