My Broken Diddly-Squat

Is there anything more horrifying than the sound of an AC repairman yelling up from the basement: “Can you come down here for a second, Mrs. Rama? I want to show you something.”

That something always turns out to be a mechanical part, about yea long and yea wide, which is fried beyond repair. The part is so damaged, in fact, that the AC repair person simply cannot get over it.

“I’ve seen a lot of people run their AC into the ground, Mrs. Rama, but whooooo-wheee (produces a low whistle) this is really something else.”

The repairman encourages me to come closer for a better look.

“See this whoozamachit-chat right here, Mrs. Rama?” he says, and I nod in acknowledgment while my eyeballs begin their slow migration backwards, into the techno lingo-free recesses of my head. “What you have here is a thingamasnippet so totally and completely damaged, that I’m surprised it didn’t snap clean in half.”

“Is that what was causing the horrible screeching sound?”

At this, the AC repairman chuckles, like I just told him a particularly gripping knock-knock joke.

But he’s not done with me yet. He wants me to understand, fully and completely, the inner workings of the air conditioning system I hosed by continuing to let it run for three consecutive days while it wailed and keened plaintively in the bowels of my house. He’s pointing at various thingamabobs and widgets with a passion that almost surpasses my own desire to get the hell out of dodge.

Which is something I am desperate to do before he whips out a cocktail napkin and starts drawing a pictorial representation of the whoozits and the whatnots.

“If you ever hear a sound like that coming from your basement again,” he tells me, “the first thing you want to do is turn the entire system off.” Then, holding the deceased part directly in front of my line of vision, he says, “Do you see how the grooves in this thingamasnippet are almost completely worn out? I have never seen a whoozimachit-chat that’s been damaged quite this much.”

And that’s not all.

The thingamasnippet that is damaged beyond recognition has also affected a diddly-squat. You see, the thingamasnippet was vibrating so violently during its final moments, that it knocked the diddly-squat clear out of its orbit and into the housing of the snickamaclot.

“I don’t know how much longer this diddly-squat is gonna last you,” says the repairman, “what with all the damage that was inflicted by the thingamasnippet before it blew clean out.”

“But you’ll be able to fix it, right?”

The repairman doesn’t respond immediately, because I’ve said another thing that is causing him to shake his head slowly from side to side and do the silent, heaving laugh.

I start heading for the stairs while the AC repairman continues to marvel at the astonishing demise of my air conditioning unit and to mumble under his breath.

“Ok, well, thanks for pointing all that out to me!” I say brightly, while slowly backing out. If I don’t leave within the next minute, I’m gonna end up looking down the barrel of a Flux Capacitor and holding a flashlight.

“And let me show you just one more thing, Mrs. Rama,” the AC repairman says.

But I am so outta there.

“You can just wrap that part up in a towel and leave it in the garage.”