THE OVERSIZED DOOR GURU

Since our recent move, my wife and I have been trying to go to restaurants in our new neighborhood. A friend recommended a nearby little café for a Sunday brunch. The place turned out to be a combination spa and diner. When you enter the front door and turn to the right you can sit and order a ‘soy-chorizo egg-white burrito’ and a ‘sea scallop salad’ with a ‘mango coconut smoothie’. If you turn to the left you can get an ‘abalone sea kelp body wrap’, ‘a pomegranate body scrub’ and combination ‘armpit / teeny weenie bikini wax’. I am not sure I like all of that stuff under the same roof. Do both sides share the kitchen? http://www.solarespa.com/

Despite the fact that some guy might be getting the ‘Metro Man’ back waxing special a few feet away, we decided to sit and order a couple of omelets (which did turn out to be very good!). As we waited for our food we could not stop watching the two men doing some kind of work along side the window outside of the restaurant. My wife immediately noticed the 1970’s countryish style sofa sticking out of the back of their beat up truck. I could not keep my eyes off the 300lb plus man in the way too small t-shirt that was not long enough to cover his giglotomous hanging belly folds.

Instead of gazing out at the local scenery during one of the first beautiful Sundays of the year, I watched a rotund over exposed guy in dirty ill-fitting clothes. He climbed down a ladder, stepped back slightly from it and barked at his young wiry assistant to shift it a few inches to right. Once the scruffy kid, wearing an equally scary outfit highlighted by a cap with a multi-colored skull pattern, shifted the ladder over a little, the large guy shuffled the two steps back and climbing up again exposing vast acreage of his uncovered belly to the small crowd in the restaurant. I think they both could have really used a ‘deep cleansing surf and sand body scrub’ next door.

This past week the weather turned nasty again. The temperature dropped into the low 40s with strong winds and thunderstorms. I was at work when one of our couriers let the side door slip out of hand as he tried to sprint through the torrential storm to his car. The door brace ripped apart in the wind, damaging the push handle and frame. Later as we were about to leave for the evening one of my co-workers tried using the door as a shortcut to avoid the deluge but she too lost her grip of it and this time the wind slammed the door against the wall knocking the glass out of it.

I got soaking wet standing out in the freezing cold rain trying to fix it myself while someone else tried to track down an after hours repairman. I got the glass loosely propped back in the door but did not have the tools or know-how to get it securely attached to withstand the storm. We luckily got a hold of a client of ours that owns a glass company. After asking for a return favor from us, he rushed over in less then 10 minutes. He quickly installed the glass and got the door to close but said there was only one person he trusted to fix all the other broken parts. That guy should be able to make it tomorrow afternoon after he finished “working on an emergency at the Auto Parts store… that someone must have mistakenly thought had a drive-thru”.

Latter the next day the door/glass expert showed up. The heavy man looked familiar to me but I did not realize who it was until I saw him walk around banging on various item in his truck’s bed while barking to his assistant “I will need this toolbox and this stool… Whether an item was 20 feet away or 20 millimeters away, he cried out for the kid in the skull patterned hat to grab it and hand it to him. He slowly scrambled up the ladder and called out for “the nose picker”. After being handed the tool he told his helper “you know what you get without a Nose Picker… a runny nose.” He caught me listening in to his joke and quickly told me the complicated real name of the tool but quickly assured me that everyone calls it a Nose Picker.

I started talking to the guy and although he spoke and dressed in a way that would make the Beverly Hillbillies look distinguished, he really seemed amazingly knowledgeable in his field of expertise. He told me about all the companies that built ‘these exotic doors’ in the 1980s and 90s all went out of business and most people have no clue how to fix them. He was not bragging, just matter of factly telling me how he makes a living being the guy that everyone calls when they do not know how to do it themselves.

Of course once he knew he had an audience he included me in all his jokes. Through his rotting teeth he called out for the kid to ‘fetch me My Old Lady’, he waved me over to the ladder to whisper to me that he calls his bright orange rubber mallet “My Old Lady because it is really a Dead Blow Hammer”. Later on the big guy referred to one of the broken off missing pieces as a ‘Jesus Cap’. “I call it a Jesus cap because when the little cap inevitably pops off you always look down and yell ‘Jesus, where did that go’.”
Even with all his breaks to tell me bad jokes, the oversized door guru amazingly fixed the door in no time. It has been repaired numerous times before but it is currently working better then when it was new. I wrote down his number from the side of his truck but he made it clear that I should not call him but phone my regular glass guy when it inevitably breaks again. For all the obvious reasons, it is nice to be surprised by someone. Of course I still think he is really in need of that ‘deep cleansing surf and sand body scrub’.