When I opened the door, there was a ram-shacked pickup in the street, a lone and worn looking occupant in the passenger seat, and a character on my doorstep that seemed to have fallen right out of a camp scene from "The Grapes of Wrath". He was an aging, gaunt, disheveled looking character, with more vacant spaces then teeth in his mouth, and he looked like he'd be more at home slouched over an array of empty glasses at the end of a dark windowless bar at 2pm or leaning on a stop signal post with a barely legible "will work for food" sign scrawled on the back of a tell-tale cardboard siding torn from a Jack Daniels packing case.
Quite the humanitarian, aren't I?
The thing is, I have no interest in being solicited to by anybody, at all, ever. And even less so at my home. On top of this, opening the door to find somebody that looks so worn and torn, with my kids clamoring to get out or see the visitor ads to my irritation.
I remained civil, especially after he greeted me very politely, even though it was clearly a sales tactic. He explained that he and his partner were in the neighborhood cleaning gutters, and for $60 I could have all of our gutters cleaned.
The first thought that crossed my mind was that my wife would be none-to-thrilled to look out her window to find Zeek and Cletus in our backyard. And for that amount of money, I'd do it myself. How hard could it be?
I dismissed him with as minimal an amount of irritation in my voice as possible, and once I answered the children's inquiries as to how that man was able to eat without any chompers, I was in the backyard on the ladder to starting the cleaning process before they could push-start their truck and wobble away to the next street.
About 10 minutes into the effort, I started to question the R.O.I. of my decision. Perhaps paying for this would have been a far more convenient way to go. After an hour I finished just one side of the house and left the remainder for a future effort. Then, earlier this afternoon, I was led to believe that a kids toy had been tossed on the roof along the side of the house, so I pulled out the large ladder and ascended to find no toys, but a gutter in dire need of cleansing.
I'd cleaned this particular gutter out shortly after purchasing the home less than 1 year ago, but there was so much junk in it that, I kid you not, there was a base layer of dirt, there were green sprouts of weeds, and there were even some worms in the soil. Yes, worms. Our gutter had become a garden.
I gathered the necessary supplies and started the process, contending all the while with keeping the kids from climbing the ladder and out of the way of showering dirt and leaves. At one point, my son found it entertaining to ride his 3-wheel cycle back and forth beneath the ladder I was balancing on. My visions of Lee Remick's fall only confirmed my frequent correlations between his behavior, and that of Damien's in "The Omen".
Another hour+ later and another side of the house was done. There are still two sides left. And given that this will amass to between 4-5 hours of labor, paying $60 for the whole thing to be addressed would have been a steal.
Lesson learned. I'll think twice before turning away the next drifter offering a good deal on a time-consuming task such as this.
