The Kind of Engineer Who
“I shall put up some tarpaulin on the roof, and this will stem the water flow from the rains till we find someone to fix it.” the husband declared.
We had a leaking roof.
You know – how in the novels they tell you that you must show what happened, not tell you? I’ll just tell you and you will see. I slipped on the water pooled by the bucket by my feet. The rains were in and out of the house. Literally. There was a steady drip that was meant to drip into the bucket, but had managed to splatter outside the bucket. When the man announced his intentions of putting up the tarpaulin on the roof, I was attempting to clean the mess on the floor, and slipped. I barely managed to take hold of the stairs, thus saving myself from breaking my own neck. I might possibly have also saved my teeth from shattering. I count them all as wins.
Marriage makes you robust.
Now. We have many talents in the house, but fixing leaking roofs, plumbing, electrical wiring, aren’t even remotely in the vicinity of talents we boast about. In fact, we barely manage to put up an assortment of holiday lights every year. But still, the husband has this undeniable faith in his capabilities on all these fronts. With a smile, he embarks – a few dashes to the hardware store, a few YouTube videos, and a hearty dose of laughter infused with optimism, and you will find the man attempting to do everything.
One of our neighbors is retired and likes tinkering. He asked us what the husband was doing on the roof with a mild look of concern on his face. “Is he an engineer?”
“Err…Software Engineer.” I said. To which the husband piped up from the roof, “Though many years ago, I also studied Electronics and Communications Engineering!”
The neighbor still looked concerned. “So, not a mechanical or civil engineer then!” he asked. Sometimes, society is too polite. What he meant to say is, “So you are the kind of engineer who calls a mechanic or electrician to actually fix things, right?”
Several neighbors came through the course of the day with concerned looks on their faces. Some laced it with humor, others with alarm. It was an illuminating experience.
The Benevolent Roofer
The man in question, though was undeterred by public opinion – he sat there on the roof, polished off a whole thermos of steaming noodles like he was on a picnic, and waved to the people below. ‘Benevolent Roofer’ is the phrase that comes to mind. Folks on walks waved back. Dogs woofed. Cats meowed. Squirrels scampered. Butterflies flitted.
He then went on to spend 3 painstaking hours placing tarpaulin on the leaking section in hopes to stem the steady leak from the rains. We clambered up and down the ladder giving him a tile or two at a time to place on the tarp. ‘They are heavy!’ he panted, and I sweetly refrained from mentioning that they were actually only as heavy as the weights in our living room – the weights he’d bought to do weight training 5 years ago. I picked the weights up everyday to clean under them, but he never did.
The rains came that night. The tarpaulin held on the roof – meaning it did not fly away. But it somehow managed to find a way to pool more water into the weak spots. The next day, we found that where we had 1 leak before, now we had 3.
But like the children said to me when I said it will all make for a hilarious blog post, “Amma! Now remember! He is allowed to say he made it worse, you are not!”
Fascinating
We caved in with the leaking roof, and had a pair of competent roofers come and fix the roof.
It was fascinating to watch them. It had taken the whole afternoon for the husband and his support crew to place the tarp on the roof. He called several friends who all gave varying levels of moral support, advice and company via cellphone throughout the day. The man had the look of an astronaut in touch with his NASA team in Houston the whole time.
The roofers, on the other hand. They came. No fuss, no jibber-jabber: the pair of them removed all the offending tiles, replaced the leaking area and put new tiles on them in far less time.
What’s worse?
One stood in our garden and threw 7 tiles at a time, and they were all deftly caught by the man on the roof.
It took us a few minutes to stop gaping at the scene.
Never mind
That evening we stepped out. The sun was shining. The leaking roof had no husbands on it. The house inside had no buckets to catch the leak from the leaking roofs. The birds were chirping, the leaves were all showing off that they were as good as their east-coast-fall-color relatives. It was all marvelous.
“You know? I still liked that I tried to put the tarp on the roof!” he said looking far too pleased with himself.
“I quite like having my husband firmly rooted on the earth instead of on rooftops.” I said diplomatically.
The husband went back to his code, and the roofers went to their van.
All was well.
Nourish-n-Cherish 