Today is 7/7/07, and my daughter says it's the luckiest day of the century. I'm therefore soliciting good luck stories, and feel free to add one. I know this isn't the best of them, but here it is:
A few years back, our beloved oil burner took a turn for the worse. The barrel cracked, I think. Our trusty oil burner guy came over, hummed a few rounds of taps, and told us only to use heat in extreme emergencies.
Now at this time, Con Edison was running a fantastic special. If you'd convert to natural gas (99% of which, they say, comes from the good ol' USA), they'd give you a free oil burner. All you had to do was pay some guy three thousand bucks to install it (or maybe eight thousand bucks, depending upon which guy you happened to select).
Now for this price, the guy would also remove your oil tank and your oil burner. Having just filled the tank, to the tune of over three hundred bucks, this broke my heart to some extent, but I sucked it up and dealt with it. The problem, the salvage guy(sent by the Con Ed guy) assured us, was the oil in the tank was dirty, so we'd have to pay him a hundred and fifty clams to remove it. It was a big job, but he'd make the sacrifice, and do it for us.
But a friend of ours came over and said, "This is above ground, and the oil can only get dirty underground." Then he drained the tank, brought the oil to his house, filled his tank, and gave us two hundred and fifty bucks (US). He also looked at our old boiler and said he'd come back for parts. My wife declined his offer to pay for them.
The next day, when the salvage guy came for the oil tank, he was livid to find it empty.
"You said it was heavy, so I emptied it for you," my wife informed him. "I did you a favor."
He looked sadly at the burner. "My friend is going to come over for some of the parts," she told him.
This was too much for him to bear. "I'm going to take all of it, or I'm going to take none of it," he declared.
My wife smiled, said no problem, and went upstairs to call our friend. She asked him to take the parts right away. But our multi-faceted friend was hiking in Pennsylvania, and couldn't make it.
She went back downstairs.
"Tell you what," offered the guy. "I'll take the whole system now, and I'll give you two hundred bucks for it.
"Well..." began my wife, reluctantly.
"Two hundred bucks," he repeated, counting out twenty dollar bills.
"Well okay," she said, "but my friend is gonna really be disappointed."
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