I Can’t Put My Arms Down

January 29, 2014 by alyssajsliter 1 Comment

I’m originally from Ohio. Dealing with cold weather is what we Ohio-ans know best. However, once you have left the North, you start to realize just how freaking cold it is. Having been in the South for several years, I have lost my cold-weather conditioning. I have become a complete wuss when it comes to cold weather. Anything below 40 degrees makes me, along with the rest of Charlotte, shut down completely.

As luck would have it, the week that Piedmont Natural Gas was scheduled to turn on the heat in the new house, Charlotte was experiencing record-breaking low temperatures. Piedmont was scheduled to arrive that day somewhere inside the narrow window between 8am-12pm. Perfect.

Trent just so happened to have an “extremely busy” day helping other lucky clients buy and sell houses and was not able to keep me company while waiting for the technician. Shocking.

Never one to lose hope, I showed up at 8:00 am sharp. I recalled my frigid Ohio upbringing, and I came prepared to deal with the weather:

To reiterate, when cold weather hits any southern city, it causes panic comparable to what I imagine would be brought on by a zombie apocalypse. Piedmont Gas had a gazillion emergencies and even though I was bordering on hypothermia, these other emergencies took priority. No worries though, Piedmont did show up. Around 2:30pm. Right on time.

Luckily, yard work kept me warm and busy while waiting. I did find some silver linings to this icy day and have a few tips if you run into this situation.

Silver Linings

Raking leaves in freezing temperatures has it’s benefits. Though I wasn’t able to actually “rake” the leaves, I could, however, use a shovel to pick up piles of frozen stuck together leaf clumps and put them into the bags . This is actually very efficient for clearing piles of leaves. Sorry there is no photographic documentation of this effort as my arms had frozen from the elbow down. Side note: do not fill the bags all the way. Frozen/wet leaves are super heavy.

Waiting 6.5 hours for a technician allows you to get some serious yard work done – 30 bags of leaves and the early stages of of tackling the monkey grass. Seriously, wtf is monkey grass? It doesn’t even smell like a monkey.

Trying to thaw your body out in freezing temps by doing yard work turns out to be a great work out. I’m seriously going to be so buff.

My technician was awesome sauce – which allowed me to forget how much I cursed at Piedmont in my head all day and swore to hate-blog about them when I got home. He was incredibly informative and shared some great stories about his past life as a baseball player. We bonded, and it made my day.

Tips

When scheduling your appointment, ask the company where you are on their schedule. Are you scheduled at the very beginning of the day and definitely need to be there at 8 AM or are you near the end and should consider taking a day trip to Belize prior to their arrival? Also ask if they can give you a 30 minute warning phone call before they arrive. They will chuckle and say no, but it’s worth it to ask and laugh along.
Be prepared for the weather. The night before, you should check out the weather report. Nothing is worse than waiting for hours on end and also being physically uncomfortable.
Have a plan to stay busy while waiting. Time goes by much quicker when you mentally prepare for the situation and plan additional chores and honey-dos. This way the time you are waiting for the technician will not be wasted time.
Have the company’s phone number on hand in case you need to call when you start to wonder whether the cold weather has gone to your head and you simply imagined that they told you they would be there within that four-hour window. They can tell you if the technician is running on time or running late. Spoiler alert: they’re running late.
Patience, patience, patience. It is no fun waiting hours on end for technicians. I know it sucks. But it helps to look at their side. They aren’t having fun either and being nasty on the phone or in person will not help anyone out. Trust me, I tried it.

Trent’s Tips

Make sure you have a girlfriend when scheduling appointments with vendors. Waiting for any vendor is not fun. Unless they’re bringing pizza. And even those guys now have an online tracker that gives up-to-the-minute details on when that pizza will be in your mouth. On the day the gas guy is supposed to come, ensure you fill your day with endless meetings in climate-controlled rooms and apologize profusely to your girlfriend for the unfortunate scheduling conflict. Try to look sincere.
Ask the gas company to describe their technician’s general appearance. Ask for a sketch-artist level of detail. No matter how late he is, if he is an ex-baseball player with lots of stories and helpful, gassy advice for your girlfriend, you’re gonna be pretty gosh-darn grumpy when you find out he looks like this: