It’s funny how one trivial incident can conjure up memories of a much bigger incident that happened years ago.
Take, for example, early last month when I had to decide on which fuel plan I wanted to use for the upcoming winter. Automatic delivery? Delivery only per request? Pay in advance? Pay monthly on the budget plan? Pay upon delivery?
At my age, I’m not good at making so many decisions in one day. My brain barely can handle even one major decision per year.
But after weighing all of my options, I finally decided upon the automatic delivery, mainly because I’d probably forget all about ordering fuel until I’d already run out and stalactites were forming on my ceilings. I also chose the monthly payment plan because…well, I couldn’t afford either of the other two options.
Anyway, all of this made me recall a time many years ago, when my husband and I lived in a mobile-home park in the country and also had to make a decision about our fuel. Our oil tank, because we had no basement, was located outside, above ground in the yard. It was a real eyesore, big and ugly and covered with so much rust, I honestly was tempted to paint it black and white like a cow and stick a papier-mâché cow’s head on it.
But the tank didn’t belong to us, it belonged to the park, so I couldn’t touch it. Keeping it filled, however, was our responsibility, and the kerosene and oil mixture it required was pretty expensive, much more than just regular heating oil.
We were on automatic delivery back then, which meant the fuel provider would pop up unannounced whenever he was in the neighborhood and fill the tank. I’m the type who likes to plan my budget in advance, and in my opinion, the fuel was being delivered a little too often. So when it came time for the next heating season to begin, I called the oil company and asked if we could be taken off their automatic-delivery list and put on their delivery-by-request list. That way I could control our expenses more easily because I’d be able to save up money for the fuel before calling them for a delivery.
The employee said there would be no problem.
But a week later, on a Friday morning in September while the weather still was warm, I woke up to find an envelope hanging on my doorknob. Inside was a bill for an oil/kerosene delivery, to the tune of nearly $500. Needless to say, I wasn’t pleased.
Even worse, when I let the dogs out into the yard, they went running out of the side gate…which apparently had been left wide open by the delivery guy. I ended up having to run the equivalent of the Boston marathon to catch up with the dogs and bring them back home.
Furious, I grabbed the phone and was fully prepared to call the oil company and say some really un-nice stuff to them before demanding that they come and siphon out about $250 worth of their crummy oil, but my husband told me to calm down.
“Oil prices actually are lower right now than they’ve been in a while,” he said. “They might go way up again later on this season. So this just might be a blessing in disguise.”
At that moment, the thought of having to cough up $500 I hadn’t budgeted for didn’t seem much like any great blessing to me.
That night, the temperature plummeted, and the next morning, I awakened to the strong smell of oil. I walked out to the living room where my husband was watching TV and asked him if he could smell it. When he shook his head, I realized I’d asked him a dumb question. In the past, countless baked chickens and casseroles had been unceremoniously cremated when I’d told him to keep an eye on dinner in the oven, because the man never smelled anything burning.
Trusting my own nose, I went outside to check the oil tank. To my horror, oil was spewing out of the top of the tank’s fill-pipe and running down onto the ground.
Our neighbor, Jennifer, an attractive blonde who’d just recently moved in and had introduced herself as a former exotic dancer who also was into nudism (much to my dismay and my husband’s delight), was outside at the time and said hi to me.
I asked her if she’d seen anyone delivering oil the day before.
“Definitely!” she said with a giggle. “I was doing some yard work and the guy couldn’t stop staring at me while he was filling the tank.”
I didn’t dare ask her what she had (or hadn’t) been wearing at the time, which probably would have explained a lot.
I dashed back into the house and called the oil company to complain.
“That’s impossible,” the representative said. “You’re not even on our automatic delivery list. You couldn’t have had oil delivered yesterday.”
“Well, I have a delivery bill for nearly $500 from you and a puddle of oil on the ground to prove it!” I shot back.
He finally said he’d send someone over.
A young man arrived about two hours later. He opened the
fill-pipe and peered into the tank. “Wow!” he said. “This thing has really been
overfilled! There’s no room in it for the oil to expand.”
THE PHOTO I TOOK FOR EVIDENCE!
Visions of the tank swelling up like a hot-air balloon and blowing my home to smithereens filled my mind.
“Got anything I can use to siphon off some of this oil?” he asked. “That’s crazy that it’s so full. The guy must have fallen asleep or something!”
I already had a pretty good idea what the “or something” was.
I couldn’t believe he was asking me for a siphon hose. I mean, I figured he’d at least have some kind of hose with him in his repair truck.
Coincidentally, I’d just bought a battery-operated liquid transfer pump for my aquarium, to make cleaning it easier, and it still was new in the box. I didn’t know if it would handle oil, but I figured it was worth a try. I went inside, opened it, shoved some batteries into it and then handed it to the guy.
He removed the hose from the pump, stuck the hose into the tank and then used his mouth to suck up some of the oil. He then proceeded to choke and spit it all over my lawn. Still, no oil flowed into his awaiting bucket.
“Um, maybe if you connect the hose back onto the pump, which is battery-operated, it will save you some trouble…and prevent you from getting an oil slick in your stomach,” I suggested.
Sure enough, the pump, which had cost me only $15, pumped oil into the bucket with lightning speed. By the time the guy was done, he’d taken five gallons out of the tank to release the pressure. I made a mental note not to pay for those five.
“That’s a great little pump,” he said, handing the oily, drippy thing back to me. “I’ll have to get one!”
“I’ll sell you this one cheap,” I said, frowning at it. “I don’t think I want to use it in my aquarium now.”
He didn’t take me up on my offer. Instead, he set to work digging up all of the contaminated soil around the tank and then washing the tank with some kind of biodegradable product and sprinkling the soil with a powder.
When he was through, he handed me a bill for $225…$200 for labor and $25 for supplies.
I, for the first time in my life, was rendered speechless. “You don’t seriously expect me to pay this, do you?” I finally managed to ask.
He shrugged. “I just hand out the bills, and this is considered an emergency weekend call. You’ll have to take it up with the office on Monday.”
The minute I opened my eyes on Monday morning, I reached for the phone, called the oil company and asked to speak to a supervisor. When the woman answered, I blurted out everything – the unwanted oil delivery, the gate being left wide open, the oil spill and the bill for cleaning it up. I think I might even have thrown in the word “lawsuit” for effect.
The woman sounded extremely sympathetic. She told me I definitely didn’t have to pay the service bill. She also said she would deduct the cost of the five gallons of oil that had been siphoned, and best of all, she would give me a substantial discount on the unwanted oil that had been delivered in the first place. All in all, we ended up paying only $175 for the full tank.
So I hate to admit it, but my husband was right. The delivery did turn out to be a blessing in disguise after all.
And we owed it all to Jennifer, the nudist.
I sure wish she lived next door to me at this house because I really could use her as a distraction for my next fuel delivery.
On second thought, she'd be about 65 years old now...
Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.
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