The Uniform of Calm I Put On for a Furnace Repair
A customer once told me I was the calmest man she had ever met. I thanked her. I did not tell her the truth, which was that I had been up since four that morning with a sick dog and a bad night, and the calm she was admiring was something I had put on that day like a clean shirt. There is a kind of work in this trade that never shows up on an invoice. Over forty-seven years it has cost me more energy than any physical part of the job. When I walk into a house, the customer reads my face in the first three seconds. If I walk in tense, she gets tense. If I walk in steady, her shoulders come…
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