Be careful …

Quite a few years ago, my wife, Earlene, and I journeyed to Oklahoma to repair a rental property.  It was an old house, sitting on eighty acres out in the country, with no close neighbors.

As we sized up the house, it became clear it needed much more work than we had planned. We needed to rearrange rooms, add walls and doors, paint the house and fences and more.

We loaded all the tools we possessed, headed to Oklahoma, and booked a motel room not far from our project. Each day we went to the house, worked on it, and returned to the motel, leaving all our tools at the house. It was, after all, in a remote area and few people drove by and fewer even noticed the house.

One day as we worked installing a new door, a man walked into the room where we were working. Unannounced. He just appeared, no knocking. In fact, he had been standing in the doorway from the hall before I even knew he was in the house.

I pulled myself together and asked if I could help him.  I really had in mind, help him out the door and off our property.

“I see you’re making some improvements on this house. Are you staying here, or just working on it during the day?” And he appeared to be inventorying our tools.

To say alarms were going off in my head is like saying there’s sand in the Sahara.

“We’re here most of the time,” Earlene answered.

He looked at her, nodded, then looked back at me. “Do you lock the place up when you leave at night?”

I scanned the room, noting the tools. We didn’t have much in the way of power tools. But what tools we owned were in this room. Packing them up each night and unpacking them each morning would be a sizable chore. “Absolutely. We lock it up whenever we leave.”

“We certainly lock it up tightly,” Earlene said.

He nodded, turned, and left.

We listened as he walked through the house and out the front door.

“Should we be worried?” Earlene asked.

I just shrugged. “I don’t know what to say. We don’t have expensive tools, but they’re all we own.”

“You think we need to spend the night here?”

“We could. But for how long? We’re weeks from finishing.”

Work slowed. Every few minutes one of us would ask a question or make a comment about the man and his visit. Who was he? What did he want? Why did he ask about our locking the place at night? And ever so often the question was, should we pack up our tools tonight?

About twenty minutes later, I heard a car door close, and several minutes later, the same man walked into the room again. I started to ask him to leave, but he spoke first.

“I noticed you don’t have many good tools for the work you’re doing.” He stuck out a device and said, “This will make getting the hardware on the doors more accurately and much easier.  And you really need a nail gun. You’re much more likely to split that molding trying to put it in with a hammer.” He stepped back through the door, then returned with a nail gun and a compressor. “And I’ve got a couple of other things that will make your job go faster. I’ll bring those by tomorrow.”

I didn’t know what to say. Earlene said thank you.

“My name is Gary and my business is house repair and I know how much good tools can help. But they’re expensive. So I wanted to make sure you would keep them locked up when you weren’t here.”

During the next few weeks, Gary supplied many helpful tools and even more helpful advice. We became good friends. Eventually we convinced him to manage our rental property. Over the years, he repaired many problems with our rental and rarely charged us for his work.  “After all,” he would say, “friends help.”

So, the moral of this story is – be careful … about your first impressions.

jim