"Repairman"

BY AUSTIN BLANTZ

He fixes furnaces and air conditioners; simple, but hard work. He started doing it fresh out of high school, and he had little knowledge but was determined to work hard to provide for his family: “I would do anything to provide a good life for my family, even if it means doing backbreaking work for the rest of my life.”

The phone always seems to ring when I'm warm in my bed. It's one in the morning, and I have to go crawl through a pitch-black, freezing, 19th-century basement to fix someone's furnace.

I always ask myself, Could they wait until the morning? Then I think back to the family I have at home, I try to imagine them pushing through the 30-degree F night with no heat, freezing, praying for morning to come. I always come to the same conclusion. I go to work. Whether I'm working in a 100-degree attic in the summer heat, where just the nauseating smell of insulation and my dehydration is enough to make most people quit, or if it's a simple day where I'm working outside on a cozy fall day: Either way, it's no secret that I hate my job. I can’t even talk about it without an angry facial expression to go along with it. But I do it for my family.

I don't think of myself as important, but I think what I do matters. When you walk into your house, I'm sure your first thought isn't usually how well your heating or air conditioning is working, but I'm sure you will always notice when it's not working. It might not seem like much, but it’s hard work. Just because I hate my job doesn’t mean I don’t work hard. I take pride in what I do, knowing I make a difference in people's lives. Seeing people's thankful expressions as I leave their homes is just enough to keep me going. Helping people while supporting my family is what keeps me going and continues to pull me out of bed in the middle of the night.