Service Calls or Something More?

The Uncanny Timing We Can't Ignore

Every once in a while, life hands you a moment so oddly timed, so perfectly inconvenient, that you can’t help but stop and wonder if something bigger is nudging you along. I’m not talking about lightning bolts or huge miracles but rather the tiny, almost unnoticeable moments where you find yourself in precisely the right place, at exactly the right time, for no reason you can logically explain.

But here’s the kicker: For me, these moments show up disguised as a broken furnace, an aging air conditioner, or a customer who swears the whole system’s gone sideways. They arrive in the day-to-day work, the crawlspaces, attics, and places nobody wants to go, but somebody has to.

That’s where these stories begin: in the middle of ordinary service calls that turned out to be anything but ordinary.

Last winter, a customer called me because her heat wasn’t working. Simple enough. Except … not really. She was convinced something catastrophic was wrong. We started checking things out and finally discovered that the brand-new thermostat had died, while the furnace was working great. But that’s not the story I remember.

The homeowner’s husband had passed away a year earlier, and he used to take care of all of the home maintenance. As we were going through the equipment again, I still couldn’t figure out why this perfectly good system had suddenly quit. Nothing was adding up. When I got downstairs, I discovered a random water leak in the basement.

This leak had zero connection to the heat. It was brand-new, too. She hadn’t been down there for months, and we caught it right as it started, before it damaged anything in the basement. She and I just looked at each other, a little bewildered that the timing lined up so perfectly. There’s a little divinity in that story, if you ask me.

Then, this fall, it happened again with another longtime customer, a teacher. We were replacing parts of her 26-year-old air conditioner. I was working in her garage, minding my business, and suddenly something in me kept insisting, ‘You’ve got to get in her attic. You have to look.’

She told me nobody had been in that attic in 20 years. The access hatch was tiny and miserable, but I went up anyway, and sure enough, her flue vent (important for safely directing harmful gases like carbon monoxide) was disconnected entirely and had been for a long time. You could tell from the particulates and corrosion that the moist winter exhaust had been leaking inside the attic year after year.

I’ve left homes feeling dizzy from mild carbon monoxide exposure. It’s why my whole team now carries fire-department-grade CO detectors that flash lights on our toolbags.

Carbon monoxide is silent, invisible, and fast.

I tell homeowners all the time: Please, please, please get carbon monoxide detectors. Put one in your bedroom, not the basement! I travel with my own carbon monoxide detector. Hotels don’t always tell you when someone got sick, or worse, in a room the previous winter, and believe me, it happens, even in the large hotel chains!

These moments I described: The thermostat that quits the same night a basement leak begins, the sudden urge to climb into a forgotten attic, all make me wonder. Sometimes, I think about a customer, and they call the next day. It really does feel like fate. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I’ve learned to listen because, sometimes, those little nudges show up exactly when someone needs them most.