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The bill keeps rising—and trouble comes in—because modern technology has apparently surpassed the U.S. repairman as well as his customers. Repairer and repairee glare at each other over a barricade of stubbornly nonfunctioning appliances, across a battlefield strewn with canceled checks and blackened TV tubes. Emblazoned over the unhappy scene is a legend to express their sorry relations: "Out of Order." Says a Salt Lake City housewife, expressing a sentiment universal to the times: "I just have to find someone I can trust, but I'm too dumb to know if I've ever found that someone. I have a feeling I'm being cheated all the time."
Chinese Water Torture. The complaints are not of wreckage on a grand scale. The trouble is more like a Chinese water torture: a steady drip, drip, drip of $10 here, $25 there, $50 somewhere else in a vain but never-ending attempt to get all the myriad gadgets of the modern household working at the same time. The problem affects everyone: to the U.S. repairman, all householders are created unequal to their possessions, and neither fame nor fortune can speed him on the snail-like course of his appointed rounds.
One spectacular example is the case of Hollywood Actor Dana Andrews. As guardian of a twelve-room, $95,000 stucco house, in which he lives with his wife and three children in Burbank, Calif., he has played a dozen years of unrelieved tragedy opposite the U.S. repairman. His first mistake, says Andrews, was buying the house; his second was spending $1,200 to have it painted. Within two months the paint started to peel since the painter had failed to sandblast the old paint off the stucco, and had put oil paint on top of a water wash. "So I called my painter," says Andrews, "but he wasn't interested in my paint job any more; he'd taken up ballet dancing."
That was only a taste of what was to come. The washing machine overflowed and rotted out the laundry floor. No sooner had Andrews put in a new floor and a new washer than "the same thing happened all over again." Next to go was his $500 power lawnmower. "Eight months ago it broke down, and I'm still trying to find someone to fix it." One piano tuner used vodka on the piano keys. "They curled up like Oriental shoes." A furniture repairman smeared polish remover over all the furniture, got drunk, collected $100 and left. "He ruined the finish on five tables." Then came the ultimate catastrophe. One night, in the midst of a dinner party, a Niagara of water cascaded down the chandelier into the dining room. The new roof leaked. "Three times," says Andrews, "I've had the roof repaired. But no one can find the leak."
As of last week. Homeowner Dana Andrews had shelled out something like $15,000 merely for emergency repairs.