Out, Damp Spot

By Tony Kornheiser

Sunday, June 8, 1997; Page F01
The Washington Post 

My friend Gino was looking forlorn, like a basset hound at a funeral. I asked what was
wrong.

"The roof fell in," he said.

"You mean, like, you're swamped with work?"

"No," he said. 

"You mean, like, all sorts of things went wrong at once?"

"No," he said. "I mean, like, the roof fell in."

What follows is a story with many important lessons for the American homeowner, such
as the need for maintaining sound structural integrity, and the value of having adequate
insurance, and the wisdom of not letting male humans own homes, on account of they
are idiots. 

The story began a week before, when Gino was in his den and noticed a steady drip,
drip, drip from the window beside him. The water was falling from the top of the
window onto the sill, inside the house. 

This struck him as odd. It wasn't raining. It hadn't rained for days. 

Now, Gino was not born yesterday. He knew something had to be done. So he did
what any man would do. He got up and made himself a sandwich. 

When he got back, the dripping had stopped. Another homeowner problem solved! 

(This is typical guy behavior. My friend Nancy recently smelled something burning in
her house, but she couldn't find anything wrong. She was afraid that it was an electrical
fire, so she asked her husband to do something. He did what any man would do: He
opened the windows to get the smell out, and went back to watching the ballgame.)

Anyway, a couple of days after the dripping incident, Gino was back in that same
room, typing, when suddenly the computer started fizzing.

Gino does not know much about computers, but he knows they seldom fizz. 

He looked up. Water was dripping into it from a pinhole leak in the ceiling. Again, it
was not raining outside. 

Gino did exactly what I would have done in that circumstance: He moved the computer.

Then he resumed happily banging away on the keyboard, until he noted the sound of his
daughter screaming. He looked up. The pinhole was widening. It was the size of a
marble. Then, a second later, it was the size of a football. 

Something was clearly wrong -- finally, this hit him, like a dash of cold water in the face.
In fact, it hit him exactly like a dash of cold water in the face. 

"It was like someone was in the attic, tipping over a bathtub," he says.

You can tell a lot about a person by how he reacts in a crisis. Here is the canny
homeowner strategy Gino came up with: He put a pot on the floor, and waited until
morning.

By morning, he had it all figured out. In a slap-to-the-forehead revelation, he
remembered there was an air conditioning unit up there in the crawl space above the
room. So he phoned the air conditioning guy.

The air conditioning guy climbed up to the crawl space and said, yes indeedy, the unit
had malfunctioned, and spewed water all over. He fixed the leak. As he was leaving he
said, "By the way, it's crawling with termites up there."

Termites? 

"Yeah," said the air conditioning man, disapprovingly. "It's really creepy. It made me
wanna puke."

So Gino called the exterminator. 

The exterminator went up into the crawl space. Then he came down. 

"You don't have termites," he said. 

"Whew," Gino said. 

"You've got carpenter ants."

"That's better, right?" 

"Not really," said the exterminator. "Why do you think they call 'em carpenter ants?" 

"Because they are skilled at basic home repair?" Gino said, hopefully. 

"Good thing you called me, though," said the exterminator. He had a manly hitch in his
voice, like Marshal Dillon after running the bad guys out of town. "I put some powder
down. It'll kill them." And he left.

What happened a few seconds later can only be described as mystical.

Gino's two dogs began acting strangely. They were obeying some timeless imperative,
some instinct born in the wild that that gives dogs an ability to sense danger and react in
a manner that features random moronic drooling and yowling and aimless galloping in
circles. 

"What's wrong, boy?" Gino asked his Labrador retriever, Harry S Truman. 

Before Mr. Truman could explain, the house shook with a terrific crash. Gino ran to his
den, and opened the door. For a moment, he just stared, slack-jawed. Then he
slammed the door, turned around and said in a very, very loud voice a very, very bad
word, which caused the dogs to madly suck up and apologize for whatever they had
done.

Then Gino opened the door again. This is what he saw:

Under the weight of standing water, the ceiling had collapsed. Water was cascading
into the room, along with ten thousand ants. 

Ants. Gigantic black ants were raining down from the roof, writhing in agony. They
were dying from the poison. The dogs were wolfing down poisoned ants as fast as they
could. Gino was stomping ants and yelling at the dogs to stop. 

The phone was ringing. Help was at hand!

It was someone selling commodities options. 

This all happened last Monday. I am pleased to report that everything is back to
normal. The dogs are okay. The air conditioner is working fine. Gino's house is no
longer infested with ants. Now it's infested with contractors.

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