Screw The Stars, I'm Looking At The Gutter, Too

Got a phone call two days ago,

“G’day, this’s Bruce from the gutterin’ mob. I’m just orderin’ the fuckin’ gutterin’ for your place.”

“Hi Bruce. Ok good. Thanks for getting back to me.”

“Yeah, no wuckers. Is jasmine alright?”

“Jasmine? That’s... it’s…she… uhm. Can you tell me what jasmine is in bloke-speak?”

“It’s brown, mate.”

“Well, the bricks on the place are…”

“It’s not as dark as mission brown. Lighter brown. Still brown, but.”

“Sounds good. Order away. Do you need entrance into the place to do the job or can it all be done from outside?”

“Nah mate. She’s an outside job. I’ll get ’em ordered and we’ll go from there.”

Having dealt with tradies before, I then put it out of my mind. What’ll happen is he’ll order the guttering, return the guttering because it’s the wrong type, get the right guttering, use that guttering on another job he promised a mate to get done, receive reminder call from strata management after strata management have received reminder call from me, re-order new batch of guttering and so on. I won’t see the guttering guys until April at soonest.

At six o’clock this morning, they appeared on our roof and started ripping the old guttering off. That’s a less-than-48-hour turnaround. I was impressed in a sleep deprived kind of way. These guys don’t muck around, unless of course they’re actually doing our job with the wrong set of guttering because they owed a mate. There’s probably some other guy down the street thinking it’s been a while since he’s heard from the guttering mob.

Anyway, all this efficient gutter removal has presented me with a mystery. As the old stuff was being ripped off, they were emptying a ton of leaves from every section. Loads. I mean, I couldn’t understand how the gutters hadn’t just fallen off from the weight of leaves building up in them.

So what? Cleaning leaves out of gutters is one of those jobs you hear about all the time. Well, yes, if there are trees overhanging your place, but there are absolutely no trees overhanging our building. The roof-line is taller than the neighbour’s foliage. I think that leaves spontaneously generate in gutters like corn spontaneously generates in stomachs.

(For those of you wondering why I say that, it was held in popular wisdom for some time that there was a gland in the body that produced either corn or diced carrot. This was suggested because if you threw up, one of them would always be there, even if you hadn't eaten any.)