I knock on the customer’s door. “Just a minute”, he says. I hear the cacophony of canine exuberance shuttled to another portion of the home. He invites me in. The ammonia smell is overpowering, making my eyes sting (urine is nature’s smelling salts). I proceed to the living room, where I suspect the problem is. I see a section of wire obscured by a cocoon of electrical tape. The customer feigns ignorance of it. I peel away the tape the find a portion of wire that had been eaten away to a skeletal single thread, and upon further inspection I spy tooth marks along the entirety of the sticky-from-a-decade-of-urine wire. I hunker down onto one knee to repair the line, and feel the gush of cold moistness sponging up through the carpet and wicking its way up the fabric of my khaki work pants. With stinky knee and sticky fingers, I inquire as to the customer’s knowledge of the damage in question. He once again claims innocence, and wonders aloud as to how the wire had been chewed upon. I glance at the bedroom door, straining against a dozen paws, claws planing shavings of wood excitedly, made all the more apparent by the blending of of barks into feral background noise. “Hm, must’ve been a squirrel that got in,” I explain, stretching my imagination to inhabit the same dog-free world he seems to self-delude into existence. I then take my leave to drive directly to the next gas station, spare pants in soiled hands, nose wrinkled from putrid fumes picked up from flooring soft and warped from years of urination. That “squirrel” must have also suffered incontinence.
