Keith Gimmy, a “Murfreesboro maintenance guy,” has been collecting stories from some of the experiences he’s run into over the past several years working in residential maintenance doing handyman work.

“Friends and coworkers kept telling me I should write them down, so eventually I did,” Gimmy said.

This year he released You Should’ve Mentioned That: True Stories From a Life of Fixing Things, a compilation of 31 true stories “about things I’ve actually run into on the job . . . although I’ve changed the names of people and businesses to protect their privacy.”

From the book, a couple of egg-related tales:

Hard-Boiled
I was sitting in the office at Brookstone one afternoon when a resident called me directly. Her neighbor’s smoke alarms were going off, and she thought she could smell smoke.

I jumped in the golf cart and headed for the building as quickly as I could. Once I figured out which apartment the alarms were coming from, the situation became a lot more concerning. An elderly woman with limited mobility lived there, and nobody was answering the door. I knocked and tried the doors and windows, hoping I’d find some way inside, but everything was locked. With the alarms going off and a resident who might still be inside, I had no way of knowing whether she was simply gone or lying unconscious—or worse—on the other side of the door.

Brookstone didn’t have a master key, and I didn’t have her apartment key with me, so I hauled back across the property to the office, grabbed it and raced back to the building. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I texted Rachel, the property manager at the time, to let her know what was happening. From the initial phone call until I finally got the door open was probably less than five minutes, but there was a lot going through my head during that time.

When I opened the door, the alarms were blaring and a dark gray cloud of smoke covered roughly the upper third of the apartment. There weren’t any visible flames or excessive heat, so instead of backing out and calling 911, I went inside to find out what was happening. I still didn’t know whether the resident was home, but the smoke was clearly coming from somewhere, and I headed toward the kitchen trying to hold my breath as long as I could.

I found the source sitting on the stove. A cast-iron pot was on an active electric burner with smoke pumping out of it. I grabbed a nearby dish towel, pulled the pot off the burner and shut the range off, then went back outside for some fresh air.
Once I’d caught my breath, I went back in and started opening windows to clear the smoke. I also searched the rest of the apartment for the resident, but she wasn’t there.

With that concern finally settled and the immediate problem under control, I went back to the kitchen to see what had been cooking.

Eggs.

There were maybe four or five of them, or at least what was left of them. All the water had boiled away. The eggs were blackened and cracked open with dark, charred centers, and they were still smoldering a little in the bottom of the cast-iron pot. It looked like the resident had put some eggs on to boil, forgotten about them and left the apartment to run errands.

Whoops.

The building dated back to 1984, with wooden cabinets directly above the range. How much longer that pot could have sat there before the situation became something much worse, I don’t know, but I was glad I didn’t have to find out. The neighbor had smelled the smoke and called me, and I’d gotten inside within a few minutes. By the time Rachel came over, everything was already under control and I was airing out the apartment.

Fortunately, there wasn’t any actual damage. Once the smoke cleared, there really wasn’t anything for maintenance to repair. I updated Rachel on everything that had happened and left the resident side of the situation to her. She spoke with the woman afterward and helped her set up reminders to check things before leaving the apartment again.

Rachel and I were mostly grateful that it hadn’t become something much worse, and I was grateful to the neighbor for paying enough attention to make the call.

The only things that got burned were the eggs.

___

Eggshells
I got a work order at Brookstone for a kitchen sink that wouldn’t drain. Nothing particularly exciting about that, so I started working through the usual suspects. I pulled apart the drain underneath the sink and found it clear, then ran a 15-foot auger down toward the main without accomplishing much of anything.

At that point I needed to get farther downstream. Luckily, my maintenance shop was directly underneath this particular apartment, so I had easy access to the two-inch drain line coming from the kitchen. I worked out where I thought the problem had to be and picked the easiest section of pipe to cut open.

I knew I was cutting into a clogged kitchen drain. I didn’t know exactly what was waiting on the other side.

As soon as I made the cut, a couple gallons of old sink water and food debris came pouring down on me.

Head to boots.

There are smells that deserve elaborate descriptions. Old kitchen sink water really isn’t one of them. It smelled exactly like you’d expect several gallons of water that had been sitting behind a food clog to smell, and now most of it was on me.

Once the initial downpour stopped, I started digging into the blockage and found something I hadn’t encountered before. The pipe was packed with what looked and felt like coarse grit. As I broke it apart, it came out in little flakes.

Eggshells.

Apparently, the resident had been routinely feeding eggshells through the garbage disposal. The disposal happily ground them into tiny pieces and sent them downstream, where they had spent what I assume was a year or more slowly accumulating inside the pipe. Eventually they packed themselves together tightly enough that my drain auger couldn’t get through them.

Standing there soaked in old sink water, looking at a drain pipe packed full of eggshells, my reaction was mostly: “Huh?”.

With the pipe open, I was able to use a drain bladder and water pressure to start breaking the mess loose. That’s when I discovered just how much was actually in there. The compacted shells came out in flakes and chunks, and they kept coming until I’d removed somewhere around four pounds of them.

I have no idea how many eggs you have to eat before you’ve accumulated four pounds of shells inside your plumbing. I didn’t particularly want to do the math.

Eventually I got the line completely clear and the sink draining normally again. Since I already had the pipe cut apart, I installed a cleanout before putting everything back together. If I ever had to come after another four pounds of breakfast, I wanted a better way in.

I finished the repair, cleaned up my tools, and went home to change out of clothes that smelled like somebody else’s kitchen sink.

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Keith Gimmy is a Murfreesboro resident, maintenance technician, U.S. Army veteran, and barbecue and outdoor cooking enthusiast.

Find You Should’ve Mentioned That: True Stories From a Life Of Fixing Things on Amazon.