Shortly after we moved into our new place, it didn’t take very long for us to figure out that the doorbell didn’t work. All it took was one seemingly unhappy tradesperson standing at the door for an unspecified period of time, waiting for us to answer a door that didn’t actually ring.
Fortunately, after he knocked (the universal back-up measure when doorbells don’t seemingly elicit any kind of reaction), we sprang into action and answered the door immediately. When the tradesperson saw us test the doorbell to confirm that it actually did not work, he understood and was a good sport about it.
Ever the good Canadians, we tripped over ourselves with a chorus of apologies. To ensure that we didn’t waste anyone else’s valuable time, we immediately put up a sign saying, “Please knock loudly, doorbell doesn’t work.”
To live without a doorbell during the pandemic didn’t seem like a huge loss, at least at first. Obviously, we wouldn’t be having friends drop by to check out the new digs for some time, so that wouldn’t be an issue.
Given that we were contemplating building a garage as well as installing a back-up generator, both of which requiring the presence of an electrician, we didn’t make the doorbell a huge priority. We just assumed that we could piggy back the doorbell on one of those jobs, rather than set up a house call for just the doorbell.
To me, having no doorbell actually brought with it a bit of a sense of relief. Back when I lived in the city, there were days when I would have liked to yank the doorbell out of the wall for the revolving door of aggressive door-to-door salespeople that rudely ignored my “no peddlers or solicitors” sign. But thankfully, a provincial law outlawing door-to-door sales calls of that nature ended that practice before I performed my first doorbellectomy. Continue reading
It's the Journey 