One of the local celebrities we have here in town is a crime fiction writer of some renown.
She has written twenty three different crime novels over the last thirty years, and while she is not exactly a New York Times bestseller, she is a pretty big deal in our small town! She called the owner of our business recently with an unusual request – she wanted to go on a ridealong with one of our HVAC tech.
The boss chose me, which was very exciting because I had read all of her novels! She was a very nice, quiet older lady, who had a notebook and a little pencil she used for taking notes while we discussed various aspects of ductwork and HVAC systems. I managed to get her to tell me that the villain in her newest book was an HVAC tech and used that as a way to sneak into people’s houses. She took a lot of notes about the residential AC systems I showed her, but she wasn’t satisfied. These air ducts and vents were too small, she said, her character could fit cameras in there, but couldn’t crawl around. I told her that residential air ducts are far too small for even the smallest child. For a grown man to move around air ductwork it would need to be a major commercial facility, and probably one from a few years ago. As HVAC tech improves, everything gets smaller, so a killer lurking in the air ducts is an increasingly impossible idea. I hope she names the killer after me!