Gaslighting the Gaslighter

Hick has a habit of poo-pooing my statements and concerns, while imagining his own declarations to be decrees read by a manservant from a scroll of parchment, after tooting a long horn.

Like when I told Hick I couldn't get home on our road because there was a car on fire. First thing he did was mention that he'd heard sirens, so MAYBE that could have been about a car fire. We live just under 5 miles out of town (or so we've told the insurance company), and I assure you that the only time we can hear sirens is if the vehicle it emanates from is on our gravel roads. Yet Hick could not accept my statement as a simple fact. He hopped on the Gator and drove down there to look for himself.

I swear, if I told Hick the sky was blue, he would chuckle in his annoying way, and say, "Oh, Val. I don't know about you sometimes... EVERYBODY knows the sky is green. But whatever you say..."

Hick will also go into detail explaining something to me, all the while incredulous that I have never heard of such a thing. This generally concerns mechanical contraptions that I have no experience with, and am unable to refute Hick's proclamations of fact. The one exception being the little metal bar I found on the road, and researched to be a gadget used for balancing tires. All the while, Hick mocking me that such gadgets had a different shape, and different markings. Heh, heh. I was happy to rest my case after providing Exhibit A, an internet sales page with a picture of my find and their bulk price.

Anyhoo... Hick has a couple of bugbears that vex him to no end. One being water splashed from the bathtub onto the wall. Let's hope that The Pony, in his advanced years, does not do that any more now that he's back home. Another Hick trigger is a door not fully closed. Mainly, a closet or pantry door. Or the one to the laundry room. It's not good enough to have that door pushed to, almost closed. Nope. Hick will walk through the house and push or pull them until they latch. It's as if he's afraid something will pour out the crack like a Pandora's Box. Or the Lord's vengeance from the cracking open of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The third thorn of contention in Hick's side is the running of the air conditioner. Or furnace. He's obsessed with how long the blowing cycle is on. Last month, Hick declared that something was wrong again. He couldn't go to sleep, because he kept waiting for the furnace to kick off. How he could even hear the blower running is beyooooond me, what with his breather making so much noise.

Anyhoo...Hick called his regular heating and cooling company, but they were closed due to Stay-At-Home-Down. Luckily Hick had other contacts who worked for other companies who were a bit more lax in their perception of essential services. He called one, who got him a slot within two days. Of course it was on a Friday, Hick's busiest day. He got tied up at the hospital with the friend he's helping with her cancer treatments. Which left ME to deal with the workmen.

Hick had explained to them that every couple of years, this happens to our heat pump, and his regular company says there's a small leak they can never find, and they add Freon to the system, and it works another couple of years.

After spending about a half hour fiddling around with the system out back, the two repairmen left without making any repairs. I'm just a stupid unbelievable woman, but I DID go out on the back porch and tell them that Hick thought it was probably low on Freon, due to a small leak. They declared that our system was NOT low on Freon. They even called Hick to tell him the same thing. The only good part of this exercise in futility was that Hick was WRONG about the Freon, and that the repairmen didn't charge us anything.

Hick came home and opened up the part of the HVAC that's in the basement. He said he washed the coil and rinsed off the mesh filter. The heat was running normally, kicking on and off. Hick SAID. Then a couple weeks later, time to switch to air conditioning, and the blower was running all the time again!

Hick called his regular heating and cooling company, now open. He made sure he was here when they arrived. He followed them around back and watched them work. Funny how they FOUND a small leak. Said they repaired it. And filled the unit with Freon. At a cost of $225.

Sure, this meant that Hick had been right all along about the Freon. But something just tickles my funnybone about those other repairmen assuring Hick that Freon was not a problem with his unit. And Hick grousing about that for several weeks, since he'd been SURE that WAS the problem.

Uh huh. How does THAT medicine go down, Hick? Knowing that you're right, but having someone insist that you're not.