My pal Kenny and I go way back, to the point where I literally cannot remember life without him in it.
Middle school, grade school, up through now, Kenny was always around.
That doesn’t mean we were best friends all those years, in fact we could go months at a time without seeing each other, but the bond was always tight. Now we are both in our 20s, and I hold down a decent job (all things considered, but this pandemic has been hard on everyone), and Kenny is still drifting. He recently moved into my garage, saying he had enrolled in an HVAC certification course at the local community college and needed a place to sleep. It turns out that he also needed a place to practice his craft, which meant making a racket with his heaters and A/C units. He had a couple of the old box-style air conditioners, like we used to have when we were kids. He took off the housing, and used one of them as the “control” model, while he slowly dismantled and reassembled the other air conditioner, He was trying to learn A/C systems from the inside out, by dissecting them like a specimen. And then he repeated the process with a couple different kinds of space heaters, as well. As irritating as it was, I was pretty impressed how devoted Kenny was to learning the craft of HVAC repair. It was the first time I had seen him this focused in years, and if he could parlay this into a real HVAC job, he would be set.