I was dispatched to diagnose & repair a free-standing gas unit, I believe it was an older Regency that the customer couldn't get to work right. She was a nice looking woman, late 30s. Very pleasant, as well.
She said that the stove worked fine & then yesterday she noticed that the pilot was out... her husband was away on travel & "just fix it & tell me how much..." So I spread out my drop cloth & grabbed my tool bag. I opened the front door & it looked like somebody had just thrown the logs in the firebox. A couple were laying right over the pilot hood, so I figured that's why it was out. I pulled everything out, spiffed the firebox, cleaned the glass, lit the pilot, checked the gas pressure & read the thermopile, but I didn't have a manual to reset the logs. I asked the customer if she had one & she said the unit was on location when they moved in the year before & didn't know anything about it. OK, I'll look around, maybe it's under the back of the stove & I walk around it. "Oh, look!" I say, "There's some paperwork under here. Maybe that's it."
So, I pull out 5-6 pages of not-to-neatly folded paper & open it up & it's HARDCORE PORN! A man & a woman engaged in various positions of explicit you know what, that had been downloaded off the internet... I immediately folded them up & said, "Nope. Not what I need" & tried to discretely put them back under the unit. She asks me what they were & I hesitated, not knowing what to say & she stuck her hand out. What could I do but hand them to her? She opened them up, looked at them & turned about 6 shades of red. She looked at the date, which just happened to be the day before, EXACTLY when the stove stopped working. She says, "My Son! He did this! When he gets home from school..." Evidently, he figured he'd stash them under the stove, for whatever reason & when he, did he must've shifted the whole unit & caused the logs to fall on the pilot. Anyway, I used a little tech savvy to reset the logs in what I thought was the correct pattern & cleaned up. She was so embarrassed by those pix, that she couldn't even look me in the eye when she paid me for the service...I laughed all the way to my next call...
She said that the stove worked fine & then yesterday she noticed that the pilot was out... her husband was away on travel & "just fix it & tell me how much..." So I spread out my drop cloth & grabbed my tool bag. I opened the front door & it looked like somebody had just thrown the logs in the firebox. A couple were laying right over the pilot hood, so I figured that's why it was out. I pulled everything out, spiffed the firebox, cleaned the glass, lit the pilot, checked the gas pressure & read the thermopile, but I didn't have a manual to reset the logs. I asked the customer if she had one & she said the unit was on location when they moved in the year before & didn't know anything about it. OK, I'll look around, maybe it's under the back of the stove & I walk around it. "Oh, look!" I say, "There's some paperwork under here. Maybe that's it."
So, I pull out 5-6 pages of not-to-neatly folded paper & open it up & it's HARDCORE PORN! A man & a woman engaged in various positions of explicit you know what, that had been downloaded off the internet... I immediately folded them up & said, "Nope. Not what I need" & tried to discretely put them back under the unit. She asks me what they were & I hesitated, not knowing what to say & she stuck her hand out. What could I do but hand them to her? She opened them up, looked at them & turned about 6 shades of red. She looked at the date, which just happened to be the day before, EXACTLY when the stove stopped working. She says, "My Son! He did this! When he gets home from school..." Evidently, he figured he'd stash them under the stove, for whatever reason & when he, did he must've shifted the whole unit & caused the logs to fall on the pilot. Anyway, I used a little tech savvy to reset the logs in what I thought was the correct pattern & cleaned up. She was so embarrassed by those pix, that she couldn't even look me in the eye when she paid me for the service...I laughed all the way to my next call...
That afternoon, we were sitting in the front yard, waiting for my uncle to pick us up, when a car pulled up - the woman in the pics, with her husband. They were the owners, and she saw us looking at the pics - she started yelling at her husband, who got out of the car, walked up to us, held his hand out, we gave him the pics. He never said anything. The next day, my uncle assigned us to another job, he didn't say why.
(the kind with bark, that is) 
