Compared to these guys, I have no work ethic at all.

In fact, I’m sitting pretty today, typing away in an amazingly tasteful and even more comfortable customer lounge, (and, hey, you wanna look? Check it ooouuutttt….), Irene and I just waiting (and OH how we love waiting!) for six things to simultaneously get done on our Allegro Bus. Outside in the almost-spotless shop, Brannon and his consistently hard-working family – his brother, father, father-in-law and his wife – stay hard at it, replacing my 2,000 Watt inverter with a 3,000 Watt version, adding two more house batteries, and getting ready to install our Kenmore residential refrigerator, which will roughly double both our refrigerator and freezer capacities while simultaneously working, which the Norcold refrigerator standard to most motor homes hasn’t done very well. In fact, I could tell you stories about the Norcold but won’t, at least today – all I can say is that Irene is liable to be so happy having a reliable, working, decent-sized refrigerator instead of, as she so succinctly says, “that friggin’ Norcold” – that it could bode very well for me if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

But it’s all taking some doing, and don’t tell me ‘cuz I’ll tell you, nothing fits easily when you are doing a retrofit. For instance, the six batteries will be increased to eight, but there is no good other place to install the extra two batteries, so they are customizing two battery slide-outs and will install six batteries on the bottom on one and have the other two batteries on the top. The space they have to work with is exactly the size it needs to be…to about the sixteenth of an inch. If they get it working correctly, and right now it looks like they may, it will be a feat of custom engineering that will alone be worth the price of admission, not that I’m telling Brannon that until this is all done, of course.

Nor is the refrigerator install the end of the story, even given all it entails. By the end of tonight, per Brannon, not only will the refrigerator be installed (and the supporting batteries and inverter), but a residential-style fan will be in the bedroom,

Brannon and friend install fan

the old-school night drapes will be gone from the coach’s front and the new-school drop-down day/night shades will be in place, and Brannon’s peer Chris will have also showed up after having worked three other jobs to install our flat-screen TV in the bedroom. There are other things….trouble-shooting a water-pump light that shows a continuous “on” condition and putting a new power plug into a wall to facilitate the subwoofer’s new home, a change in placement necessitated by the previous replacement of the cabinets by the dining table, done yesterday by the famous Tim (who has yet MORE cabinet work to do, but that’s Friday…what day is this, anyway?).

They work hard and they apparently don’t stop and I recently learned they don’t sleep. Brannon has estimated we will be finished up by 11:00 PM this evening. But he and his brother won’t be finished. A bit ago he received an emergency phone call from the famous Bob Tiffin, who owns Tiffin Motor Home Company. Bob has a highly irate customer in a new Zephyr…the top-end Tiffin coach….without air-conditioning for three days now. In Raleigh, NC. Five hours away at least.  In 90+ heat and supercharged humidity. And, when Brannon and his brother are finished here, they will, without sleep, drive five hours to Raleigh and help out the guys there. Because, you see, Brannon is still working for Tiffin, and until July that’s the way he’ll roll.

If, when I talked previously about my observing a somewhat lackadaisical work ethic in some of the Tiffin employees over the month we’ve been here, I bet you thought I meant EVERYBODY who works back here, didn’t you? Let me say right here, right now, I didn’t. I didn’t mean everybody. I didn’t, at least, mean Brannon and his gang. Or Tim or Chris. I can’t speak for everybody, but I can speak for them. These guys, at least, rock big.