Locals Only: Going broke on “free”

Recent events of a highly personal nature lead me to believe that, not only is there “no free lunch,” a gratuity is expected, to boot.
My adventure begins at a chain store, where I am seduced by the concept of “0 percent interest.” This is the best offer, ever! I love it, drooling at the thought of

month after month, 12 in all, where I don’t pay a penny of interest. Before they can change their mind, I immediately buy every major appliance I can think of, whistle and sing “My oh my what a wonderful day!” the whole way home, where I curl up in a ball on the couch, cry for an hour straight and punch myself in the head repeatedly.
I believe they call this “buyer’s remorse”; or, more likely, “buyer’s complete breakdown.”
Looking over my paperwork, I realize that the installation of my dishwasher will cost about $25 more . . . than the dishwasher itself!
So I call my friend, one of those guys who know how to do everything. I tell him how much they want to charge me for installing a dishwasher. He laughs, not demonically but still pretty creepily, and tells me he’ll do it for me. I tell him OK, but I’m going to pay him.
“No you’re not,” he says firmly. “I’m doing it for free.”
Which he does. Unless you count my sanity as payment.

To protect his reputation, I’ll call my friend “Dan.” (Coincidentally enough, his real name is also Dan.) He is extremely reliable, and extremely dangerous. His idea of “planning” is to rip something apart, and take it from there.
He arrives on the appointed day, and, just as the delivery guys drop off the appliances, starts ripping out the old dishwasher. It takes him a little longer than he expected, so the delivery guys are long gone by the time he has used various tools of destruction to turn the old dishwasher into a pile of scrap metal.
Time to install the new model . . . oops.
The new dishwasher won’t fit! Turns out the old one was some kind of custom model, to fit this space that’s about four crucial inches short of the standard dishwasher height. My knees buckle and the room starts to spin, but Dan grabs me by the arm to keep me from falling.
“Tell you what I’ll do: I know a guy in Seattle, I can get you a slab of granite for like 200 bucks, maybe 300, tops. I’ll cut it for you, we’ll rip out this old counter, lift up the granite so the dishwasher fits. It’ll look great, be a piece of cake.”
My stomach is still churning, but my wife’s eyes are bugging out like Johnny Depp just walked in the room, at the thought of granite counters. All I know about granite is that it’s incredibly heavy, but Dan says it’s going to look great.
Of course, he insists I can’t pay him for any of his labor . . .
Long story short: we figure out we’ll also need a new sink, the granite cost about twice as much as Dan estimated, and “piece of cake” turned out to be six weekends of grinding, sanding and fitting, covering the decimated kitchen with several layers of dust.

“Free” cost my piece of mind, a chunk of my fragile soul and hundreds of dollars, though Dan refused to accept any money for his dozens of hours of labor.
The granite counter looks great, so it’s a fair trade off.
Who needs sanity, anyway?

Anyway, that’s my story about “free.” I apologize for boring you with an irrelevant story that probably has nothing to do with anything going on around town.

tscanlon@northcoastnews.com