Sometimes you just need a Guy. I am aware of how sexist this is–maybe sometimes the Guy is actually a Gal–but in my experience they’re mostly Guys, these experts upon whom I depend. The Mechanic Guy, the Contractor Guy, the Computer Guy, the Landscaper Guy–it’s crucial to me that I place absolute trust in the Guy who’s taking care of some aspect of my life. I must believe he’s a creative problem-solver, is not ripping me off, is totally on my side, is working in my best interests. My need to find the Guy is a reflection of how modern citizens have become so rarefied–which in this case is a nice word for “lame”–that we, or at least I, have to rely on specialists to do things that a hundred years ago everyone could do for themselves (well, maybe not replace their hard drives, but you get the idea).
I’m sorry to say that gender comes into it too–if I’m having trouble with one of these Guys, I never want the Hubs to get involved, since then it seems like I’m sending in “My Husband” to do the dirtywork for me because I’m a weak female. I also have a bit of a subconscious and sexist sense that I’ll get better service if it’s just me, which is probably really naive (and no, I don’t try to work that angle). But I do work hard to nourish the relationship with the Guy, because lord knows, I need the Guy.
For example, since we have two mid-’90s cars in our family, the Mechanic Guy knows us well–as busy as the local shop is, I can call up with just “Hey, Sal, it’s me” and he instantly knows the last problem my car had and asks how it’s doing. I know this should bring me concern–if your mechanic knows you that well, maybe you need a new car–but instead, it makes me feel safe and secure and part of a community. Sal knows my car! I can’t get a new car! Sal’s taking care of this car! He’s my Guy!
The Contractor Guy is a particularly important Guy to cultivate carefully because he spends a lot of time in your house. With you. LIke when you first wake up and come out to pee in your pajamas, he’s already there. You have to kind of be okay with him. If he talks really a lot and traps you in your own house sometime, you just have to be grateful that at least he shares your general politics despite some really random occasional race-bombs that seem to contradict that. And if you’re totally dependent on trusting this Guy, and you really need to believe he likes you and is giving you an honest deal, sometimes you let those bombs slide, which is shameful. When I need to trust the Guy, I start to quote him (not on the race stuff of course, but on whatever he thinks is best to do for the house) and like to drop into conversation how much I trust him and how good of a job I think he’s doing. I desperately need to reassure myself of this constantly and place full confidence in him. The Hubs accused me of being a victim of Stockholm syndrome with this Guy, and I had to concede he was right. I’ll follow the Guy to hold up the bank for the SLA if I think it will result in a reputable job on my windows or my carburetor.
There are other kinds of Guys in everyone’s lives that don’t inspire the same kind of frantic, clinging devotion–the FedEx Guy, for example, or the Recycling Guy. Those are just Helpful Familiar Guys. My brother-in-law has a Wine Guy (I’m in a slightly different, ah, socioeconomic class from that), and I have friends who have their Fish Guy at the market. Those are Luxury Guys. Neither category has the power to threaten your very stability if you don’t have complete faith in their loyalty to you. The Hubs, on the other hand, has a Barber Guy who recently redid the floors in his shop without warning, and when the Hubs drove by and saw the sink and chair taken out and the shop closed down (temporarily, it turned out), his anxiety and distress reached frenzied proportions until he found out what was going on. Of course it did: He thought he was losing his Guy.
The tide can turn quickly between me and the Guy. The Guy whose love and trust I’ve been painstakingly wooing all this time with my false intimacy and compliments and inside jokes can easily betray me with one sloppily installed doorknob, one miscommunication about the way the tree should be taken out of the yard, one unrecovered set of files on the hard drive transfer (okay, so that is worthy of my total breakup and excommunication, and if I confess that I’m writing this post on some weak-ass program called TextEdit because my Geek Squad Guy lost all my word processing software along with all my course files and all my mp3s while upgrading my hard drive yesterday, I’ll probably start to cry, so let’s just go back to the doorknob example). The bottom line is, I need to love the Guy. I place all of my fragile soul in the hands of the Guy, because I cannot do certain important things myself, or even if I can, I don’t trust that I can do it as well as the Guy. Are you the opposite of a Renaissance Man? Gotta getta Guy.
Let Guy=Expert.
(Ok, and you can’t embed video in comments, apparently. Disregard.)
I totally understand your need for the guy, Literacy, except that in my case it’s almost always The Gal. I trust women much more in the medical field – my doctor, ob/gyns (hello! of course!), chiropractor, and acupuncturist are all women. This is true for most professionals I’ve been reliant on, and given a choice, I’ll always opt for the Gal over the Guy. Perhaps it’s that I think that I can relate to them more easily, or that I think that they’ll be more straightforward with me because I’m a woman and they know what it’s like to be talked down to – I assume that we’re sort of in the same boat. I think that I also assume that they’re much more serious about their job because they have to work harder to be taken seriously. Of course, this has backfired, too – I once had a female mechanic, but that relationship went awry because she turned out to be almost as dishonest as some of the male mechanics I’ve dealt with.
I was actually thinking about that sector of professionals and realizing that for every job you mention, I would DEFINITELY choose a Gal (though my Gal-doc recently sold her practice to a Guy who inherited me and he has been fabulous. Not the Ob/Gyn of course!). I think everything about the preferences I list both above and here is totally sexist in some deeply primal way. Just acknowledging.
I feel much the same way, but in the case of My Guy or My Gal, I’m pretty much a bi-sexual.
The one thing I do is allow for the reasonable mark up. If I like them, I’m willing to pay a bit more and even offer additional generosity (no not at the OB). My reasoning: if they are taken care of, they will take care of me. Additionally, if I need them right away (perhaps I notice there is a faulty something or other), they more likely to be happy to help. If I think a cost is too high, I don’t have to get upset. I might say, ‘wow, that’s a lot for me right now, is there anything we can do about that?’ and if there has been a history of generosity, they are more likely to return the spirit.
Just out of High School, a random mechanic got me for a lot of money at the Jiffy Lube. I was naive and uneducated on car stuff and it was before the ease of GOOGLE research. I didn’t know he had got me, except that he was a ‘client’ of my friend’s brother in the pre-medical marijuana days and stories have a way of telling themselves after a bong hit or two. I’d like to think (and need to think) that My People these days would not be so cruel, and if so, wouldn’t brag about it. Plus, My Most Special-Fella is a shrewd MF and instead of thinking I’m incapable of taking care of business like he does, I just thank him for his remarkable skills.
My life is dependent on these guys…and I’ve come to realize that you have to pay for and wait for the trustworthy ones that don’t make you feel like an idiot.