Mid-60's Retro Gothic Dirt and the Brown Phlegm Kazoo

Today I delivered a bed frame to one of those houses that is probably worth a million or two, but would be worth quite a bit more if it wasn't decorated in mid-60's retro gothic dirt and didn't smell like pee.

And why is it that people who need hospital beds, usually because of a lack of mobility, never live on the ground floor? I had to lug 325 pounds of stuff down a long flight of stairs to the front door, then up a long flight of stairs to get to the bedroom. There really should have been a catwalk from the street to the bedroom window.

As I constructed the bed I had to deal with 3 things:
1) The pee smell. It's hard to put something together while I'm wishing I had a urinal cake to help clear the air.
2) A barrage of questions from the creepy brothers, sons of the patient.
3) Some serious B.O. coming off creepy brother #1. Every time he moved his arm I felt like switching careers to become a urinal cake.

After I had the bed put together, I explained to the creepy brothers how everything worked. They seemed so eager to know all the ins and outs of the bed frame while I was building it, but after I was done explaining it to them they chided me for not explaining it to the patient, who was sitting outside on the deck, and was apparently not planning on coming back in for the lesson.

So I moved my explanation out to the deck, which was difficult in that I was explaining the operation of the hospital bed which I generally do while standing next to the bed. I basically had to explain everything in theory with no visual aids or demonstrations. And to make matters worse I was trying to understand the questions the patient was asking while the creepy brothers were having an argument on the other side of the open glass door. This might not have been a big deal if the guy didn't talk using a throat kazoo. Throat kazoos are not made for loud speech.

When I had everything set up and all the pertinent questions answered, and some odd non-pertinent questions from creepy brother #1 answered, the patient started coughing up big gobs of brown phlegm through his kazoo and wiping them up with an ever more saturated piece of toilet paper. The phlegm is neither here nor there. I see gross stuff all the time. But as I was leaving the guy started to put out his hand for a farewell handshake. I didn't want to be rude, but I was not about to get brown kazoo phlegm on my ungloved hand.

As I made my out of the house creepy brother #1 decided he would walk me to my van. He asked several more questions which were only vaguely related to the delivery, explained how to get back to the main road (go down the hill and take the left fork, not hard) and then offered to ride with me until we got back to town. I gave my most hearty no thanks and drove away hoping against hope that I never have to go back on a service call.