callbacks

[Avery Todd]

Ron,

Thanks for actually posting something piano related. Sorry (not really) bit 
I'm on a tear tonight!

Avery

At 10:07 PM 03/16/03 -0600, you wrote:
>"My A below middle C doesn't sound right. Could you come back and check it 
>for me?"
>
>Against ridiculous odds, this one was actually in the neighborhood instead 
>of nine hundred miles away like they usually are. I had tuned for her a 
>couple of times before, at five or six year intervals, so I wasn't 
>expecting anything too terrible after only two days.
>
>When I had gone to the house to tune it earlier in the week, she wasn't 
>home, but left the door open and a note to go on in. The "piano" was 
>nicely un-buried, and had been draggggged out into the middle of the room 
>- necessitating the moving of half the living room furniture, which had 
>also been done. Getting started, I found it was a reasonably even 30 cents 
>or so low, even the bass. A string (straddling two unisons) was missing in 
>the high treble, and I remembered that we had decided last time that 
>discretion was the better part of cowardice and opted to leave it low. So 
>I split the difference of pitch in various sections and tuned it to that. 
>A Lester spinet. Awful thing. All wild strings and wretched noises. I left 
>a bill with a note saying that since I wasn't sure why the piano was out 
>from the wall, I'd left it there.
>
>Two days later, responding to the call, I found the piano back in place 
>and the living room furniture back snug in it's individual carpet craters. 
>Checked the A. It fit right in with everything else. "It's flat", she 
>said, humming to illustrate. "well, it's in tune with everything else", I 
>said, "but I'll change it if you want". So I did. Pulled it up until she 
>liked the sound of it, and took it down and back up until I found the spot 
>that was good enough to suit her, and the least far off from everything 
>else that I could get away with. Tuned the unison, and closed up. She 
>sings, you see, and her ear is very sensitive to pitch deviations. Good. 
>I'm glad I could make her happy and get the check. Another happy day in 
>the trenches.
>
>"The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast."
>                       -- Oscar Wilde --
>
>Ron N
>
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