shakers, movers, and big bo's

So the shakers is in honor of the Hayward fault wrestling around and waking me up, and then yesterday morning striking again while I was sitting in a rolling desk chair. I think rolling desk chairs amplify the shaking. I hustle myself back from World Headquarters (the office at John's house) to the shop so I can get back to finishing the key bushings on my Bo. I have a love/hate relationship with key bushings, they should not be that difficult a task but there are many factors. To name a few: the key pin size, the felt thickness, the glue consistency, the depth of the bushing, the personal preferences of the person who follows you. And the fact that I have never had to do the next step, I don't fully understand my actions. I'm "jonesing" for that task, which maybe a mistake. Anyway, I get to the shop and it is filled with extra people (not to mention we have more pianos than usual setup on the floor). And one of those people is John, who is extremely capable of diverting me in my pursuit of task completion. John has a new Iphone and he wants access to our wireless. And our wireless was setup by Steve, who was angry at ATT that day, and has no idea of the password and the clue for the password is "I hate ATT". Yeah, well so do most people. And the router is different from ours at home, and all others I have encountered in past lives, so I'm struggling a bit. I resort to the reset button. Giving the warning that if we loose all internet service, I am not responsible. Time passes, passwords are reset, and nada, the wireless will not connect. John gives up, Steve gives up and guess what it is lunch time?
Glue pot bubbling away for nothing.
Lunch, Chinese, not bad, back to the shop. And what's this? An extremely large full size moving van parked in front of the front door. What another piano? And these are furniture movers, not piano movers. Scary. And the piano needs to be setup. For those of you unfamiliar with moving grand pianos, they are put on skids and moved on their sides. This piano has come from Connecticut and the movers were two elderly black men from the south, who were extremely amusing, and had spent time in jazz clubs in NYC. So they had some good stories, but thank the gods Rhys supervised them in setup. Before they had completely pulled away, our usual movers, the Irish contingent were backing up to the door (our door is big, but not big enough for a convergence of movers). What is going on? My unused glue pot, keeps bubbling. Now a piano is leaving at least. But there needs to be a major shift, and we bribe (yes, money exchanged hands) to accomplish this. Okay, they leave. I bush maybe four keys (and remember Bo has 97, not 88) while listening to band saw, table saw, and grinder. Then the extra person in the shop has run out of work to do, so I'm called in to find something for him to do.Okay, four more keys, and guess what it's cartoon hour!
At 4:00 pm. I have actually completed my task, I think. When I find a key laying apart from the others. I think I was scraping the old leather out of the key button the day before when the phone rang and I put it aside. I now count to make sure I have 97 keys. I do. And I get the approval as to depth and thickness, and I'm not bleeding, although many fresh razor blades were used in this job. But now I have to corner the approver (that would be Steve) to give me more direction as to how to proceed with key frame cleaning etc, to move this project along, as he is leaving for a couple of days. And I am trying to consolidate key frame and keys before I loose or break anything.
Thursday morning
I arrive at the shop with Douglas playing the piano. It is just the two of us. I polish pins, and work on the wireless again. Quietly two more shop mates arrive, no panics, no movers. By 3:30 this afternoon, the Bo keys and keyframe are one unit, the wireless is working and I go off to yoga. Although we did skip cartoon hour.