They will have left it in roughly the same condition as the Visigoths left Rome in. When you open the refrigerator, life-threatening molds will try to grasp you with their tentacles. But do not judge the previous owners too harshly; remember that when they left, they were in the same subhuman, totally amoral moving-induced state of mind that you were in when you moved out of your house without so much as a backward glance at the inch-thick layer of crud that got baked onto the sides of your former oven when the lasagna exploded.

The important thing to understand is that all these things are done by the same person. Yes, homeowners: there is only one Hookup Man in the entire world, sort of like Santa Claus, and as you can imagine, he is very, very busy. This is why, when you call up the telephone company to find out when the Hookup Man will visit your house, they cannot pinpoint the exact time. “Right now,” they will say, “it looks like it will probably be an even-numbered year.” In fact most people have never seen the Hookup Man, and some say he is only a legend. But many of us believe in him, because we have seen the jolly pranks and tricks he likes to play, our favorite being the one where we have been waiting for him in our house for days, and finally we must go out for food, and the instant we are gone he comes bounding out of the bushes, where he has been hiding, and leaves a cheerful note on our door that says: “Sorry We Missed You!” Ha ha! Such a card, that Hookup Man!