It’s hard to imagine a worse situation than your furnace breaking down as a massive snowstorm is expected to hit your town, especially the day after you brought your newborn baby home from the hospital.
But that’s exactly what happened to Marie and Jesse Hulscher, from Willmar, Minnesota after Marie gave birth to the couple’s second child, Adler, on 22 February.
Jesse called Magnuson Sheet Metal with the hopes that they could fix the furnace quickly and that the repair wouldn’t break the budget.
“Instantly I panicked,” Jesse told KSMP-TV. “I have a 2-year-old here, a newborn coming home in a couple days, and this was before the big potential snowstorm.”
Willmar is a small community of about 20,000 people.
Magnuson Sheet Metal has been around since 1978 and is still going strong by catering to the needs of its customers. The company showed on that cold winter day that its claims of exceptional service were true.
“He said, ‘The fan’s not working, the furnace isn’t working, my wife is in the hospital, we just had a baby yesterday,’” Magnuson co-owner Craig Aurand said. “I just said take it easy, we’ll be right there.”
He was a man of his word. As Jesse Hulscher recalled, it was about 20 minutes from the call to the arrival of a service technician.
The repairs were completed well in time for the baby to come back to a nice, warm home.
But the bill? Anyone who’s ever had a furnace repair in the winter knows that emergencies don’t come cheaply.
“I opened it up and looked at the receipt and it said, ‘No charge, take care of the new baby,’” Jesse said.
His wife, Maria, also was stunned.
“I was like, ‘What? No, this can’t be real.’ And he’s like, ‘I know; I can’t believe it either,’” she said.
Magnuson Sheet Metal has a policy of not charging families in need or for small jobs that happen on holidays.
“We didn’t do it for the PR; we just did it to be good people. That’s it. Just to be nice to these people,” Aurand said. “That’s what this is about.”
Watch the video report below for more details:
