Engineering despair

Dumped my frustration on Steve today. Didn't mean to, but sometimes it just comes out. five and a half weeks ago, we sent our drawings to the engineer for engineering. Engineer Adam seemed like a nice enough guy--lives in the neighborhood, has a couple of young kids, visited the still-smoldering house, seemed to get our situation--but for three weeks after receiving the plans, he keeps telling Steve he's working on them. Then he sets up a meeting at the house , which I attend, with an associate of his who he is "bringing on to help." Loose translation? "I haven't done a damn thing on your project for 3 weeks and now I'm bringing in someone to bail me out."

OK, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. He's not an asshole bullshitting me, he actually got overcommitted, fully intended to get to it but couldn't, and when he realized how in the weeds he was, he threw up a flag for help. I don't know if I believe it, but for this moment, I'll celebrate the innate goodness of humankind.

Whatever the circumstances, at this meeting, the reality becomes quickly clear to me, so I take great pains to reinforce the tick-tock of this project. And I make clear the double-whammy: it's not just the fact that my family is living on a rented bed and drinking from rented glasses on rented chairs, its that as of January 9, 2009, we start paying for This Rented Life to the tune of about $6 grand a month. And that's on top of our mortgage and expenses in our home, call it another $3k. He seems to hear me and promises a 2 week turn around.

Back to the goodness of humankind. Unintended delays happen, sure. He didn't mean to cost me $7500 by dicking me around for 3 weeks. Did he? Did he? Insert Serenity Prayer here. Ooooooommmmmmmmmmmm. 

So here we are, two and a half weeks later, and I may get his work next week.

Here's where I lose my shit. If you lie to me--oops--I mean, cause me an unintended and extremely costly  delay, when you finally get around to picking up my piece of paper, you had better not put it down until you are done. No juggling other jobs, no working bits and pieces, no further delays. I waited in line. I paid my dues. Now deliver. I mean, how many hours could it possibly take to do to my little house whatever it is that engineers do ? 40? 60? 80? 120 hours? I'm going to end up paying these guys something like $6 grand for how many fucking hours exactly? If they worked full time for three weeks, I'd be paying them $50 p/hour, but let me tell you something, there is no fucking way they are putting in that kind of time. I'm going to be generous (here's that fucking goodness of humans shit again) and believe that they are putting in half that, about 60 hours. But at $100 an hour, it takes some kind of fucking gall to delay 3 weeks, cost me an addition $7500 on top of your fee, and then take 3 weeks to do 60 hours work. 

Add in the extra week and a half it's taken to do a week and half's work, and the grand total cost of delay is about $10k. Thanks, Adam. I'll send you my bill.

When is the moment in recorded history when we decided that other people's time is ours to waste? When did respect take flight? Doctors are the worst at this. Why do we bother making a doctor's appointment when the likelihood of the doctor actually seeing us at that time is nill? Doctors decided at some point that their time is more valuable than ours, so go fuck yourself. After one particularly egregious visit, where after waiting 90 minutes I was finally told, after repeated enquiries, that the doctor had in fact left the office on an emergency call 10 minutes earlier, I completely lost it. "When were you planning on telling me?" I fumed. The nurse actually had the gall to be petulant with me, as if I was somehow unreasonable to ask such a question. In the grand Handel tradition of my father, who to his dying, shaky scribbling day, wrote angry complaint letters to major corporations or local politicians or anyone else who pissed him off (another example of a family tendency to look for love in all the wrong places), I wrote the doctor a nasty note and included a bill for my time. He never paid it, but I wrote it off my taxes as a bad debt. 

Take that.

More to the point, the weirdly unique fact of our current situation is that our construction project and our life restoration are inseparable. House and home, as much as I believe they are separate qualities, are in us conjoined facts. We cannot begin to heal the home as long as the house sits dead on its lot. The structure needs sweaty men crawling on it, hammering and plastering their life force back into the denuded skeletal framing before we can psychically feel that we are progressing, that the days of rented placemats and motel artwork will soon be over  (did I mention that they sent rented art along with the rented toaster oven and rented broom?)

Steve and Joe seemed to get this from the beginning, knowing when they took on the job that  they were taking on the responsibility for our lives as well, a far larger task than simply building a house. How astounding. Lesser men would have run.

But subcontractors are a different story. To them, it's just another job, to be managed as best it can, doing a "good enough" job without pissing off too many people. 

Nothing makes us feel more powerless or more despairing. Every day now is a mental slog to twist the mirror's reflection of hopelessness into a stalwart Pilgrim belief in the eventuality of success. But like water from a thick towel, no matter how hard you twist, a bit of liquid bitterness always remains.