We bought an old run-down house in the city and decided to fix it up. Not rocket science, right? I mean, it's just a friggin' house. It's not something exotic or weird or unusual or complicated, right? I've been living in houses all my life. It's not a space capsule, it's an old house. Some wood, some glass, some bricks, right?
WRONG! You see, window guys don't work on doors. Door guys don't work on windows. Gutter guys don't work on roofs. Roofers don't do gutters. Painters just paint. Painters will scrape, but will be pissed off about it. Some painters won't go up high because that's roofer territory, and they're doing you a favor if they paint around a window, because window guys do windows. Window guys don't paint.
We have to do some brickwork on the front of the house. I see a guy putting some concrete down on the neighbor's steps, and decide to ask him about the brickwork. Turns out that maybe he does brick, maybe not, because he's a concrete guy, he's not a brick guy. But he'll do me the favor of looking at the bricks. So he comes over to look at some loose bricks. He says that before he'll fix the friggin' bricks, a waterproofer guy has to waterproof. There's a window nearby that is surrounded by wood, so you have to have a carpenter come out and replace the wood so that the window guy can put the glass back in, because the wood might be structural. Are you getting the picture here? All these different guys have different sub-contractor licenses, and a window guy doesn't do doors.
It's all figured out to be as complex and as costly as possible, so that it will employ the maximum number of people. You should've heard the concrete guy talk. You had to be there. He's talking a mile a minute about the chemical bonding agents in the concrete and how he can't set the concrete at below a certain temperature, at the same time he's telling me how modern the concrete is. We're talking about a concrete guy who I met putting concrete down on three concrete steps. He has to get a special license to be a concrete guy, and his license is maybe the same as the brick guy's but maybe not. Pretty soon you'll have to get a Master's Degree in Concretology to put concrete down on a few friggin' steps. If you don't have one, you won't be able to put concrete down on your own friggin' steps, much less anyone else's.
The concrete guy can't put concrete down at below a certain temperature, because the concrete won't set at below a certain temperature (and he actually told me the exact temperature but I will make it easy for you: WINTER) so it's all figured out that he collects unemployment during the winter months, during which time he goes to Florida. However, this is MODERN concrete, which is a lot better than the old-fashioned concrete used when this house was built. That's what he said.
They try to scare the daylight out of you. They try to make you think that your house is gonna fall over tomorrow if you don't hire them immediately. Of course, they're also backed up for the next six months so you're lucky if they can get to you. I remember one guy came over and basically told us that our back porch was gonna fall off tomorrow if we didn't get it fixed. That was a more than a decade ago and it hasn't fallen off yet. This concrete guy was going on about how the stones in the foundation could contract and expand and break. These stones have been here for a hundred years already and will be around longer than I will.
I forgot to mention that it's TWO concrete guys putting down concrete on three friggin' steps. The guy who's talking a mile a minute is the boss; he's got an employee as well. The guy who's talking a mile a minute is supervising the other guy who's actually swabbing the concrete on the steps. The guy doing the supervising probably has a Doctorate in Concretology while the other guy swabbing the concrete on the steps merely has a Master's. I was fascinated by talking to the two fellows, as they both were articulate and so I got a picture of how the whole subcontractor bamboozle works. Eventually however they said that they didn't want to talk anymore, because they were getting paid per hour and didn't want to use up too much time talking to me. Of course, with two of them working on three steps, they could've talked to me some more if they'd wanted to. The more I got them to talk, the more I could see how the entire thing worked to the homeowner's disadvantage. I assured them that I was confident that they'd finish the three steps in no time, and sure enough when I got back from lunch the steps were done.
Mad Raunter
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