No news is bad news

I’ve tried to get in touch with my contractors in Hawai`i over the weekend. I have a quote for the screens outstanding (anodized or painted?) and wanted to wish Brad a happy birthday on Sunday. Called several times, left messages, heard nothing back.

I know the pattern – not the first time it happens. Whenever there are bad news to report, I hear nothing from them. What could it be this time? Most likely the plumber can’t come to get final for another couple of weeks, and they don’t want to tell me.

This is more than annoying, it is irresponsible. Everything good that man does for the house is undermined by all the poor planning, poor communication, arbitrary action. He said he waited for three weeks for the electrician to get his rough-in inspection, just to find out that the inspector never got the request. Three weeks?

On a Monday after I got there, we had a huge fallout. He had spent the entire morning getting an inspection ordered, and I told him that was a very foolish thing to do – that he could have told me to organize that. He started yelling at me that I was the most ungrateful person in the world, that he had spent so much money on the house, that he was going to make a pittance on his work, while I was going to gain more than a million in equity.

There is something deeply socialist about that sentence, something that I recognize from Italy (indeed a Catholic socialist country): of course, the reason I can afford the house is that I have worked like a madman since I moved to America. I saved up enough money to buy a house under value. His work is not “adding a million dollars in equity,” anybody’s work would have done the same thing.

He’s certainly done an artist’s job at putting the house together, but frankly I didn’t ask for art, I wanted a house. He’s not realizing that the money his delays are costing me is cutting into what I can give him. At some point, it’s about time to forget pretty and just get the job done.