Life with Iron Giants III: The Toad and Mrs. Caseres

Garbage is expensive.  When you get into home renovation you realize that you may have missed many opportunities to become wealthy, none of which have to do with office work or other similar white-collar professions.   And one of the quickest way to riches is to advertise or pick up work from Craig's List.  Itinerant handymen who drink on the job get $50.00 an hour, skilled tradesmen (and they are mostly men) command much more....even the guy who picked up the backyard full of trash in an old truck and took it to the city dump got $3,000.00 from us and he probably sold most of the metal to a scrap dealer in the bargain.  I don't think a college education and twenty years clawing my way up the corporate ladder ever netted that much in my take-home packet and even though, according to my sister, my income put me in the top 20% of professional women.

As you can see by the 'before' photos our house required a herculean effort to restore it to liveability.  And at every step we were confronted with the decision to go with the Craig's List guy who was cheaper (read less reliable) or pony up money we didn't have for licensed professionals (who also turned out to be unreliable).

All of which wouldn't have been half as bad if we hadn't had to deal with incompetent nincompoops in the building department of City Hall in the bargain. To be fair, building and safety department guys are a crap-shoot.  Some are awfully nice and some are awfully off-their-rocker insane with various versions of Napoleon complexes that they live out fully on unsuspecting innocents like us.  Give a guy authority and a rule book and something snaps in their brain.  I think it's that absolute power corrupts thing in action which tells you that we human beings aren't hard to figure out when it comes right down to it.

Meet the Homeowner-Builder, aka The Easy Mark

Those of us who do not have a contractor doing the work (long story) are called homeowner builders and employees of the building department who can't beat their wives or kick their dogs love us. We aren't like the hardened contractors who come in with their dirt-encrusted boots, meaty hands, and don't mess with me attitude.  We are polite, respectful, and they assume we are as dumb as cows.  So they wait until they see us sidle in the door with our plans and our clean fingernails and they get all the frustrations they've had dealing with ornery (and knowledgeable) professionals out on us.

Enter my nemisis, whom we shall call Toad of Toad Hall.

My husband, Bob, who is a lot more patient than I am, first encountered Toad, or Mr. Toad as he preferred to be called at our local planning department.  We were already frustrated and picking the lint out of our pockets after being cleaned out and defrauded by our contractor, who left the job site fully-paid but half done (much of it discovered later).  The only thing he left us besides shoddy work was his beat-up straw hat which I took great delight in stomping on and then letting the dog poop into.  

Rather than trust another professional we decided to supervise the work ourselves and off we went to the building and construction department to sort out our mess and to get moving again with (hopefully) more trustworthy subcontractors.  It became my job to supervise the work and dealing with the building & safety office was the first order of business.  We'd had a very nice senior building inspector come to our house and give us a list of things that needed to be done again (only better) and we needed some engineering amendments to our plans in order to proceed. Bob had gone over to the building department with our first attempt to address these concerns, met Mr. Toad and come away with another list of things to do before getting a sign-off. Try at any cost to get anyone to help you but the toad, my husband warned me, but sadly fate always seem to intervene.

Mr. Toad was the supervisor at this particular office and I call him this because in memory no other image comes up to supplant the more human version I'm sure he must be.   Though I had never been formally introduced, the moment I entered the office I knew without a doubt to against whom Bob had warned me about.  He was loud.  He was a bumpy grey mound in a blue checked shirt with a mop of Brillcreamed hair. He was officious, and he picked his nose.  

"Next!"

My number came up and I lost the who-get's-the-nice-guy-next-to-him lottery.

I spread the plans out before me, along with my well-prepared notes, engineering amendments, drawings, and the list prepared as requested.

Mr. Toad looked them over and started jabbing at various places.

"What's this?" he asked, peevishly.

"The engineer's amendments as you requested, along with his stamp."

"Oh, no, no, this will not work!"  He was pushing his glasses up his nose and getting ready to dismiss me.

"I'm sorry?" I asked, the blood draining from my face.

"You'll have to go back to the engineer," he said as if this were rather obvious.

Not the guy who was more elusive than Howard Hughes......it had taken two weeks just to get theses amendments signed, sealed and delivered.

"I don't understand..." I said in my friendliest voice.

"He didn't draw a cloud-shape around his call-outs."

"Huh?"  I was honestly confused.

"C-l-o-u-d" he repeated as if I were a six-year old.

"But he's drawn a circle around them," I offered, still not getting it.  

He pulled out a pencil and with it poised over the paper, asked me, "Shall I show you?" and before I could answer, he drew a little curly shaped sample over the circle the engineer had drawn.

Seeing I wasn't getting anywhere on this issue I pushed the list of neatly typed amendments he'd requested Bob put together as an addendum to the plans.  

"What about this?"

"That's not what I asked for either," he said, without further explanation.

"But....."

"Sorry," he said making it clear he was anything but. 

"But what do you want, then?" I suspect my voice was becoming a teeny bit less cooperative.

"I told your husband."

"But this is what you said you wanted...."

"I never said that."  Never mind he didn't offer up the correct instructions.  Just stared at me through his bottle glasses with pursed lips.

And that folks is when the wall finally hit me and to my acute embarrassment  a teeny bit of water begin to leak out of the corner of my eyes, unbidden, unwanted.   I should point out that in all the years I've dealt with difficult clients, bosses who yelled, or the occasional nasty co-workers I have never, never, ever cried in my professional life.  Now I was reduced to this show of shameful blubbering frustration and I could feel the eyes of the contractors sitting behind me boring into my head.  All became silent.

Mr. Toad stared at me for a second, pushed his chair back and said very,very, very loudly,

"Excuse me Mrs. Caseres, but if you can't control yourself this interview is terminated."  

"I....I'm sorry."  The leakage stopped immediately and disappeared as if in reverse-footage. Where it went is a mystery.  

I took a deep breath and collected myself.  

"It's just that we are trying to do everything you asked of us and I need to know what to do now," I said with respectful acquiescence even though part of me wanted to punch his lights out.

"Make the clouds," he said again.  And burped. 

"Okay," I said, "I will take care of this right away." 

Then he saw that I was sufficiently mollified, grovelling as I was in his presence, and then he became strangely jovial.

"You know, Mrs. Caseres, that we are here to make sure you do the work properly so that everything will turn out just right for your new house.  We wouldn't want it falling down in an earthquake, now.  Ha, Ha!"

"Of course, I understand perfectly," I said, and got up, bowing as I left.  

It's the clouds.  They made all the difference as I look back, so thankful that I spent another several days tracking down the engineer and driving across town to have him trace over the circles into cloud shapes while he grumbled about the absurdity of something that wasn't in the code book no matter how hard you looked.

Saved by the clouds.  It's all rather mystical.