DAY OF WRECKING

In the beginning, On August 18th, I gave Schmidt the benefit of the doubt. I thought he wasn't bright, but he knew how to apply brute force to tear things apart. The very first day he was here, he caused about $3500 in damage to the hardwood floors. The picture at right shows a small area of the floor that he damaged by putting down wet carpeting to "protect" the floor. I discovered the carpeting was wet the morning after he started the job when I stepped on it barefoot. I immediately lifted it to see of there were black water stains, and there were.

Schmidt was a new type of creature to me. I didn't conceive of a man who claimed to have expertise in remodeling who didn't take pride in doing good work. Schmidt was even less than an amateur. At first, I thought when I gave him a suggestion about how to do something, he would go home and Goggle it to find out how people did do things. Now I doubt if he has even a clue about how to use a computer. He never submitted his work to the review of knowledgeable practitioners, but thought he was perfectly competent. The people who commented on his work and he seemed to hear were his mother and wife. Consequently, he didn't believe that his incompetence could lead to damage.

I immediately tossed the 3 carpet pieces outside. He had to stumble over them to get into the house when he showed up to continue his wrecking day, which he happily did. I told him the carpeting he put down had caused the damage I pointed out. He had no comment, but carried on with the demolition. I thought that he would do whatever it would take to fix the floor when the bathroom was finished--in another five or six days.

It is difficult to see in the photos, but the dark marks are mostly damage from water, which also destroyed the floor finish.

It was an inauspicious was to begin. 

I DIDN'T WANT TO TELL THIS BACKWARDS

I already told it backwards on Facebutt, except for the analysis of work, ethics, and plumbing history. If I can't figure out a way to get the story right way around, it may be best to start reading from the first post. I also wanted to tell the story of my bathroom with pictures.

Before Schmidt began tiling, I suggested a way to lay tiles to make sure the horizontal line is level. He hadn't demonstrated that he had much more than a clue of how to do what he was attempting. He snapped back with a goofy grin, "there are at least five ways of doing something." To be sure, but there aren't five good ways level tile, and there usually aren't five good ways of doing almost anything. All work benefits from efficiences developed by experience and passed down through community with masters in the field. Schmidt's method of hammering 2 nails into the wall beneath a few unwieldy tiles to keep them from sliding down the wall certainly isn't one. The picture shows his technique for keeping tiles on the horizontal. You can see the nail in the lower left corner. The concept of laying tile out before laying it was totally beyond his ken.

Schmidt is known among his mates who did time with him at Scott County Jail while he waited to go to trial on charges of theft and forgery in 2007 as a big time partier who got high with the owner of a Bettendorf gym. Here he is in a photo by the Quad City Times from a story they did on him in 2005 after his departure from John Deere. My eye keeps traveling from the block in the lower right corner to Schmidt's fur-topped block of a head.

Schmidt looks like a stumpy, stupid David Letterman. Too goofy and too benign to swindle anybody. He came to my office to get his cash deposit to start work. That very day, the offices were full of police detectives who were there to return my brothers tile saws, which were stolen from my garage. The detectives found them at a pawn shop. Don Gano, the detective who trained those detectives, was also down in the hall pressing the flesh with his former chums. Schmidt had to thread his way through them to get to my office. He sat down and prattled on about some priest he remembered from fifteen years ago, and what the building my office is in was like when it was a library. Meaningless prattle intended to convince me that he really did attend St. Ambrose, something I had no reason to dispute.

This an enlargement of his face from the previous photo. It conveys kind of an impression of an affable goof--no brain trust to start with, but with a self-serving bent of mind that easily became deeply ingrained criminal behaviors. What happens to a failed college football hero with minimal academic skills and an overweening sense of male entitlement when life slaps him upside the head, and he can no longer skate on his deceitful charm? What happens when your co-workers are no longer willing to cover up for your incompetence? When your wife is no longer willing to pay for you to party with your cokey crowd of lowlifes? Well, Schmidt never realized any of this had happened to him. He carries on, even now, assuming a social, intellectual, and technological superiority, which in fact he could never have truly had.

Schmidt put some of his knowledge about business to work for him. He exploited the fact that the Quad Cities area still prides itself on being a place where people still do business on a handshake. He knew that it's a standard business practice to ask for a 50% deposit to start work, and to start a job from a basic, straightforward contract. He also knew that contracts are often ignored--at least by big business. Schmidt admixed his odd glimmers--observations about the vulnerabilities of doing business, an insight into how that can be contorted to exploit vulnerable people, experience with the persuasive power of self-structured publicity and how easy it is to create that, a sense of entitlement based in part, if no completely, on a masculine priviledge he felt entitled to, and an addiction to partying and drugs. Eventually, the only realm left in which he could feel the rush of being a male in this world was the drug/party world of illicit drugs and the kind of friends you get when you have access to them.

So, what is this story about? To start with, it's about the paucity of pleasure that comes from pursuing a practice that requires no ethical skill, mistaking yourself for someone with half a brain, and offending labors that you think are beneath you.

THE BATHROOM--THE WHOLE STORY

After Tommy went home, I felt a "malenky bit sad," like Alex did in A Clockwork Orange when he was let out of prison--despite two tense months of remodeling hell, I'd more or less got used to him.

When I bought this house in 2003, it's only bathroom needed to be remodelled, but I never had the money to have it done, although I'd talked with Tommy about it for years. We discussed making a complex shower with multiple shower massage heads to aim at the lower back, shoulders, all the places that ache. I offered him $1000 for the labor, but I never managed to come up with the $1000. Still, Tommy sent his tile saw, tile cutter, and Dremel tool home with me one year. The amount of money was ridiculous, and we got older, and stopped talking about him doing the remodel. Eventually, it just seemed ridiculous that he would do it.

But I should explain why I wanted a remodel--to get a luxurious shower wasn't the reason. The bathroom needed remodeling from the time I bought the house. The window frame was completely rotted. Without a doubt, the room originally had no shower. The house was built in 1940. In the houses my Dad built in the 1960s, it still wasn't yet standard to have a tub and shower. According to the LA Times, "In 1940, only 55% of homes with plumbing had what the government considers a 'complete system': hot and cold running water, a flush toilet and a tub or shower. Sixty years later, 99% of homes had all those features.When the room was adapted to have a shower, the wooden window frame wasn't waterproofed" .


There was only 1/4" badly patched masonite on the plumbing side, and it was particularly bad around the shower. The caulk around the tub was about 1 1/2" thick, but had started to leak in the last couple of years, and the masonite had also started to rot in several places. I kept the window completely taped over with white plastic for years. The sink cabinet wasn't properly installed. Someone had cut a notch out of the door frame to make the countertop fit in the room. Everything was pretty disgusting, although the plumbing worked, but the most disgusting thing was an open cleaning trap in the floor for access to the tub drain. It was about an 8" diameter hole between the tub and toilet that was covered with a steel plate that just sat on the hole.

In August, I found a flyer on my front door advertising the remodeling services of Greg Schmidt, doing business as Pyramid Construction. His logo, a pyramid of course, dominated the design, and there was a feature story by the Quad City Times attached to the services he offered. I asked him why he chose that name for his business, and he didn't seem to know why, but came up with the explanation that Egyptians were great builders. I would never have thought that. Great tomb builders, maybe. Great mathematicians, astrologers, designers, maybe, even architects, but great builders? Pyramid design is a miracle of math, but not of building, even if you believe the propaganda of Ben Hur. The ancient Egyptians built monuments and lived in on dirt floors. 4000 years ago, in the area now called the Stans, Arabs had plumbing. The Romans had plumbing. Greeks and Persians had plumbing. But, Egyptians mostly didn't. More likely, he named his business after the pyramid scheme--in which he snookered old ladies to empty their bank accounts to support his drug habit.

But, he said he was a graduate of St. Ambrose, and he was a Bettendorf boy, claimed his wife worked at John Deere, and he was the primary caregiver of their 3 kids. He gave me an estimate of $3400 for the bathroom tear out and remodel. I was to provide the fixtures and tiles.

He called me a day later and said he'd do it for $2900 because he was between jobs. I said I'd think about it. I talked to Therese about it, and she suggested asking him to do it for $2400, thinking maybe he come down to maybe $2600 or $2700. I decided to try it, and unfortunately getting involved in a scheme distracted me from doing due diligence, which would have shown immediately that Schmidt was an unrepentant crook. When he called up next, I asked if he'd do it for $2100, and he shocked me by saying yes. I'd already been conned. He still needed a deposit of $1700 to get started to buy materials with--that was half of what he'd originally quoted, and all the money he needed at the moment, for whatever reason. According to his contract, I was to pay another $350 after the tile was up, and the final payment when the fixtures were in place.

Therese was here when he started, and commented that he seemed to have an IQ no higher than 80. The first day he worked he sprained his ankle getting the tub out--him and his drug buddy workers. It was an old cast iron tub. The standard way to get rid of them is to take a sledge hammer to them so you can take it out in buckets. He claimed the tub weighed 450 pounds, an exaggeration of about 100 pounds. Still, a mighty heft for 3 skinny addicts. The weekend Therese was here, we were without hot water. I managed to get him to take a call on Sunday, and he came and declared that the hot water heater was broken. It clearly was not. Tommy installed it new just a couple of years ago. It has a 10-year warranty, and Tommy installed it. As he said, he knew that everything HE did was right. The most obvious thing to suspect was the last guy who did something to the plumbing.

I had suggested that he break it up with a sledgehammer, but he ignored that and every other suggestion I made that would have made the job come out better. He drilled a hole in his finger when he put the subfloor down, and showed it off, playing for pity, which was already in short supply. Couple of days later he called and said he hadn't been in to work on the bathroom, and couldn't come back for quite awhile because a 15' beam fell on his head and knocked him out.

One lonely weekend, 5 weeks after he'd started working on my bathroom, after he repeatededlyfailed to show up, demanded a second payment well before he even began laying tile, and the shockingly inferior quality of the work he had done, I finally gave up my hope that I would soon have a remodeled bathroom. I accepted the fact that this guy absolutely didn't have the ability to finish it, and had every reason to continue to gouge me for money--as long as I held on to hope that he would finish the job, I was vulnerable to his repeated robbery.

I have an empathic appreciation of tradesmen. I grew up in a household where everything worked, nothing squeaked, and the house was a fully, smoothly functioning system. My first job entailed working with union carpenters, electricians, and painters, and I developed a deep appreciation for good problem-solvers, and men who were determined to do a good job, even though the demands of business worked against that. Although most of my employers were nothing short of criminals, I worked for one company in which business was practiced as an ethical concern central to the longevity of prosperity. I learned a lot about how business should be done from that company. It was run by three, and sometimes four, second generation Irish brothers from the South Side of Chicago. Jack was in charge of sales. He often intoned the complaint, "How come we always have time to do things over, but we never have time to do things right?"

Ed was entrusted with finance was vice president, and performed his job conscientiously, putting a fair price on the product, managing corporate finances, and making certain every employee had a share in the profit pie.

Tom, the only useless brother, was the corporate president. He spent most of his time sleeping at his desk. When he wasn't asleep, he rambled through the shop, insulting better men than him who endured his insults only because he had the power to fire them. He had no function in the business. He was a millstone. He was supposed to be in charge of manufacturing, but he never gave his job a moment of thought. He was the youngest of the brothers, and clearly the most stupid. His position was an obvious bone thrown to an incompetent younger brother who needed watching over by his more competent older brothers. His putative status kept him, for the most part, out of the way of doing business. The business didn't need him. The shop could run itself. It had a foreman more than capable of keeping the manufacturing going, as long as Tom was deterred from interfering too much.

Except for Tom, I respected these guys, including most of the men who worked in the shop. Most of them were good at their jobs, took pride in them, and learned their trades through the union apprentice system. That system is much maligned for charges of nepotism and corruption, because you can buy and partially bypass the apprentice system. In my experience, though, when you worked with a union tradesman, you could be confident you were working with someone who was minimally competent. Four years of apprenticeship is nothing to sneeze at. Rising through the levels of apprentice, journeyman, master honors the medieval guild tradition of passing on the skills of a trade or craft through learning in community, conscientious practice, and submitting oneself to the standards of a trade. That means you have committed yourself to a system of holding your work to a standard that is judged by those with expertise in the field, and have improved their work to meet, or if possible, exceed a standard.

That kind of ethic is what I took as standard in a tradesman or craftsman, and what Schmidt completely fails to appreciate. That is what angered me about him. He assumes that the trades are inferior to his meaningless white collar experience and degree in business, that tradesmen make good money for grunt work that anybody can do, and that he could just hang out a shingle pronouncing expertise he didn't even know exists.

Before he began tiling, I suggested a way to lay tiles to make sure the horizontal line is level. He hadn't demonstrated that he had much more than a clue of how to do what he was attempting. He snapped back with a goofy grin, "there are at least five ways of doing something." To be sure, but there aren't five good ways level tile, and there usually aren't five good ways of doing almost anything. All work benefits from efficiences developed by experience and passed down through community with masters in the field. Schmidt's method of hammering 2 nails into the wall beneath a few unwieldy tiles to keep them from sliding down the wall certainly isn't one. The concept of laying tile out before laying it was totally beyond his ken.

TOUR MAP

This is the trip so far. Take off May 21, 2010. As you can see, the first leg of the journey has been cancelled because of Facebutt unfriending.

DISQUISITION ON THE DISPOSITION OF STRINGS & THINGS

Here's a question: when you give something to someone, is it ethical to hold on to an interest in it? Should it matter what that person does with it?

If you give something away, do you have the right to have an emotional reaction if the person does something with it you don't like?

If I buy you a new spring wardrobe, and next winter you toss it all out because it's all last season's stuff, am I entitled to be pissy? Can I reasonably expect to have a stake in whether you burn the wardrobe in a heap in the backyard, take it to Goodwill, wear it out, or pass it on to your sibling? It seems to me that it is more decent to give a thing and give up any interest in it. But, I might give a living thing, such as a puppy, to a person, and not give up my interest in and expectation that the puppy will be taken care of appropriately. The sentient "thinG" has value as a feeling creature, and I wouldn't want to squander that value. For the same reason, I wouldn't give something of value to a wastrel. But, what if the scoundrel wastrel doesn't have the same value system I do? Do I have the right to punish the wastrel, or can I only consider myself warned not to cast pearls before swine again?

If I receive a gift I don't like, am I entitled to toss it, give it to someone who will appreciate it, never wear it, or put it under the car engine to catch oil drips? Part of the value of the gifts I receive is the care taken in the selection, so I feel a bond to the person who gave me the gift that has to be honored by properly tending the gift.

That's why the corgi lamp Bernie gave me is such a problem. I have used the lamp, but it's too cute for me. I've hung onto it for years out of a sense of obligation to Bernie. After all, as she just explained to me she's my friend because we've been friends for more than 40 years, and that's too long to just "give it up for any reason," suggesting that ditching me must have crossed her mind. I would like to get over this corgi phase, but here is the lamp, and despite my embarrassment for putting a gift on my divestiture list, should anyone want to claim it, I will part with it, and endure Bernie's displeasure. It is kinda cute, though, isn't it?

When I was about 17, my mother got angry at my fast cousin Joel Ann, and returned an ironstone pitcher and bowl set Joel Ann had given her. It was done to hurt Joel Ann, and, I'm sure, to try to get Joel Ann out of her brain. Joel Ann must have carefully selected the set for my mother. It was meant to go with an old Eastlake set my mother had bought. Joel Ann probably couldn't afford it. It had a lot of symbolic exchange value, and it was probably all spent in the intense emotions of its being given and given back. Mother and Joel Ann made up, but the set never reappeared in our house, and I never saw it at Joel Ann's house, either.

My dad gave me a car once. I was about 40, and it was an old serial killer car, but a good car. I drove it for many years. It was the car I drove before the one I've got now, which is 13-years old. After I'd had it for a couple of years, Dad told me that he intended for me to trade it in or sell it or something. I thought he gave it to me to drive, and that's what I did with it. Trading a good car in would have been a problem for me because then I wouldn't want to trade a good car in for a bad one, and I don't know how to buy a car. I thought I was doing the right thing, and it turned out that I misused his gift.

I've made an effort in this Divestiture to offer things that are emotionally value-free. And most things are--take the bolo tie, for instance--the corgi lamp has strings. I can part with it, but the strings go with it, even though Bernie probably forgot she gave it to me.

But take it: it's a gift.

Lullaby for Lillie

Dogs are supposed to want to please their owners, but Lillie never indulged me this. Since she came to us at age 6-weeks, Lillie has had a sense of entitlement that rivals that of a new millennial coed. She just wants to please herself, and has always been vocal in expressing displeasure. They all have such different personalities, these dogs. I always swore that Lillie was a changeling because she was supposed to be out of the same bitch that whelped Jack, but she doesn't seem related to him. She's a little crooked, too. I mean physically--not as symmetrical as Jack or the mutts.

I always thought Lillie would live longer than Jack, because she's a year younger. She's smaller. Jack is something of a giant for the breed, and smaller things live longer in general. I can't figure out if she's 9 or 10. I got her a year after I got Jack, and I got Jack a few days after my mother died, which must have been in 1999 because I remember staying up in the house alone to see 2000 come in. My sister's clan were huddled in their hovels waiting for the world to end, and I wanted to be awake just in case. All the grains and stuff they hoarded--I don't know what happened to that. They planned to drink my niece's pool, although they hoarded water, too. They may have been planning to bathe in it, too. And it just seems that mom was dead then. The horror of knowing their plans would have been too much for an old woman. Surely she was dead then because there would have been a great commotion if she'd lived to see G.W. Bush appointed president. Ah yes, I remember being awfully grateful that she died without having to see another Republican president. So, Lillie came in the new millennium. She's nine.

The corgi lifespan is usually 11 to 14 years. But, Lillie has developed health problems. She got Addison's disease within the last year. I thought she's had cataracts for a long time, but now she's nearly blind. I don't think she'll last many more years. The blindness came suddenly. At Thanksgiving she could still play catch. Now, by Christmas, she can't find a toy to play with, or follow its arc, although she's still interested. She can't find her food dish, or figure out where her treat is when I give them treats. I touch her snout with it. If it falls to the floor she can't find it. She's afraid to go further than the porch, and she used to look for any opportunity to bolt out the front door and run the neighborhood. Her and Eddie. Once they picked up a straggler. I found them a few blocks away strutting down the middle of the road.

She's more dependent now, so she's less of a bitch. She has a shrill, annoying bark, and used to complain a lot. She doesn't complain as much now. She must have to keep her mind on stumbling around safely. She doesn't tear out the door to rassle the garden hose any more. She can't find it. Ought to save me a fortune on garden hoses. She still attacks the vac, but if I pick up the nozzle and move it 3 feet away, she's lost.

I got her as a pet for Jack, and he's always been perfectly content with her. He was downright avuncular when she was a puppy, but now he'll snap at her for food. He was overjoyed to get her. He would wait for her to eat before he ate when she was a puppy, and he let her drag him around by the collar. All day long. She was just a mite when she came to live with us. Her baby neediness freaked me out. I had to take sedatives. Jack kept her quiet at night. She was smart. It took a week to teach Jack how to use the doggy door, but the first day Lillie was home, I caught her watching Jack go out the door. The next minute, the tiny bean scrambled up the sill and out the doggy door, and she went in and out constantly. In to piss, out to destroy flowers, dig holes, tear up the garden hose. She was easy to housebreak, but perverse. I had a whole patio full of people over, and we all watched her go in the doggy door, just to the side of the glass opposite us, and squat.

She fell in the pool when she was a couple of months old. I was in my office and Jack started barking. He never barked much, and that bark sounded different. I couldn't pull the window cover back, and I tried to ignore it, but decided the barking was too odd. When I got outside she was desperately paddling for life right in the middle of the deep end. Who knows how she fell in. I fished her out with a leaf net, and held her in my lap in a towel for about an hour, as long as she trembled. That was the first time she'd ever let me hold her. She always wriggled away from you, and didn't care to be petted. After that, I removed the doggy door.

I didn't overwhelmingly like her, but I always thought of her as Jack's pet, so she had to be granted some latitude because Jack likes her. She has always tended to get nice when she's sick, and want to be held. Once, when she got the damned corgi colitis, I held her while I lay down on the couch waiting for $300 worth of medication to kick in. Jack brought one of her toys to her to try to interest her in being her old self. He nuzzled it onto the couch. She disappointed him that moment, but came back soon enough. Jack has always kept her ears clean. He still grooms her, but she doesn't return the favor. I don't know what's wrong with her. She is the only dog he ever cared about. He hates Eddie and is indifferent to Kendall. And even now with Lillie, if she gets in his way, and now she's blind she gets in everybody's way all the time, she better watch out.

But Lillie is pathetic when she's sick, and she's kind of pathetic now that she's blind. Her world has gotten much smaller. I have come to have empathy for her because she gets frightened in storms, and seeks protection curled against me or laying on my feet. She's outre most of the time, but when the going gets tough, Lillie gets needy. She remains underfoot.