A Little Slice of Hell

or, "Why I Hate My Job And Badly Deserve To Win The Lottery".

Have you ever said, "I don't make NEARLY enough money to put up with this shit!"? Have you ever said it like every 20 minutes? Have you ever said it like every 20 minutes for five solid days? Hell is making my job hell. And don't those who suffer deserve some measure of compensation for all they have been through?

I have worked in this business for 20+ years. I am feared and despised by more companies than I can count. Superintendents have showered me with flowers and other gifts in an effort to appease me. I have made grown men weep. I have seen construction projects that were epic fuck-ups. Projects that I'd be afraid to let my family walk into for fear that the building would collapse and kill them. I have worked on projects built over toxic waste dumps. I have worked projects where homeless people were relocated and refused to go quietly into that good night, coming back over and over and over again, destroying the work we'd done the day before. I have worked projects where owners went out of business in the middle and you have to figure out how you're going to finish the job. I have worked LOTS of projects that were in litigation while they were being built. I have worked projects where men have, quite literally, died. More than once. And yet.

Hell is the project that will not die. The Undead project. There is some horrific supernatural force beyond my control that will not allow this project to be finished. It is maddening.

My rep as "The Closer" in tatters. I am the one who handles the projects that no one else can handle. Me. And yet.

For a while, I approached it as a personal mission. Uttering such serious smack as "I will not allow this, or any, project to best me!". Hah. At this point, I'd just like to know to whom I should be crawling to tender my submissive "Uncle". I am soooooo ready to withdraw from the field. I wear a white flag to work every day. Not the SAME white flag. That wouldn't be sanitary. And, sure I accessorize it a little differently and wear my hair a little differently. Yet the fact that I'm draped in a symbol of surrender seems to go mostly unnoticed. Except for a couple people shouting "TOGA!" and singing "Louie, Louie", I don't think anyone cares.

I took a few vacation days a couple weeks ago. And while I was off, my bosses agreed to a meeting with the residents in Hell. A meeting to discuss various issues making them unhappy. A note on the chair in my office awaited me when I returned to work. It said something like, "The natives are restless. Bring Kevlar and join us at the meeting tomorrow. Follow the smoke from the burning effigies to the appropriate location. Please have your personal effects in order prior to this date. If you are religious, feel free to pray to your God." So, while I was away, my bosses thought it wise to schedule a meeting with 22 people who hate us so that they could tell us that in some manner that they hadn't previously. Genius. Clearly, a ploy to keep me from taking any of my vacation days in the future, by showing me how much trouble they can get themselves (AND ME) into when I'm not there to stop them.

Okay, I'd like to note that 95% (or more) of the complaints were related to incomplete or shoddy construction, which falls at the feet of Larry, Moe and Curly Construction. And boy do we love them. We won't fire them. We won't sue them. In fact, they've done such a terrible job with these 22 condos, we're punishing them by giving them another project. With 134 condos. And, you know, I can hardly wait. But that's an entirely other headache and I'm hoping that the apocalypse happens before that can become my reality.

So, representatives from my firm (two senior staff members and me) and two owners at LMC Construction, entered the meeting hall. And we sat there for an hour, listening to each person talk about how frustrated they were. How they have suffered with poor workmanship issues and items never being completed. And they really weren't very nice about it. Oh, there were little gift bags on each of our seats, but I figured they must be filled with mousetraps, live scorpions and electro-shock buzzers, so I dared not put my hand inside.

We were allowed to leave the meeting after we'd agreed to going through an entirely new set of lists of outstanding items. Basically, though some of these residents are closing in on their one year warranty, we've agreed to give them an opportunity to look over their condos one more time to make sure that they haven't found anything new. What that means to me, is that the dozen or so items that I've been pushing LMC Construction to finish so that we can all be free, just grew. Exponentially, in fact.

The worst part is that I can't blame the residents. A couple of examples of what they have been dealing with recently will help illustrate. Upon completion of the construction, LMC hired a window cleaner to clean the exterior of all the windows on the project. This is actually pretty standard. Unfortunately, however, LMC's window cleaner scratched about 20 windows when they cleaned them. Ironically, now that the windows were clean, people could clearly see the scratches. So, I started getting reports. And I called LMC and told them to review the situation and let us know what could be done. Of course, they put this off as long as possible. Thus, allowing the residents to get good and mad. And then they decided they'd just replace the windows in the units where someone had complained. After going round and round to make sure all the scratched windows were addressed, LMC ordered replacement glass. Just last week, they finished the last of the installations. But not before their installer had a mishap. While carrying the oversized glass into one of the condos, the upper corner of the glass hit the ceiling and knocked a hole in the drywall. Overcorrecting, the worker carrying the glass stumbled and fell into a halfwall and knocked it loose. Now, if you're keeping up with me, the glass cleaner caused the windows to be replaced and the window installer has insured a little more work for the drywall guy, and the green grass grew all around and around and the green grass grew all around. I mean, all of this could have been avoided if the window cleaner had been able to clean windows. How hard is that?

Sadly, this is far from an isolated incident. Recently, several cracks in the drywall developed on both the second and third floor. Cracks in the walls leading up to (and across) the ceilings. Great. Here we go again. LMC Construction decided that the fix would be to cut out the damaged drywall, install expansion joints (to allow more movement) and repaint. Sounds like a plan, except for the part where they (while cutting out the damaged drywall) cut the carpet in several places. So, now new carpet has been ordered and when it comes in, I have no doubt that the installers will scrape the walls, requiring additional painting, because this is how these things always work with LMC Construction. Or maybe they'll mix it up a little and break some light fixtures in the hallway. I don't know.

I can no longer lie to myself about only having two more weeks in Hell. Once I see the lists, I'll have a better idea. As we are scheduled to turn over the project to the Homeowners Association in a maximum of two months, that should be the deadline. And I'm gonna cling to that. Two more months. Just two more.

In the meantime, I think I'm gonna hide. I'll be curled up in a fetal position behind the file cabinet in my office. If I win the lottery, come and get me.