Some long weekends just aren't worth it...

Jenny, in her most recent post, mentioned that Chuck and Patty came over (I think Saturday) to see what the workers had done at our house. Then she said it was another story for another time. That time is now, friends! I've decided to tell you about the workers and their.... umm... work.

By now, everyone should already know that Jen and I moved into a two-bedroom house earlier in June. The house is sort of... I'll say "dividable" in that you can close a couple sliding doors and essentially turn the house into a main group of rooms and a guest set of rooms. That being the original intent of the layout, each side even had its own climate control. The only problem is that the A/C on the "master" side didn't work worth a hill of beans, so we wound up spending a good deal of our home time in the guest side, where it was cool (usually). Well, Chuck and Patty decided to do some work on the heating/cooling situation. The plan was to put in a swamp (evaporative) cooler (for inexpensive cooling in the dry time), as well as a new heat pump (for heating the house in winter, but it's also an air conditioner for cooling the house during the monsoons, when a swamp cooler won't work). And the new package would heat and cool the entire house, rather than have two independent units working. Sounds great, right?

So the workers came on Monday and started working. (I feel a note should be made at this point that the workers are Mexican just like most of Douglas and, thus, have the very typical "manana" mindset, which means there really is no sense of urgency when it comes to working. A job gets finished whenever it gets finished, and there's not much you can do to hurry things along. This mindset is the reason Jenny and I no longer eat at Denny's in Douglas; even the waitresses live by it.) They made some decent progress, and at the end of the day, they told us they'd probably be finished sometime on Tuesday. Tuesday came, and they didn't get as much done as they wanted. Wednesday, I stayed home from work so Chuck or Patty wouldn't have to spend the day sitting in our house with the guys. They showed up around 7:30, worked for an hour, then said, "We have to go to Sierra Vista for a part. We'll be back in the afternoon." So I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. And they never came back. Well, they finally came back Thursday and got some stuff done (I'm guessing; I wasn't there this time), but they didn't finish the job they told us would be done by close-of-business Tuesday. This whole time, they were just leaving their trash all over our yard and house, because apparently cleaning up after yourself isn't something they teach you in Heating & Cooling School. I can't recall if it was Tuesday or Thursday when they installed the control unit for the swamp cooler, but they cut a hole in the wall right above an old standing clock, without moving the clock first, so the little German-looking figurines on the clock were pulverized by hunks of sheetrock. This, unfortunately, wouldn't be the last damage they did.

On Friday they came back and worked most of the day, which meant we weren't able to change our drivers license addresses or do our grocery shopping. At some point in the afternoon, we heard a tremendous crash like something got broken. We went to investigate and everyone played it all cool like nothing had happened. After they left for the day, I went into the guest bathroom and noticed they'd knocked a chunk out of our tile countertop. That, apparently, was the source of the crash, but they made a point of NOT telling us they'd damaged our bathroom. I think it was also on this day that they installed the control unit for the heat pump. But the first hole they cut in the wall wasn't in the right place, so they cut another one, which left a nice, square hole in our living room wall. Then the guy wired it wrong, so the A/C control turned on the heat instead of the cool.

On Saturday, they came back to finish up. Jenny couldn't take anymore so she went across the road to visit with our neighbor. I was sitting in the kitchen playing a computer game, and the guy came back in to re-wire the heat pump controls. He fiddled with it for a while, then tried to call someone, then turned and said to me, "You don't have the internet here, do you?" I told him I didn't, so he wandered off to try to figure out how to fix his mistake. Meanwhile, the other two guys, who had come in to hang out while wiring guy tried to work, decided to watch me play my video game. And ask me questions about my video game, and whether I'd ever played Halo 3 (which, as far as I know, they don't even make for PC). Then wiring guy came back in and fixed his mistake. Then he fixed the hole in the wall, which left a big white circle on our wall where there used to be pretty yellow paint. Some time after that, I heard another tremendous crash. Jenny was still across the road visiting, so I went to investigate, determined to get a straight answer this time. It turns out one of the guys broke through the ceiling in the garage, leaving a hole in the ceiling. But that's not all. The guy broke through right above a lighting fixture, the kind they have in businesses, with the long flourescent "bulbs" in them. So he bent one side of the fixture, at the same time knocking out the "bulb" and shattering it all over the floor. That was the last straw for me. I called Jenny and told her what happened. Then I called Patty and told her what happened. Jenny came home, and Patty came over to check things out. Then she laid down the law for the workers. This is where it gets really amazing. Patty told them she wanted the white circle on the wall painted. They asked if she had a can of the paint they could use (I'm not kidding). Then they suggested hanging a picture over the white area (again, I'm dead serious). Finally, they agreed to go buy a can of paint. Patty asked them repeatedly who broke the countertop, and no one out of the four workers would give her a straight answer. So then she asked where the missing chunk was, and again no one would answer her. So she told them she wanted it fixed, and that the tile is 35 years old, so it might be hard to find. They went into the bathroom and ripped up a piece of the tile to take to Mexico to try and match it. BUT THEY TOOK THE TILE NEXT TO THE DAMAGED ONE, INSTEAD OF JUST TAKING THE DAMAGED ONE. So now there's one broken tile and one missing tile. Then she asked why they'd put up the old registers instead of putting up new ones, since they included new registers in their quote, and since they'd told her at the start of the job that new registers would work much better than the old ones. They hemmed and hawed and Patty told them to put in new ones. Then she asked about the hole in the ceiling, and they assured her they'd fix it themselves (God help us all). And then something interesting happened: they got out a shop vac and started sweeping up the messes they'd made on the carpet. This is only interesting because it was the first time all week they'd done it, and I'm not sure it would have happened at all if Patty hadn't been there laying down the law.

At that point, the workers left to go buy registers and paint. They came back a while later and replaced all the registers with new ones (which, I must say, work much better than the old ones). Then they opened up the new can of paint and tested it on the wall. Against all reason and common sense, they tested it on an undamaged part of the wall instead of on the mess they'd made, and it was the wrong color. So now there's a little whitish spot of freshly-painted wall about 2 feet below the big white circle on the living room wall. At least they had the sense to stop at that point and not paint the white circle whitish instead of the yellow it was supposed to be. Patty's plan was to just have Carla (the aforementioned neighbor Jenny was visiting with) doctor up whatever color paint they came back with, and paint the wall herself (Carla is amazing in that way. Bob Vila wishes he could be Carla). But they took the can of paint when they left, without anyone noticing, so now we're back to no paint. Their plan was to come back today and patch the ceiling and finish cleaning up their mess. They may be there now; I don't know. I'm just hoping they're gone for good when we get home tonight.