Tuesday morning I awoke to the distinctive sound of aluminium ladders being rattled about and the piercing beep… beep… beep of some large vehicle backing up. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was 8 am. Nice. I’d been in bed for six hours. Not asleep, mind you; just in bed. Monday had been, apart from 9 hours of irritation at work, my first day back to school and I’d been up late doing homework.
I staggered downstairs and made some coffee and watched out the window as a handful of workers scaled their wobbly ladders and started tearing off the roof of my neighbour’s house. I watched as they tossed rendered shingles and nails and tar paper into my side yard, on top of my day lilies and gladiolas and arbour vitae. I rolled my eyes in frustration because this was the second time in two years my neighbour has had a new roof put on his house – and by this very same company who had done such an absolutely shit job of it the last time.
As expected, I got a knock on my front door.
‘Uhm, yeah, we’re doing the roof next door.’
‘Mm-hm.’
‘And was wonderin if you could move your car so’s nothin gets on it and stuff.’
I took a breath. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe whoever belongs to that car—’ I pointed to the black SUV with the roofing company logo on it parked crookedly in front of my house ‘—could move so I can park there. Otherwise I’m not sure were else I’m supposed to park.’
And so they obliged me and moved their vehicle to the drive at the neighbour’s house, and I parked in the street. Walking back to the house with my freshly-emptied rubbish bin in tow (because Tuesday morning is pick-up day), I glanced up at the roof and enquired of someone’s backside: ‘Just so we’re clear, we’re not going to have the same problem we had two years ago when your company did this roof are we? You’re not going to trash my yard and kill all of my plants, right?’
‘Uhm… no, sir.’
‘Mm-hm.’
Tuesday night when I came home from work, my headlamps flashed across the grass as I pulled into the drive and little Day-Glo green spots lit up. Roofing nails with their little green plastic collars on them.
‘Mm-hm,’ I muttered, picking up some of the nails and tossing them into the unkempt, disused planter box full of dead weeds in front of the neighbour’s house. ‘Fuckheads.’
Wednesday morning I was off to work before the roofers began their day and so it wasn’t until nearly 5 pm that I again pulled into the drive – and came to a halt only just halfway. Lying in plain sight directly where my left front tyre would typically come to rest was yet another Day-Glo green roofing nail. I exited the car and picked up the nail and glanced about to see if anyone was still on the roof. Nothing. As I turned to go back to my still-running car, I noticed that my giant rubbish bin was covered with dust and bits of crushed limestone. The same sort of crushed limestone I have in the centre strip of my drive.
‘Mm-hm.’
I got back in the car and pulled the rest of the way into the drive and, exiting the vehicle once more, I marched over to the bin. Gravel lay scattered across the top, concentrated mostly on the right front corner, and across a metre-wide strip of the drive itself. I glanced straight up at my own roof, some ten feet above me. Nothing. I turned and looked at the neighbour’s roof also some ten feet above me but also some twenty-five feet away. Also nothing. I glanced at the gravel again and then marched towards the front of the house and, because I was now staring angrily at how some of my plants were crushed to the ground, I tripped in the substantial divot that wasn’t there earlier that morning carved out of the centre of my drive not three feet from the bin. Grinding my teeth furiously I rounded the corner by the disused planter of weeds and discovered someone walking towards a truck parked in front of the neighbour’s house.
‘Are you one of the guys doing the roof on Bob’s house?’ I asked.
‘Uuuuhm.’ he looked around, apparently to be sure I was talking to him. ‘Yeah.’
‘Come here,’ I said. He did and I marched him over to the divot. ‘Can you tell me what that is?’
‘Uuuuhm… no sir.’
‘Mm-hm. Well, that’s a divot,’ I explained, pointing. ‘A divot that wasn’t there this morning when I left for work. A divot that appears to be related to the shit load of gravel all over my rubbish bin.’ I swept my hand in that direction like I was showing a grand prize to a game show contestant. ‘Any ideas about either one of these?’
‘Uuuuhm… no sir.’
‘You guys didn’t happen to pull your big-ass truck in my drive again to collect the tear-off from the roof, did you?’
‘Uuuuhm… no sir. We always get permission first.’
‘Mm-hm. Then how do you explain this? Or all the nails everywhere?’
He brushed timidly at the gravel on top of the bin. ‘I don’t got no idea,’ he explained. ‘Looks like somethin fell on it.’
‘From where?’
‘Uuuuhmm…’ he squinted into the afternoon sun.
‘Certainly not from my roof. And Bob’s roof is twenty-five feet away. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that all this gravel came from that hole. The question is “Why?” ’
The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, sir. You can talk to our foreman but he ain’t here.’
‘Oh I plan to,’ I said.
I left it at that. As the man walked away I kicked at the divot in my drive and turned to walk to my back door – and noticed for the first time the dozens of crushed cigarette ends scattered in my side yard and all through my day lilies and gladiolas and arbour vitae.
‘Mm-hm…’
Thursday morning I woke to the industrious clamour of the roofers and stumbled downstairs for a cup of coffee. I watched out the kitchen window (as it faces the dull white panorama of the side of Bob’s house) as the workers climbed their ladders and began prepping for another day of destruction. I finished my coffee, donned my sunglasses because the rising sun burns straight down my drive this time of year, and strolled out into the morning to have a nice little chat.
‘You got a minute?’ I called up to the first person I saw.
‘What?’ I took this response to mean Yes, please feel free to speak to me as I am enthusiastically all ears as opposed to I am sorry, I did not understand the complex nature of your enquiry.
‘Is there someone who can explain to me why there are crushed-out cigarettes all over my yard; why there are dozens of nails – not including the ones I’ve already picked up – everywhere and just how on Earth, or better still, why on Earth there’s this big gouge in the middle of my drive and gravel all over the top of a rubbish bin, a bin whose top, you might notice, is almost four feet off the ground? Can someone tell me why, after I asked you guys the other day to not have a repeat performance of two years ago, I come home to find my plants crushed and my yard trashed like I asked you not to do?’
‘Uuuhhmm…’ he peered down from the roof. ‘I can’t really say…’
‘You mean you don’t know?’
‘Yeah I guess.’
‘Do you think some random person just came along with a shovel and thought it would be interesting to dig out a bunch of gravel from my drive and toss it on top of the bin just to see what I would do? Do you think my cat – who is less than a foot tall – clawed out some gravel and threw it four feet into the air? You guys have been the only people here. This obviously didn’t just happen any more than all these cigarettes and nails just happened. And obviously my plants didn’t just happen to fall over on their own.’
‘What am I supposed to say?’
I paused. ‘Really?’ I asked incredulously. ‘How about not treating me like I’m some sort of idiot whose just making things up. You can see this stuff just as easily as I can. What the hell where you guys doing in my yard yesterday? Did you back your truck up my driveway without permission again or where you just bored and decide to trash things out of spite?’
‘I don’t know what you want me to say cause everything you’re telling me is just goin in one ear and right out the other.’
I paused. I stared. I asked, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? That’s your answer?’
‘I can let you talk to my foreman.’
‘Okay, fine.’
Round the back of Bob’s house, The Foreman was crouched down having a cigarette and filling a bucket from a garden hose. ‘Hey, Paul,’ the guy on the roof called down. ‘This guy wants to talk to you.’
‘Bout what?’ Paul didn’t bother to look up.
‘I dunno. He’s bitchin about some kinda plant or somethin.’
‘What about it?’
‘I dunno. He says he wants to talk to you’
‘For what?’ He glanced up at the guy on the roof.
‘I dunno.’
I watched this exchange in wide-eyed disbelief. I was ten feet away from Paul The Foreman and he wasn’t even acknowledging me.
‘You realise that I’m standing right here, right?’ I asked, growing more furious by the second. ‘It’s not like I’m invisible or anything.’
Paul looked up at me, cigarette smoke getting in his left eye, and he squinted. ‘What?’ he asked.
I took this to mean I am sorry, I did not understand the complex nature of your enquiry. Behind my sunglasses, my eyes narrowed and I snapped. ‘Are you fucking kidding me? This is how you guys deal with shit – by acting like a bunch of fucking assholes? Fuck you! I’m calling your company!’
Enraged, I marched into the house and dialled the number for the roofing company. I had laid it out – just it case – as I blearily drank my coffee earlier. No sooner had someone picked up on the other end when I saw the guy from the roof – not Paul The Foreman – approaching my back door, hand raised as though he were about to knock on the door. I told the person on the line to ‘Hold on just a quick second, would you please? I’m so sorry’ and exploded ‘GET THE FUCK OFF OF MY PROPERTY!’ at the roofer and slammed the back door in his face. ‘Sorry about that,’ I returned to the phone. ‘Let’s see. Where was I? Oh yes. I want to talk to a supervisor or preferably your owner about a complaint I have with one of your crews and their foreman.’
Within seconds I was dispatched to ‘someone in charge,’ called Tom, and I explained, as politely as I could, very angrily and in no uncertain terms to Tom just exactly what had happened. Tom was concerned and told me he would meet me to discuss the problem. Thirty minutes later he arrived and I walked out to show him precisely what the issues were and explained:
‘What pissed me off, Tom, isn’t so much that your workers are clearly inconsiderate of other people’s property, it’s that when someone complains about your decidedly poor work habits or point out the fact that you destroyed something, you don’t look at them and tell them that you are somehow incapable of processing the information. The only thing that tells me is you have no customer service skills. You tell the person “I am so sorry for this, sir. You’re right. This should never have happened. I don’t know if I can help you but let me try to get you to someone who can answer your questions and hopefully put things right.” I don’t care what happened back here or why; I don’t care if they had a fucking party with strippers and a couple of midgets. What I do care about is being lied to and treated like an idiot when I clearly have a valid complaint and the evidence to back it up. Want I want is an apology – a simple acknowledgement of wrong-doing – and for the mess to be cleaned up, because if this is how your company works, I wouldn’t hire you to roof a dog house.’
Tom quietly agreed, poking his foot in the divot in my drive, and offered me his card and his apologies when I was through. I accepted both and returned to my house, an ever-vigilant eye cast to Bob’s roof. Somehow I was not surprised to find there was no-one in sight.
When I arrived home from work late that evening, Bob’s roof was completed and new gutters had been hung as well. I casually inspected the side yard as I walked to the door. No cigarettes, no nails, no tar paper, gravel pushed back into the divot, and it looked as though someone had made a valiant effort to right a couple of the crushed day lilies.
I smiled an evil and self-satisfied smile. Sometimes it’s nice to get your way…