Say it to my face
There's a whole lot of drama going on.
It started several weeks ago with a new washer and dryer. Simple enough. The delivery company arrived to deliver them, but there was no convenient turnaround location, so they backed their very large truck down the driveway in order to try to reverse up it. Nevermind that they were already in front of the house and didn't bother to take the new appliances out. Once they were at the bottom of the drive, they decided it was too dangerous to back up it, and opted to try to re-deliver in a smaller truck. We received a call later that day: no smaller truck available. Can we meet them at the end of the driveway with a pickup truck. If we had a pickup truck available, would we have bothered to pay fifty American dollars for a delivery fee?
Alicia and her brother Adam ended up driving to Raleigh to the nearest Home Delivery America office, where the washer and dryer were being held hostage. They picked them up and we set them up without any assistance or old appliance disposal service from the useless delivery company. After some negotiations with Home Depot, the delivery charge was reversed. This appeared to be the end of the saga for a while, but something else came up-- if the morons from Home Delivery America couldn't make it up the driveway without staining their underwear, how were we supposed to get heating oil delivered this year? Nevermind that heating oil has surpassed three dollars a gallon. If I happen to knock over a liquor store, or if the heavens tear open and money starts raining down on me, I might need to accomodate a truck bearing number two fuel oil.
Ginger, Alicia's mom, happened to be setting up a new homeowners policy on the family property, a stretch that includes this house, their house and her late mother's house. She needed to provide photographic evidence that all of the houses exist, and are still standing in relatively good order. In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, she got Adam, Bobby the foreman/handyman and Jeff the family friend to come out with a bobcat to do some grading, clearing and general cleanup outside the house. For those that know me well, this was very necessary. Several years ago, we were offered the chance to move into this house rent-free-- all we had to do was make it livable. It'd been abandoned to the wilderness for well over a decade before then, so we had our work cut out for us. Unfortunately, we only had about six thousand dollars to spend on this project, most of which went to plumbing work. The exterior of the house has been sorely neglected, and to make matters worse, we had gone through a pair each of barely working hand-me-down washers and dryers, all of which were sitting behind the house. All of which would have been removed if Home Delivery America had bothered to attempt to deliver the washer and dryer.
The guys arrived yesterday morning to do the clearing and grading work. They chainsawed away at the massive hulk of an oak tree that had tumbled into the woods in a storm last summer. They scraped the driveway and made it passable. Around the entire house, they plowed, pushed, dragged, piled and flattened. They did a great job. They even cleared half an acre adjacent to our house-- a real place to turn around. Hell, there's enough room there for an entire new house. We'd asked for years what it would cost to get someone out to do this sort of thing and were always shot down. "It's not your property, just leave it alone." About the driveway: "That thing has Chapel Hill Grit on it. It doesn't need any work." We tried to do as much by hand as possible, but with everything else going on in our lives its seemed an insurmountable task. We appreciate the work more than anyone could imagine. After all, we do have to live here.
Before we had an opportunity to thank anyone, however, the mouths started running. Before we knew it, half of Alicia's extended family was running their mouth about how we live in a hovel. It was like a grade school game of telephone, and the further down the chain it went, the worse it became. Every window is broken out! Hundreds of mangy dogs roam the property! A ten foot tall pile of garbage stands spewing flies by the back door! Dozens of disabled vehicles and discarded appliances rust at every turn! Hazardous waste to rival the 9th Ward of Orleans Parish covers the ground as far as the eye can see!
Alicia's parents heard about this before we did, and evidently it got ugly. Uglier than the things that were said about us. I've never in my life dreamed that they'd take a moment to defend me or Alicia in any way, but they certainly made me think twice about how they feel about us. I don't know exactly what happened, but I've heard things that made me raise my eyebrows. Things that may take a long time for some people to get over.
Things that wouldn't have happened if someone had just bothered to let me know they had a problem. If only they'd said it to my face...
