The hell that are tradesmen

Tomorrow the floor refinishing crew is coming to start on the apartment floors. They look absolutely terrible; the previous tenants had really trashed them and then on top of that they've now got drywall spackling spatters everwhere. In preparation for this, I had contacted a cleaning woman to come in today and do a half day of cleaning -- try to resuscitate the bathtub in our unit, clean Burke's tub (in similarly bad shape), sweep up and generally clean for the refinisher and the painters, who are starting on Monday.

At at 1:00 she calls me with this ridiculously long-winded story about how she doesn't use banks and instead puts her money in CDs (huh? somehow those are safer than savings accounts?) but you can't get money out of a CD unless you have the full value of the CD in cash on you -- blah blah blah. The short story was that she had to cancel today because she coudn't dredge up $5 for the bridge toll.

These tradespeople (and I'm using this term loosely) in general have almost no idea how to run a business. Some of them are terrific, but a lot of them are just barely hanging in there. Why in the world this woman wanted to spend 10 minutes telling me her no-bank money saving philosophy is beyond me, since it clearly falls in the "too much information" category. I remember when I was interviewing painters, one guy proceeded to ask me if he could work 3 days a week, since he customarily spent 4 days a week at the track (this was in preparation for starting his own business; his grand plan was to finance a paint store with winnings from the track). Somehow he didn't seem to realize that this information was providing me with even greater disincentives to hire him, and every minute he continued in this vein was sapping my aleady meager reserves of good will. Same with this woman -- if you can't rustle up $5 to get to a gig that's going to pay you 20 times that, something is very, very wrong. And it's not something that will color my glasses rosy the next time I need to find a cleaner (or a painter or anyone else).

So the upshot of all of this was that after I picked Devon up from Elaine's, we had to dash over to the apartment to do at least a cursory sweep out before the refinishers started. Devon was really clingy -- probably because Walt's been away -- and wouldn't let me put her down, so I was trying to sweep one-handed. It was also incredibly dusty and awful, and I really wanted to get her out of there. She had aleady grabbed some construction detritus in in the living room and got sawdust in her eyes, which precipitated lots of crying. After a few minutes of struggling with this, Aaron, who was just finishing up his carpentry, came in and saved the day by offering to sweep up. It was a good thing, too, since Devon was really getting hungry by this time and was quite fussy, even after polishing off some pecans we "borrowed" from Uncle Burke's apartment. Even the stuffed animals that Burke gave her, including practically the entire cast of Sesame Street, didn't really placate her. It was a relief when we finally got to Glover.