Childish Behaviour

NOTE: As of September 23, 2009, this post has been edited in
accordance with a court-mediated settlement. The names of the
contractor and his excavation subcontractor have been replaced with
pseudonyms.

So this morning, Contractor A (who had spent a lot of time threatening us) is going to come pick up his tools and equipment, without which, his attorney informs us, he is unable to operate his business.

He insists that he be allowed to walk all over the site, determining what is his. Since I don't trust that man on the site, our attorney told him that would not be allowed. If he thinks anything is missing, he can make a list and send it through proper channels. Apparently Contractor A (who is a remarkably stupid man) thinks this requirement is unreasonable and "oppressive": that he know what exactly it is that he's claiming we're withholding from him.

Let me roll my eyes for a second.

For one thing, I don't want his tools or equipment. If I could remove any evidence that he had ever done this to us in the first place I could not be happier.

For another, I see no reason why I should be forced to let him walk all over my property, deciding at will what is his and what is not. We spent a fair amount of time finding his crap (and it is largely crap: some lights that are valuable and that's about it) and assembling it for him. Anything else that we know to be his is involved in maintaining the site at its current level of safety, or it might be buried under the trash heap he left in the yard: I have no way of knowing where everything he owns might have disappeared to. Given the incredible mess left behind in Contractor A's filthy, tainted wake, I think it's unreasonable to just give Contractor A, the man who left trash all over the site and seemed to consider the entire world his personal cigarette tray, carte blanche to dig around and make more of a mess in the name of finding perhaps another 5-gallon bucket or a rusty screwdriver that I'd be more than willing to get to him as soon as it appears in the natural course of things.

Anyway, if he tries to come on the property today, I will have to call the police.

In better news, Counterforce came out and marked the location of the new sump pit: the permanent sump pit. They should be showing up any minute to start digging.

Some other pictures of the site:

Weeds growing in the excavation.

This container was brought on site by Contractor A (that miserable excuse for a human being who stank up our lives for too long), and now we can't remove it because as you can see here, the driveway is cracking in half. Any extreme weight would send the truck to remove it plunging under our house and would knock the whole thing down. Nice, huh? Fortunately, we don't have to rely on Contractor A's judgment (or lack thereof; we saw precious little evidence that the man had half a wit about him, though he certainly has quite an ego and a thoroughly dishonest approach to his clients; he often lied to one of us about things the other had supposedly said, though fortunately he was so stupid that he never did so successfully) about whether it's worth trying: we just told the container rental guy what the situation was and they agreed to wait to come get it until the site was safe. Unfortunately, we're stuck with this container until we get structural backfill on this side of the house.

posted by ayse on 08/03/05