Carefulness

A couple of days ago, I came home from work and immediately noticed that the workers had removed the window from the room we call the <em>office room</em>. Uh oh, I thought. It’s been in the back of my mind, where my mental to do list lives, to remove those blinds from that window. They were a nice set we got from Smith+Noble a few years back, when we redid that room. Nice, as in <em>expensive</em>.<br />n<br />nI went over to the room from the outside, stuck my head in and looked around. No sign of them. Walked around the house looking in all the possible places they could have moved them, but nothing. Heard that the dump guys showed up at the end of the day. We concluded that the blinds got tossed.<br />n<br />nThis incident got me thinking of the way stuff gets treated by the workers. To their credit, when we explicitly tell them something is to be saved, they go out of their way to make sure it gets preserved. But if something gets overlooked, it’s most likely a goner.<br />n<br />nOne example, which is really a trifle, is an outdoor, gray plastic electrical box. It had a weatherproof cover protecting a GFI outlet. The outlet disappeared (those things cost about $15 each) along with the cover, and the box itself is smashed, as though a girder fell on it. Again, this is a piddly example, but still valid.<br />n<br />nOne other example is the phone line coming from the utility pole on the street, down to the house. The line was simply cut at the house, so it’s impossible to hook up a phone to it unless I wanted to rewire the end of that line. Not exactly sure who’s gonna deal with it at the end, and it’s not a big deal now since we’re forwarding our land line to our cell, but it’s just another example.<br />n<br />nI guess this is just a lesson that we really, <strong>really</strong> should have taken to heart the General’s caution, which was if we care about it , we should move it. Starting today, we’re looking at stuff with a bit more experienced eye.