Schedules and Life in the South

I am a happy anal retentive person. I know I am AR. I am happy being AR. I wish everyone was just a little bit more attuned to the details of a smoothly run life.

However, I live in the South. I used to live in the North where 5:00 meant within five minutes of five, either way. Now I live in the South where Monday means sometime in the future.

I have made appointments and missed a day of work so a worker could come to my house only to have that worker not show up and not even call. When I called the boss, the boss said he would check into what was happening and call me back within five minutes. I never heard from him again. I was asking for an estimate so that I could spend a couple thousand dollars for some new faux marble countertops. But apparently in the impoverished South, income means nothing.

We have been talking about pouring a patio off the lanai for at least a year. I live in a community with a Home Owners Association – a group of individuals who know more of what I need to do to my property than I do. I have a permission slip from the HOA so that it is even legal for me to have a patio. I finally got someone to come to the house and say that they agree, and I can have a patio. It was supposed to be poured on Thursday or Friday, with the following Monday at the latest. It is now supposed to be poured tomorrow. It’s going to be twelve days after my original date for having a patio. I am getting all excited.

I went through this same ordeal with the warranty on the house. It was a newly built house with a one year warranty. There was a thirty day warranty as well. That one took me five months to get completed. I was told with the year warranty that it would go much better. It took not quite five months, so it obviously did go much better. Of course, we had to call the national headquarters and threaten legal action to get it done in four months and three weeks, but it did get completed.

I know that service businesses have to deal with the public, quixotic and testy as they may be. But if your job is dealing with the public, then building a public trust and public goodwill would seem to be a major portion of the business. It is in the North.

I don’t know how long it will take me to adjust to this laissez faire attitude. I can only feel that Scarlett O’Hara is waiting for tomorrow for a reason.