Meyer's Pride Construction - This week in numbers

800.72 – dollars worth of nails that Brien and I purchased at 9:30 Tuesday night. Apparently this is what roofing contractors do in your spare time once the season of American Idol has ended. 1¼” ring shank coil nails have been in short supply in Broward County for the last 3 weeks, even from the roofing supply companies, so when one of our roofing buddies called us last night and told us Lowes had just gotten a load in, Brien and I rushed over there and bought as many boxes as we could before Lowes closed. We left just enough for the other roofers to discover in the morning and be frustrated that there weren’t more.

3 – customers that have been drunk when I met with them.

4 – hours is all it took for Dave Page to change his mind from not being able to fly to Ft. Lauderdale for Memorial Day to calling us mid afternoon on Friday to let us know that he was in fact in the airport on his way here.

117 – minutes for me to remove and replace 40 feet of fascia boards along the back of a house we are roofing. This was physically the hardest I worked all week. I was dripping with sweat, covered in sawdust and roofing granules, and looking like I just survived WWIII.

5 – minutes drive between completion of said fascia work and beginning a round of golf with Brien and Jamey for Brien’s birthday. Exhausted, my goal was for my golf score to be lower than the number of minutes I had just spent doing fascia work. It was close.

50 – inches diagonally from one corner to the other on our new Panasonic Plasma HD TV. World Cup, we are ready for you.

7 – remote controls that now lie around our house, including 2 Direct TV, television, VCR, DVD, receiver, and the CD player,

6 – security cameras on the house that Dave Page and I estimated on Saturday. Dave is convinced that it was a drug house, given the neighborhood, the inhabitants, and the interesting “trinkets” inside the house.

0 – people that have waved at me when I wave at them while driving. Back home, everybody raises a hand from the steering wheel to greet an oncoming car or a pedestrian. Especially if you’re in a truck. Here, you wave at a guy walking in his neighborhood as you drive by, and he just stares at you with a bit of a scowl, as if he’s just seen an obnoxious alien or something.

93.1 – a local rock station that offered me $1000 dollars if I tune in to 93 Rock, get the song of the day, and then be the 9th caller after that song is played. A usual radio station gimmick, only this one I discovered because I received a telemarketing call at 8 a.m. from a woman (presumably from the station) bringing all of these exciting details to my attention. I’ve never, in my 26 years, received a sales call from a radio station asking me to listening to listen in. Whatever happened to just playing good music that people want to hear?

1,000,000 – times that Brien and I have wanted to cuss out, shoot, etc. the Pembroke Pines building department staff. They are the epitome of government bureaucracy that is slow and apathetic about, yes even hostile toward, customer service. They are inefficient and have made numerous mistakes on what should have been easy shingle jobs. They do not accept responsibility, but instead blame it on us, and being full of grace and mercy as Meyer’s Pride is want to be, we have numerous times swallowed our "pride", taken the hit and corrected their mistakes ourselves. We have paid fines for failing inspections we didn’t call for, rescheduled inspections that had previously been passed but didn’t get recorded in their records, fixed problems they had previously said were okay, and dealt mercifully with the snotty, condescending, make-one-comment-and-I’ll-pop-an-attitude-with-you ladies that make you want to pop a knot on their head big enough for a camel to suck. We will never do a job in Pembroke Pines again. Pembroke Pines is a municipality very much under the domain of the Prince of Darkness.

1 – lady sitting next to me in the Tamarac Bldg. Dept. who told me the little goalkeeper glove attached to my key chain was cute. The tiny replica goalie glove key chain came with the last pair of keeper gloves I bought. It is not cute. Roofing contractors are not cute. I have removed the glove from my key chain.

2 – times I laughed out loud at the ignoramus who took charge in one of the building department lines the other day. He had taken the clip board on which everyone signed in when arriving at the permit counter and was trying to figure out who was next in line. Ignoramus came to the Asian man sitting next to me, whose head was bowed and had apparently fallen asleep, and asked if this was him. The man was asleep, and didn’t respond. Ignoramus tried again. Still no response. This frustrated Ignoramus shoved the clipboard in the man’s face, literally 2 inches from his nose, and yelled “Si Senor is this you mi amigo?” The Asian man awoke, clearly startled at the loud voice, the clipboard in his face, and the fact that someone was speaking to him in his “native tongue.” He shook his head, looked at me (as I was laughing out loud) and shrugged his shoulders, and went back to sleep.

363 – miles driven. This does not include Murray’s Mileage, half of which was spent driving back and forth to Hell to visit with the Devil (see Pembroke Pines).

11 - inches from chin to the tip of the beard on the Jewish engineer that came to inspect a roof I am working to have replaced for a customer. A rather large man, with a digital camera hanging from a string around his neck and wearing some sort of Jewish looking garb, he had a very quiet, very raspy voice and said very little. As he walked along the ridge of the roof, I couldn't help but picture him with a violin, dancing lightly from one roof to another fiddling happily while the rest of the town sang along. I asked him if roof inspecting engineers made a lot of money. He didn't answer. I asked what he would do if he were a rich man. Either he didn't get the joke or hadn't thought about being a rich man as much as Tevye the Milkman. Oh well. La Kayim.