Roger the Homeless Roofer
As told to me not too long ago, by Miranda, a bartender at the Sea Star lounge in Gold Beach:
The joint was leaking rain. Drops fell from the roof in five places, all them landing on the floor in the long rectangular area behind the bar where Miranda made and served drinks.
She put in an emergency call to the skinflint owner of the building. The owner hired a homeless man living in a truck near Brookings to reroof the joint. One man only. His name was Roger. Apparently Roger used to do handyman jobs for a living and the owner wanted to give him a gig to get him going again.
Roger showed up in a beater truck with his ladders and tools. He went to work, but for roughly only an hour or two a day. The rest of the time he gambled and drank beer in the bar.
Oh, and he lived out of the truck in the back parking lot while doing the roofing. Gas was too damn high to commute from Brookings.
This went on for two weeks. Work barely progressed. Then one afternoon, someone repossessed Roger's truck! Apparently it was a friend's who he had bought it from but stopped making payments. Luckily, the repo man didn't take Roger's tools and ladders.
Roger continued to work on the roofing job and lived under a tarp in the back parking lot for two weeks. He still kept to his schedule of working one or two hours a day. Thankfully the weather was mild and hardly any rain fell.
Finally, the roofing job was complete, and a good thing it was. A rainstorm smashed the area and...
now there were approximately 11 places where roof leaked, and all of them landed on the floor behind the bar.
Miranda called the owner and a day or two later Roger materialized and got up on the roof and ripped off the shingles from a certain spot. He'd forgotten to wrap a liner or tuck it in or something like that. Miranda didn't get the gist of the error. It was roofer talk.
The roof no longer leaked, for now.
Miranda had been understandably frustrated with Roger and his incompetence. She knew the owner had a soft heart for the homeless. That was great, she said, BUT DO THE JOB RIGHT!
Yeah some reciprocity for the kind efforts, and patience, of members of our communities who are trying to help would be helpful. We also need to try to remember that many of these folks are working with limitations, either mentally, physically, or both. That being said, some people are just assholes.