Sunday, August 20, 2006

A creepy, crazy cult

I survived my third Sat. work day at church. The school was supposed to open last Thurs. but they have 3 more inspections to go. Week one was spent removing 41 desks from a school that closed in Asheville and hauling them to our church. These are modular desks. Sort of like mini cubicles. Last Sat we installed 23 0f them in one of three double-wide modular classrooms that they bought from the Charlotte public school system. Now, since the school didn't open last week (more failed inspections; it seems our handicap parking space wasn't the size of a heli-port and the handicapped parking sign was 3 inches too low) we were able to get the new floor put in modular #2. A month ago we removed all the floor tiles from that modular and since we couldn't prove that the tiles didn't contain a molecule of asbestos we had to treat it like plutonium. The couple who helped with that saga haven't been back to church since. Anyway, now that unit #2 has a new floor it's now slated to be the classroom for the grand opening. So yesterday we installed the remaining 18 desks in there. The flooring guys left the toilet out on the fire escape (which is 3 inches too narrow to meet code and the bottom step is 7 1/2 inches instead of of 8 1/2 inches, another violation). The pastor got this great deal on a water fountain on E-Bay. The problem is it's not the refrigerated one he thought he was getting so cheap. I'ts really just a shiney stainless steel spigot. So we will have to patch the wall where a real water fountain was suppose to go and the kids will have tepid water to drink. All together there are about 10 separate inspections that need to be passed. And they have to be passed in a certain order. You can't get the heat pump inspected till the electrical inspection is passed and the power turned on. Wait, it gets even better. Modular #3 has to be cleaned and emptied of all the garbage in it before next Sunday; you see that's Friend-Day and we are suppose to use it for a fellowship dinner. But don't worry we have all the uniforms ordered for the children. I wonder if they passed inpection. It's a wonder anything gets done at all in this county. It's like some third-world nightmare, except being sanctified Nazarene's we can't bribe anyone. If the school never opens we managed to create one heck of a nifty telemarketing center; all we need are 43 Pakistanis to man the phones.