No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
So I am sitting in church last sunday, and the Pres. of the Elders Chorum asks if anyone has time to help with a move. Nobody raised their hand... This guy is sitting beside me looking desprate, and nobody is responding. I am thinking that it is a monday during the day and everyone is working, because this is usually a good group of guys when it comes to helping out, so I alone volunteer to help out.
Later I find out that most of the guys were there the day before and they don't want to go back. This guy it seemed to me was obviously mentally ill. He had been out of work for a few months. He has one dog, and two cats living with him. In the upstair bathroom were 3 litter boxes, and downstairs in the laundry room where a washer and dryer should have been were 8 litter boxes. He never managed to clean out a box. Apparently he was just adding another each time one got full.
The walls had holes in them where he was trying to find "studs" to support his clocks. There would be fifteen little nail holes followed by a 3 inch hole cut in the drywall to receive the mechanics of the clock so it would sit flush against the wall. I counted and filled seven such holes. The cats ate out of the kitchen sink. Food on one side, and water on the other (frighteningly this made some sense).
This is going long soooooooooooooooooo
After 6 hours on monday, and another 6 hours on tuesday of which the last 2 1/2 were devoted to vacuming a carpet that needed to be pulled up, taken out, and burned anyway. I made a strategic retreat to my own home just minutes before his landlord arrived to survey the damage.
He called me last night while the home owners were still there and asked if I would meet the owners today and go through the house with them and haul off some more junk (during the previous two days I threw mountains of junk both in the dumpster and in the back of my truck to haul the the junk yard, only to find him going through the junk and putting it back in the garage). I told them to leave anything they want thrown away on the driveway and I would stop by to haul it off today.
I don't really want to meet the people who own the house. I only met the guy who was living there on sunday ( two days ago).
3 days and 14 hours later my service project is complete. Do I have a warm feeling inside? I think that it is more likely that I picked up some bizzare disease floating in the dust generated by a thousand litter boxes, and am on my way to a fever of 103.
Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.