Incompetence Knows No Borders
When my wife Ellen of blessed memory, who passed on to Paradise in 2020, and I bought our house 20 years ago, it needed some work. We got a highly recommended electrician to switch many ceiling fixtures with recessed lighting....
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When my wife Ellen of blessed memory, who passed on to Paradise in 2020, and I bought our house 20 years ago, it needed some work. We got a highly recommended electrician to switch many ceiling fixtures with recessed lighting. He did a nice job. I oversaw his work while Ellen was out all day. That night, I looked forward to surprising her as she walked in the door. As I flicked on the lights, I not only surprised her but also me. The electrician had forgotten to reconnect the house lighting to the electric grid.
In California, it had been the style to spray on all ceilings a kind of stuff that looked sort of like cottage cheese. Everyone had it at the time. It was for insulation, to reduce indoor heat in the summer and cold in the winter, or something like that. Maybe it also was to reduce harsh acoustics. By the time we bought our house, everyone was getting rid of that stuff, and so did we. I hired a highly recommended cottage cheese-on-the-ceiling remover. He did a great job. All the cottage cheese was gone and replaced, as agreed, with a lovely repainted texture. Pretty. Just one thing: He then had painted every room’s ceiling in the house blue. Blue ceilings.
We had agreed on an off-white, like the walls. I came home from a day’s meetings and entered the House of Blue. WTH! (“H” stands for “Heck.”) I phoned him, and he was both decent and honest. He explained that he is a one-man operation and does an average of five jobs each day. His wife takes the five orders and lays the stack of five pages on their dining room table each morning, in the order of the jobs to be done. He just follows the stack. That morning, his wife had opened their front door, and there was a brief gentle breeze that blew the pages onto the floor. She picked them up and restacked the pile as she remembered it. She made a mistake. We were his first job that day. He never bothered to notice that the page topping the pile was for a different address and customer name than mine. They wanted blue. He gave me two or three new coats of off-white. I wonder whether he next had to repaint their ceilings blue, or if they decided they got lucky with Fischer Off-White.
We had ugly worn-out carpeting torn out and replaced with floor tiles. The flooring people came and delivered the wrong tiles. Ellen and I looked at each other and agreed: The wrong tiles were nicer. Sometimes morons are good.
A Bathroom-Turned-Sauna
It brought back memories of when I built a house in Samaria, Israel (the “West Bank”). My prior wife and I were one of 35 American couples in our 30s who got together in New York’s outer boroughs and decided to create a “Jewish West Bank settlement” in Judea and Samaria. As a first step, we decided it should be legal, so our group communicated with the late legendary Israeli leader, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of blessed memory. His wife, Aliza, had just passed away. His heart was broken. We applied to have our pending community legalized. We were building on land that no Arab had ever claimed in the heart of Biblical Samaria (Shomron) in what the Arabs and United Nations call the “West Bank.” By contrast, the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible, and all maps for 2,500 years have called it Judea and Samaria. So did we. And we always will.
We offered the Prime Minister to name our new community in memory of his righteous departed wife. Begin was deeply moved. And so the Naveh Aliza neighborhood in the Ginot Shomron section of Karnei Shomron was declared legal, and we set up a life there. At the time we were 35 young families. Today there are 850 families in Ginot Shomron and 10,000 Jews in Karnei Shomron. The Bible records G-d’s promise that the Jews would return to Samaria and plant vineyards there. Jews have returned there, and there never ever will be a “Palestine” country or state there. The U.N. and the International Court of Justice can choke on it. Countries that have “recognized” such a non-entity can remain delusional about their “Two State Delusion.” But the 850,000 Jews now populating East Jerusalem and the rest of Judea and Samaria — soon to be one million — are there for keeps. (READ MORE: The Palestinian Authority Is Jihadist Too)
What — Joe Biden is pressing for Israel to abandon Judea and Samaria? Well, how much you wanna bet the Jews of Judea and Samaria outlast Biden? And Jimmy Carter. And Obama. And Ocasio. And Rashida Tlaib. And Ilhan Omar. And Jamaal Bowman. And Cori Bush.
But it was not all smooth — because incompetence knows no borders.
We all built duplexes with finished basements. My neighbor asked the architect to put in a laundry chute so that the dirty laundry upstairs could free-fall into his basement washing machine. The architect in Israel never heard of such a thing. It was 1985 Israel, and we might as well have been asking him to build a high-speed underground travel tube to the Tundra. He spoke only Hebrew, and we were pretty well versed in the Holy Tongue, but neither Isaiah, Jeremiah, nor Ezekiel ever had spoken of laundry chutes. Somehow we conveyed the idea to him, with charades, drawings, and acting out. He said got it. “Yesh Mayvin. Yesh Mayvin.” When the house was built, my friend moved in and dropped his first batch of clothes down the laundry chute. Turned out that the chute never made it to the basement but opened over the kitchen stove, dropping socks right into a pot of boiling chicken soup. Chicken socks. With stripes.
We had our experiences in our home, too. The electric company forgot to hook up our home to the town’s main electric grid, a foreboding of what would happen to us 20 years later in California. Incompetence knows no borders. But the classic incompetence we experienced came in the bathrooms. The first time we flushed the toilet, the entire bathroom was enveloped in a steamy mist. We figured it was a fluke. Must have been. So we tried again. We now had a sauna, a “shvitz.” WTH? We called the plumbers, three guys who were dead ringers for the Three Stooges — Moshe, Elly, and Metultal (Hebrew for “curly”) — and they came back to examine their Mona Lisa. They looked, they peered, they huddled, and then team leader Moshe raised his finger in ecstasy, pointing to his temple. “We figured it out! It seems we hooked up all your toilets to the hot water instead of the cold water.”
I never imagined such a thing was possible. Oh, of course, it is logistically possible, but who would have thunk it possible for such incompetence to flourish in a land that invented the CT scan, Waze, and the Iron Dome? When you are surrounded by that many imbeciles, you get to thinking: Could that mistake be a good thing? Instant toilet disinfectant! A germ-free lavatory. But the flip side became more clear: mold, sweating at the worst time to sweat, and most of all — no one normal does that. Moshe, Elly, and Metultal fixed their screw-up. As they left — none too soon — I coulda sworn that Metultal was saying “Nyuck, Nyuck, Nyuck!” in Hebrew.
Incompetence Is Forever
I am prompted by two recent incompetences to share these memories. Earlier this week, we noticed that our Homeowners Association (hereinafter, the “Gestapo”) still had not mailed us a $4 key for which they had charged us $25. We initially had offered to come in, pick it up, and pay by card. They responded that they accept only checks — this is the Year 2024 — and do it only by postal mail. Fine. OK, that is not incompetence, only quirky. So we mailed them the check. After many weeks, my wonderful darling wife, Denise, mentioned to me that we still had not yet received the cockamamie key. She called, and once again was assured that this time it really would be in today’s mail. “The key is in the mail.” Watch this column for updates.
But the zinger that sent me off the Biden-Harris-Clooney-Pelosi-Jean-Pierre merry-go-’round to write this was my visit to my local bank today. Like most people who have received the memo, I have not gone to the bank for years. I deposit by phone, pay by card or online platform, and live by plastic. When COVID erupted in 2020, that was my signal. Two years later, I underwent that lung transplant for which I needed to take immunosuppressants forevermore. So I do the simple thing. However, something came up for which I needed to sit with a banker for 45 minutes to proceed with a more sophisticated banking matter. Therefore, although I could have deposited by phone app, I figured I might as well bring with me some checks I had on hand to deposit. To my utter amazement, I discovered that there are people who never got the memo and still deposit by waiting in line for the grass to grow. They don’t even trust the ATMs. The line to deposit was at least 50 minutes long.
You know how it goes. You get in line, not expecting it to take that long. Then it does, and you start thinking “The heck with it — I’m outta here!” But then you consider that you have spent so much time waiting already that you may as well get some bang for the wasted 20 minutes, not realizing that your wait is not even halfway over. I call this phenomenon “Vietnam War Syndrome.” And then it is 35 minutes and then 40, and what are you going to do? You have wasted so much time already, so how can you now walk away? Well, slow and steady wins the race (as long as your competitors are slower and less steady).
I finally get my turn at the teller window. The person is speaking broken En . . . g . . . li . . . sh, but that’s OK because I can’t even speak that person’s language in its broken dialect. She sees my checks payable to “Rabbi Dov Fischer.” She looks up my account number and says “I ca . . . nno. . .t de . . . po . . .sit these.” Why not? “Because the name on your account is not ‘Rabbi.’” I explained to her that “Rabbi” is not my first name but an honorific like “Pastor,” “Father,” “Sister,” “King,” “Emperor,” “Sultan,” “Emir,” and “President.” Really, if his credit card company finds an excess balance of $75 and sends a check payable to “Pope Benedict XVI,” but his account was set up as “Joseph Alois Ratzinger,” they won’t accept his deposit? Or if it is set up as “Benedict XVI,” but the check is payable to “Pope Benedict,” they won’t accept it because (i) the account says his first name is “Benedict,” not “Pope,” and (ii) it leaves out the XVI? Or, reflective of an American high school graduate, the check gets the Roman numerals wrong, like XIV? Like, what, the teller is going to maintain the check was intended for Pope Benedict XIV (who lived from 1675 to 1758).
My dear wife Ellen of blessed memory often quoted Judge Judy: “Beauty fades; dumb is forever.”
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