So, yeah, the story about these contractors. ...
Around Labor Day My Father found these two guys to redo the floors and walls of the upper floor and bathroom. They came for a week. Seemed like My Father loved these guys. Either they were working on another job at a property he owns in town, or he came recommended through a friend. Regardless, bottom line is that these are two strangers that I don't want invading our home doing a home renovation that didn't seem necessary.
I am still living this ruse that I have shit to do. I would stay home because someone needs to be around the house while they're fixing up the place, but I know that if I told the truth I would have to face My Fucking Father's questions about what I'm doing with my life. So to keep it up, I just leave -- don't remember where I was going in early September, but I just went out. Honestly, I don't know if my parents believe that I'm working. In fact, I don't really know if they really care that I'm lying, if I'm lying. But just in case, I keep up with the charade.
So they were there a week, maybe a week and a half. But they were not done. One day they just ... didn't show up. Since fixing up the place was My Father's idea, I didn't even mention anything like, "Hey, did these guys come today? I don't think I've seen them all week."
And it was a week before it became very clear to all of us that the contractors just skipped the job. As steamed as he was, My Father wasn't outwardly showing it -- no deflective yelling at us, for example. That was bad enough, but his efforts to contact them yielded only one text, about a week after they went AWOL. One of the two guys that had been working on the house (they finished tiling most of the floor, removing bricks from a living room wall and cutting down a part of a half-wall) said that something came up and that they'll be back as soon as they can. They never did.
But that wasn't the worst of it, either. Some time after that, My Father said that the contractors stole two pieces of big antiques that he was displaying at our house, a dish and vase that he says date back to China's dynasty days 2,000 years ago. He has said that to us ever since he showed them to us, and I still am skeptical about that, but I have no proof that he's wrong. Besides, those two things are important to him, and that still doesn't give these asshole contractors the right to steal them while, supposedly, My Father thought these guys were cool (where did he find these guys, anyway?) and went downstairs to huddle in my parents' bedroom to relax.
So I did what he asked me to do and filed a report with the city police. Weird just going down to city hall and waiting for an officer to saunter in, take out a report sheet, sit down and start writing. This was something I had a bit of anxiety over, and my visceral thought was to see a person of authority share my sense of urgency. But he didn't, and upon reflection -- well, it took us at least two weeks to go through all the shit that we moved around and discover that the dish and vase were gone, so they are probably long gone by now, so really, what could the cop do?
So for about 15 minutes I sat there and told the police officer -- whose last name sounded familiar to me, and after a while I think he was the person I called about the time I left my night shift job at Xcel and saw that someone rear-ended my car -- everything I knew, which wasn't much. He gave me his card with a case number that I couldn't read; he re-wrote it, gave the card back to me, and I was on my way.
What the officer wanted were pictures of the two missing antiques. My Father has them on his phone, but it's a hacked phone, and even though he can take pictures, there's no way to send them. (We've been through this before with some pics he wanted to send to some insurance adjuster, and we nearly got into yet another fight over why I wasn't able to send them.) I don't remember if I asked him if I could just take his phone and show it to the officer. Don't know why. Maybe it's because I was working at the time and it would have been too difficult to leave work (actual work), go home, take Father's phone, go to the police station and show the officer who is primary on the case Father's phone and go, "Yeah, so this is what they look like." Maybe I realized then that doing that is kind of useless.
So what I did was give him some information about who these contractors were, a timeline of when they worked and when we realized something was missing, etc. Once there was nothing new left to tell him (pictures on Father's phone excepted), I stopped calling. And since I haven't heard from the officer, I guess the case is lying dormant.
When Father decided to hire someone else to finish the job, he made it a point to put away the remaining valuables in a corner of a room the new contractor won't be working in. In hindsight, this is something he should have done in the first place.
In the meantime, if anyone has seen a huge Chinese-looking plate or vase, please let me know.
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