Rumour Has It

NOTE: As of September 23, 2009, this post has been edited in
accordance with a court-mediated settlement. The names of the
contractor and his excavation subcontractor have been replaced with
pseudonyms.

A neighbor came over today and introduced herself, and gave us a tidbit of gossip about our project.

Did you know that apparently we were trying to turn our house into units (rental units, that is, not units of length or something abstract like that) and could not get the permits, and had pressured Contractor A (that's the guy who showed up drunk on the job site) into working without them, and that's supposedly why they walked off the job?

I could go into how this has elements of what really happened in it and how they got twisted into something totally false, but much of the story is already up here so I won't. It's just so damned funny to think that nobody really ever believes that all we ever wanted was a storage space for our tools, and they have to make up other possible reasons for our motivations in this debacle.

(Some time after posting this, we were told by another neighbor that the person who had been spreading these stories around the neighborhood was Contractor A, who they recognized from photos on this site. We can't think of a good reason why he would want to tell lies like that about us to our neighbors -- it doesn't even make sense in the "get revenge on them" view of things, since the first thing they did was come by and ask us to set the story straight for them. But you know, Contractor A did a lot of stupid stuff and said a lot of really dumb things in his dealings with us, so in a way it kind of fits, whether it's totally true or not.)

posted by ayse on 09/24/05