Raising the Roof

I spent this morning at work, however my housemate invited his buddies over and spent the day crawling all over the roof, ripping off shingles and plywood and applying more shingles and plywood. The roof turned out to be a mess: mis-applied shingles, rotting wood, poorly-attached joists. It's about typical for this house, which appears to have been the abode of do-it-yourselfers whose aggressiveness in the face of home projects was matched only by their incompetence in the face of the selfsame projects. (Don't ask me about wiring.)

I share the incompetence trait, but my response in the face of a lack of knowledge is: get someone else to do it. I mean, that's the whole point of dividing up labor, right? I get on with the writing and cutting up bodies, and other people shingle roofs, wire houses, and fix my car, right? Well, assuming I can pay them for it, that is.

So, why is it that you find so many jobs that were done by people that clearly didn't know what the heck they were doing? You don't save money or time in the long run by doing a crappy job on your own. I know how it happens--I work, after all--but I still don't understand why, and I never have. Why, when I know my professor is spouting absolute B.S., do I have to sit through the inane lecture, biting my tongue? Why, when I know my supervisor has no plan and is just randomly firing off things in the hope that one of them will work, do I have to be patient?

It's the elitist's credo: why do I have to live with the mistakes of people that are stupider than I am? I don't even have patience with my own stupid mistakes, so where do they get off expecting me to have patience with theirs?! Sometimes I think that if I'd spent more time telling people where to get off and less apologizing to them for their own mistakes, my life would have been better. So why don't I? I've always been afraid of what might happen, which is probably the worst stupid mistake I've ever made. I was afraid of having to stand alone.

Well, I have to do that, anyway. At least, if you stand up, you can be proud of being brave. It's not worth it to be "nice", especially since you never get anything out of it.