inspectors

Here’s the reason we don’t answer the doorbell any more: Two guys, dressed in matching blue sweatshirts and blue knit caps, were on our porch the other day to let me know they were going to do an inspection of our house.

“We’re just checking homes in the neighborhood for storm damage, hail damage, that sort of thing,” one of the guys, the one who held a clipboard, told me. He handed me a color brochure that he clearly felt not only completely explained his presence there, but gave him some kind of authority to do an inspection of our house.

“Okay, but who sent you?” I asked him, a little bluntly but reasonably, I thought.

He looked at me as if I’d just fixed him with a smokey gaze and asked, “Vood you care to tango vit me?”

“Uh, I did, I guess?”

Well, at this point I had questions, as you may well imagine, the first of which was: Did you just wake up this morning and think to yourself, Hey self, let’s go see if that red house down the street has sustained any damage from weather, age or other normal wear and tear. ‘Cause that’s not a thing that ever happens to me, so I wonder why it happens to you.

Are you, I also wanted to ask, empowered by the local municipality to conduct seemingly random home inspections? Because that would at least make me tend to believe you weren’t some rando casing the joint to see if there was anything worth stealing around here.

Finally, I wanted to ask, would you please get the hell off my lawn before I call the cops?

“Well, thanks, but no thanks,” I said, and began to back into my house.

“If I may ask, why not?” And he asked this, I’d like to point out, as if he were just a little bit hurt that I didn’t want him to barge into my hearth and home unannounced.

Yeah, why wouldn’t I want two strange guys to wander around my yard, scope out my house real good and make notes about what they saw? What’s weird about that? Too bad I wasn’t feeling snarky enough to say that out loud.

“Because I didn’t ask for it,” was what I eventually said, followed by “thanks anyway,” because I didn’t want to be rude, I guess. And I tried to smile in a friendly way as I closed the door. On the two strangers. Who said they decided to just come to my house today to check things out. As you do.