Where are the good inspectors?

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, November 6, 2007

I'm sure that there are good inspectors out there, I just haven't had the pleasure of meeting many of them.

Inspection has a spotted history, and in fact first became popular during the 1700s in England, when pomp replaced religion after the Reformation. The Reformation of course eliminated Purgatory, a place where everyone went if they didn't provide enough land, jewels, or money to the church to buy their souls out of it.

These "protesters," or Protestants, became believers in a less financially guided God, and believed that repentance was enough of and by itself to get oneself into heaven.

Thus it was that large funerals rather than large church donations became the send-off mechanism. Unfortunately, they cost almost as much as the tithe to bypass Purgatory, but everyone felt better about their newly-deceased loved ones by spending the money on opulent funerals instead.

The king, or queen, depending, found that this loss of revenue-Church of England, which had displaced Catholicism-alarming, and began charging for proper funeral inspections.

So much for that. It isn't the history of inspecting that gives it a bad name, really, it is instead usually the fact that anyone who wants to be an inspector probably shouldn't be allowed to be one.

I ran into my first inspector after plumbing a house that the local lumber yard had built on blocks in their back lot. Since this house could conceivably be sold and moved out of state, inspection of the in-wall plumbing was necessary. The inspector said to me, as he pointed to the PVC pipe behind where the kitchen sink was going: "See that elbow?"

Yes, I replied. Since all kitchen sinks are beneath a window, one cannot run the vent pipe straight up through the roof. It has to turn 90 degrees one way or the other, and then go up.

"You'll have to fix that." He turned to go.

Wait, I said. Fix what. You can't run the pipe up through the window.

"That elbow isn't up over the height of the kitchen counter. It has to be.

Please, I said, explain this to me.

"If," he said, "there is a flood, and the flood waters are higher than the kitchen counter, then the water would be higher than the kitchen sink, and that elbow being below that won't allow the vent to work."

I said nothing more, but thought to myself: this guy should get an award for passing out the most unmitigated load of balderdash with a straight face in the history of mankind. Who is going to stand in water that is level with the kitchen counter and expect the kitchen drain to function properly. I was tempted to mention that my elbow location was more reasonable; that in fact someone could well believe that the water only being midthigh deep would still allow them to wash the supper dishes. I did not.

I didn't because most inspectors scare the snot out of me! I did some wiring in the garage, asked several electricians about the way to run a 100-amp range cable up through the garage attic, and over to the house's electrical panel. Without a doubt, Minnesota has set the bench mark for this stuff. The Minnesota State Board of Electricity does a great job of listing and defining proper devices and procedures for just about everything an electrician does.

And most of their inspectors are fine.

The inspector stood in front of that main panel in the garage. I stood beside him, a little bit proud of having installed all this wiring and panels, and meter base and stuff. He pointed to the range cable, which ran up out of the top of the box in a conduit, and said: "Get rid of that piece of PVC conduit!"

He turned to walk away. I asked him: "What's wrong with it?"

He looked at me and spat: "You got some kind of problem with that?"

"Uh, uh, no sir, no problem."

I obviously lied. I did have a problem with that. Unlike the plumbing inspector, who delighted in delivering large servings of total logical nonsense, this inspector did not. God is a lot like that in the Old Testament, I think. He didn't give Noah a lot of background on The Flood, either.

Napoleon had some of these same bullheaded attributes. When told that the English outnumbered him three to one at Waterloo, he ignored such trivial information as unimportant to either him or God.

Maybe I'll meet a good inspector at my funeral.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills.