Robert Hargrove

It’s been a while since I have written in this blog. The reason, I have taken a brief leave of absence from my normal preoccupation of making my living with my mouth—public speaking and coaching.

Instead, I have been preoccupied with the restoration of a 100-year-old house I own situated on 7 acres in Waltham, MA, just outside of Boston. In my next career, I intend to be a gentleman farmer.

Well, if truth be told, I am normally a rather lazy person, but when I put my mind to something, like this project, I become what the late great Peter Drucker called a “monomaniac with a mission.”

I told Mr. Guo (the Chinese contractor I hired to do the job who speaks nary a word of English) that I was operating on what Jacqueline Kennedy called the chinziest budget for the project and would act as the procurer.

I made over 100 trips to Home Depot and Loews to buy tile, toilets, weather-stripping, paint, and everything else imaginable. As a Chinese restaurateur once told me in broken English, “You save money, but you lose your time,” In this case, no truer words have ever been spoken.

Mr. Guo (low bidder) took on the job with a can-do-spirit, but was quickly drained of all enthusiasm when one day he pulled up a porch board to discover four rotten timbers below it and a soggy, moldy crumbling basement foundation below that. “Too much working. Everyday, Too Much Working!”

He complained to my stalwart project manager, Vivian Song, a double PhD in material science, “This house is a swamp.”

I was soon to discover that dealing with the material properties of the house—its bare stucco walls, broken windows, and moldy kitchen—would be the smallest part of this undertaking, and dealing with “Guo,” as all called him, would be the biggest part.

Guo, who appeared to be charming and professional and straightforward at the beginning, proven to be as crafty, canny, and conniving as a minister’s uncle in a Mandarin court.

Getting the job done at the agreed price required on our parts a combination of diplomatic nicety, along with the kinds of threats of annihilation that only someone like Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde could bring to dealing with Guo’s complaints and all too numerous absences.

We went from breaking bread (Chinese doughnuts at the local Beijing Star restaurant) one day to threatening to bring him before the Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court the next to talking about what a great friendship was developing the day after.

A typical scenario: toward the end of the project when we were pushing to meet an agreed upon deadline, I created a list of 28 items that needed to be completed: put the door knob on the back door, touch up the kitchen paint, straighten drain pull handle on the sink, and so on.

Guo, who seemed to increasingly defer doing any additional work, but who wanted to keep his personal relationship with me, had his girlfriend call me on a Monday morning three days after a small snowstorm. “Guo wanted me to tell you that because he’s your friend, he will do the jobs he has agreed.”

“Yet because of the snowstorm, the driveway might be difficult for safety reasons to get up, so the earliest he will be able to see you is Wednesday or Thursday, safety being his consideration.”

I hit the ceiling, “Tell Guo I spent $100 plowing the gravel, albeit hilly driveway yesterday and furthermore, if safety is a concern, tell him that it only takes one minute to walk up the gravel driveway. Further, the heaviest tool he and his 30-something workers will have to carry is a paintbrush.”

To be continued…