When the Dirtlease COO was abducted by aliens last week, he felt cool air and saw a shadow overhead. Thinking that the vehicle behind him wanted to pass, he rolled down his window, stuck out his hand and beckoned. If it was the cops, he hoped that they would not see the can of Shiner in the cup-holder. ‘At least it’s not a Budweiser’, he thought. ‘That would be insult to injury.’ Then, he woke up strapped to a gurney with a bunch of short, sexless blue men with long fingers, large heads and large eyes pinching him.
‘Am I in Roswell?’ he asked.
One of the blue men blinked. Another grasped the COO’s wrist and felt each of the COO’s fingers seriatim. The blue man’s skin was smooth and cold.
‘Is this about the warranty seal?’ the COO asked.
The blue man blinked again. Another started to undo his belt buckle.
‘Oh, no you don’t’, the COO said. ‘Don’t even fucking think about it.’ Shortly before he lost consciousness, he remembered how his grandmother had told him to always wear clean underwear. ‘You never know’, she had said. ‘You might be in an accident’.
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Our understanding of the facts is incomplete. Government officials have refused to speak on the record. FOIA and FOIL requests have met with Fabian tactics. Eyewitnesses have been taken from the park, resettled in Cook Brothers properties, and instructed not to discuss what they saw. The park itself has been sealed off and made into a Superfund site. When investigators from the Dirtlease staff showed up at the house of the code enforcer for Saint Lawrence County, they were met by men in balaclavas, searchlights and black helicopters.
Here is what we know. In June of 2023, Dirtlease acquired three new homes. The homes were TRU homes, made by CMH Manufacturing, Inc., doing business as Clayton Homes. One of the homes was delivered to the Dirtlease park in central New York. The other two were delivered to the park in northern New York.
New York State law requires that new manufactured homes bear three stickers, i.e. a HUD data plate, a manufacturer’s warranty seal, and an installer’s sticker. The HUD data plate is issued by HUD. It contains, inter alia, information about the manufactured home’s roof load and wind resistance capacity. The manufacturer’s warranty seal is issued by the manufacturer and warranties the manufacturer’s workmanship. The installer’s certificate is printed by New York State, filled out by a licensed manufactured home installer, and put on the home by the installer after he (it usually is a ‘he’) has blocked, levelled, tied down and skirted the home, hooked up the utilities and installed steps. In older homes, these stickers were placed inside the cabinet under the kitchen sink. In newer homes, they are usually placed in the closet in the master bedroom.[1] All three stickers must be there in order for a certificate of occupancy to be issued.
When the three TRU homes were delivered, Dirtlease staff saw that they did not have manufacturer’s warranty seals. The COO called Clayton. Clayton apologized for the oversight and sent three warranty seals with the applicable signatures and serial numbers. These were placed in the applicable homes. Because these homes did not have master bedroom closets, the data plates were in the cabinet under the sink, as in older homes, when the homes arrived from the factories.[2] The COO placed the warranty seals next to the data plates under the sink and the installer placed installer’s stickers next to the warranty seals.
Certificates of occupancy were issued to the home in central New York and to one of the homes in the park in northern New York. After the code enforcer inspected the other home in that park, he called the COO to tell him that the warranty seal was missing and the installer’s certificate was illegible.
‘You’re shitting me’, the COO said.
‘Nope’, the code enforcer said.
‘It’s exactly the same as the other home’, the COO said. ‘It’s the same home. It has the same stickers. You inspected that home and issued a C. of O. for it. Why the bloody hell can’t you do that for this home?’
The code enforcer texted the COO a picture of an installer’s sticker that was smeared with water and illegible. ‘See?’ he said. ‘I took that picture when I did the inspection. There’s no warranty seal, either.’
‘That’s impossible. We put them there.’
‘You want me to get Bill Sherman involved?’
Bill Sherman is the head of manufactured housing code enforcement for New York State. He is a hanging judge, only sober. The COO ignored the ice pick in his gut and said, ‘No’.
‘So take care of it’.
‘We will do that.’
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This is where regular life ends and the paranormal begins. In investigating the matter, Dirtlease staff have focused on the four weeks between the time when the stickers were placed in the home and the inspection. During this time, a woman purchased the home. The Dirtlease staff did not have access to the home during this time. The purchaser was present at the inspection of the home by the code enforcer, but no member of the Dirtlease staff was there at that time. A partial transcript of an interview of the COO, carried out pursuant to an internal investigation, is reproduced below:
Investigator: Did you notice that anything was off about the purchaser?
COO: The first thing was that when she came to look at the home, she looked at the toilet and said, ‘Now I won’t have to shit outside’.
Investigator: What was her name?
COO: Siobhan, only it’s pronounced ‘Shivan’. You watch Succession?
Investigator: Did you notice anything else?
COO: She drove the Founder crazy when she bought the place, because she didn’t want to pay sales tax. She said he was going to pocket the tax payment and screw her.
Investigator: Did the Founder do that?
COO: Of course not!
Investigator: Anything else?
COO: She claimed she didn’t use water, but her water meter showed consistently high usage.
Investigator: Was the meter defective?
COO: No.
Investigator: Did she have contact with the code enforcer prior to the inspection?
COO: She would call him every day to complain about small things, like the width of the gap under the front door or the way the catch-plate was installed. These were all things that passed inspection on the identical unit.
Investigator: Were these things taken care of?
COO: Mike, the manager of that park, took care of them.
Investigator: Anything else?
COO: Well, her warranty seal disappeared and her installer’s sticker was mangled. That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?
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Shortly before the COO’s abduction, Mike, the manager of that park, met with Siobhan to verify the absence of the applicable stickers. He confirmed that the warranty seal was missing and that the installer’s certificate had been damaged by water. He spent three hours in the home because Siobhan stood in the doorway and refused to let him leave. He said that she spent the time shouting at him that the water meter ws defective and that the Founder was trying to rob her.
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Investigator: Mike has enormous reserves of patience.
COO: Yes, he does.
Investigator: Do we pay him enough?
COO: Can we return to the topic of alien activity?
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Whatever the blue men gave the COO was not like terrestrial anesthesia. That was a splice taken out of time. One minute, you are sucking on a tube and the next, you are in the recovery room with your arm in a sling. On the spaceship, he found that he drifted in and out of consciousness. If he could trust what he saw, he was on a table in the middle of a steep amphitheater made up of five courses of benches. Four blue men stood next to him around the table where he lay. Rows of sleep-deprived younger blue men sat on the benches, watching. Of the four blue men who stood at the bottom of the theater with him, three spoke in high, accented voices. One sounded like Siobhan.
‘We need to abduct more Black people’, Siobhan said. ‘All you ever bring me are these redneck crackers.’
‘Yes, Your Leadership.’
‘This one has abnormal primary sexual characteristics and is of below-average intelligence.’
‘He was the best specimen we could find.’
‘Have you analyzed the documents?’
‘They are issued by the entity to which the population has delegated authority for regulating certain aspects of their existence. They appear to be devoid of significant information. They are, effectively, random ones and zeroes.’
‘Get me another sycophant!’
‘Right away, your Leadership.’
Although the COO could at times hear and see, it was exceedingly difficult for him to move. He felt nauseous and was frightened that he would vomit while he was lying on his back. He managed to make a small sound, really just a faint eh – eh, to let them know that he had a problem. One of the blue men grasped his arm and inserted a needle into a vein. The blue man who sounded like Siobhan leaned over him, blinked his large black eyes and seemed to try to smile cruelly, although the shape of his mandible did not allow that.
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Investigator: So? What else do you remember?
COO: I woke up on Route 37 far away from the park and any town. The closest place was the casino, so I walked there.
Investigator: You play?
COO: Yeah. I lost my shirt at Blackjack.
Investigator: Anything else?
COO: When I woke up, I had about a week’s worth of beard on my face – and my butt hurt like you wouldn’t believe.
[1] Stickers are now usually placed in the master bedroom closet instead of in the cabinet below the sink to ensure that, if the homeowner changes the kitchen cabinets, he or she will not lose the stickers.
[2] The TRU Elation is the entry-level 3 BR 2 BA TRU floor plan. Although the workmanship of TRU homes is not first-rate, they have some desirable design features. One of these is an indoor master shutoff that allows the homeowner to shut off water to the entire home without crawling under the skirting. Another is a pantry alcove with washer-dryer hookups just off the kitchen. This is very convenient, but the space taken by the alcove is space that would otherwise be used by a closet in the master bedroom.