Earlier this month, a woman named Bella Montoya banged on the walls of her coffin during her wake. She was not as dead as had been previously believed. Assembled family and clergy undid the screws and opened the box. Ms. Montoya left her wake standing up.
I have had trouble recently with a maintenance guy in my park in central New York who I will call Ivan. Ivan is a good kid. He is not a slob. He has only one child. He lives with his child’s mother. He and his companion appear to be a good match. They are frequently together and they finish each others’ sentences. The police have not been called to their home on domestic violence charges. He likes his beer and cannabis but he stays away from hard drugs. He keeps his home neat and his lot well-mowed.
The problem is that his workmanship is shoddy.
I have written about Ivan before. He did a half-assed job on a rehab of a park-owned home. He screwed up some cement forms because he tried to incorporate an uninsulated patio slab into a foundation slab. After he poured the cement two days ago into the now-remediated forms, the surface was rough, not level and out of square. Here’s a picture of what he did:
The following text and email exchange regarding the foregoing has been edited for length and clarity:
Code Enforcer, to Me: Good morning. Went out yesterday, Ivan was there and did have issues with the concrete. Wanted to make sure you saw the pad. It is definitely a little rough with some low/high spots and you may want to have your installer take a look at it before he brings the home in to set it to make sure he isn’t going to have an issue with it.
Me, to Code Enforcer: Sorry for this.
Me, to Ivan: ?
Ivan: It does have one high spot and one spot that is low I don’t think they will have any issues installing the home and leveling it. The concrete came and I had to try to add water to the top so I could float it out
Me, to Installer: Sounds to me like the surface of the pad is rough and not level. Will that be an issue? I have attached a picture.
Me, to Installer: Following up. Any Problem with this?
Installer: No problem but it does look like $6,000 worth of wasted concrete
Me: Yeah, it is shitty workmanship – but can you install the home on it?
Installer: Yes I can going to have to use hardwood under each block pier
Me: You can’t fix stupid.
I recently learned that you can prompt Chat GPT to write a story in the manner of a given writer. So this morning, I sat down at my computer, pulled up Chat GPT and typed in the command, ‘Chat GPT – Write a story in the style of Nikolai Gogol about a sloppy mobile home park maintenance guy’. Chat GPT paused, took a sip of coffee, and emitted the following:
Once upon a time, in a forgotten corner of the world, nestled between rolling hills and forgotten valleys, there existed a dilapidated mobile home park. It was a place where dreams had long been abandoned, replaced by the melancholic sighs of broken aspirations. Here, in this forsaken land, resided a man named Ivan, a maintenance worker of questionable capabilities.
Ivan was a man of disheveled appearance, with a hunch in his back and a permanent frown etched upon his weathered face. His clothes, always stained with grease and dirt, hung loosely on his frail frame, a testament to his lackadaisical approach to personal hygiene. Despite his unkempt appearance, Ivan possessed an uncanny ability to blend into the decrepit surroundings of the mobile home park. It was as if he were an extension of the peeling paint, rusted metal, and broken windows that defined this forsaken place.
Every morning, Ivan would stumble out of his ramshackle trailer, a cloud of dust trailing in his wake. Armed with an array of mismatched tools, he would set out on his daily tasks, or rather, his semblance of tasks. For Ivan was a master of illusion; he could appear busy without accomplishing anything of substance. His favorite pastime was to tinker with broken machinery, creating a symphony of clanking noises that echoed through the park. It was a performance, a spectacle of incompetence, yet somehow, it garnered him a sense of perverse admiration from the residents.
The mobile home park, with its decaying infrastructure and haphazard layout, was a treasure trove of problems awaiting Ivan’s half-hearted attention. Burst pipes, leaking roofs, and crumbling foundations were but a few of the challenges that greeted him each day. Yet, with each passing day, the problems seemed to multiply like weeds in an untended garden.
One could observe Ivan’s methodical approach to his duties, or lack thereof. He would wield his wrench with a lazy flourish, tightening a bolt here and there, only to watch it unravel moments later. His repairs were merely temporary band-aids, a charade to appease the desperate cries for help from the residents. They had learned to accept his incompetence as a fact of life, resigned to the perpetual state of disarray that defined their existence.
But amidst the chaos and neglect, there was a certain charm to Ivan’s bumbling presence. He had an air of tragicomedy, like a character from one of Nikolai Gogol’s tales, navigating a world that seemed determined to confound him at every turn. His misadventures were the stuff of legends within the mobile home park, recounted with equal parts frustration and amusement.
And so, Ivan continued his haphazard dance through the mobile home park, his shoddy repairs and comical mishaps woven into the fabric of its existence. For the residents, he was a constant reminder that life, even in its most dilapidated form, could still offer moments of laughter and camaraderie. And though Ivan’s maintenance skills may have been questionable at best, his ability to bring a touch of levity to their troubled lives was undeniable.
In the end, it was not his lack of skill that defined Ivan, but rather his unwavering presence and the sense of community he inadvertently fostered. Through his bumbling efforts, he reminded the residents that amidst the decay and despair, there was still a flicker of hope, a shared sense of resilience that bound them together. And so, Ivan, the sloppy maintenance man of the forgotten mobile home park, became an emblem of the human spirit’s enduring ability to find solace and even joy in the most unlikely of places.
That’s a pretty good evocation of Gogol’s voice describing a manufactured housing community with deferred maintenance problems. It is also a fair description of a certain type of mobile home park resident. But it is not a story. Things happen in Gogol stories. Funny, grotesque, twisted, incongruous things. A guy buys up the rights to dead people for kopecks on the ruble to use them as collateral for loans. Another guy loses his nose and the nose becomes an alpha male. A nebbish finds meaning in life by buying an overcoat. Nothing happens to Ivan in the Chat GPT version. It is a description of a state of affairs, rather than a process.
Until Chat GPT can write a story where funny, horrifying, unexpected and crazy things happen, human content creators will not be obsolete. I understand that that time is coming quickly. Ms. Montoya did, after all, die a week after she escaped her first wake. The undertaker put a bullet into her brain the second time, to cap out-of-control overhead. But until we are fully obsolete, we can enjoy our useful economic lives. All we need to do to ensure that is to learn how to pour cement correctly.