Remember the hole?

Do you remember the hole in our ceiling? The one right above the back door, that was open for like 8 months? The one that, as soon as we paid the $250 to have it drywalled and repainted, the plumbing above it started leaking again? It's back.
The good news is, Eddy from Urbana Plumbing came right out this morning and fixed the plumbing very well. Kevin did a really good job repairing it using the existing pieces. Eddy's opinion was that some plastic plumbing pieces are just junk no matter how good of a job you do repairing them. So, $285 later we have brass parts instead of plastic and two useable showers again. Once we pay the $250 to have the drywall fixed a second time, we'll have invested $800 in the repair.
I am thinking a lot about what Eddy was telling me this morning. Different contractors bid on jobs in new construction, and of course whomever turns in the lowest bid gets the job. The first thing they do to cut costs is use cheap, crappy parts. Then they hire unskilled workers, call them "apprentices" and pay them $10 an hour. So if they lower their charge for labor by $20 or even $30, they are still making their profit because their employees are sub-par. So you have untrained workers putting in junky parts. Eddy said, I don't even bother bidding on new construction anymore because with the brass parts I use and the cost to pay actual trained and licensed plumbers, we never get the work.
I asked him, is this happening all over town? And he said, not just in our town, but everywhere and in homes at every price point. Half a million dollar homes in Trails of Brittany have the same cheap plastic plumbing that any other new home in our area has. (I am sure not all of them do, but he said, many contractors operate this way.) What a shame. They save a buck now and we pay the real cost in the end. The $10 our plumbing contractor saved when installing our plumbing just cost US $800.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a meditation on Tuesday about integrity in our work. How each of us is called to a certain role, a job, a vocation if you will, and we need to be faithful and honest with ourselves and with others in carrying out that vocation. Maybe nobody else can see the corners we are cutting as we go about our work, but WE know. We trust our bankers, our plumbers, our postal workers, our teachers, our President, and many others to be doing the job they have promised us they'd do. How devastating it is when we discover that trust has been broken (can I hear you say "weapons of mass destruction"?), and what a long and difficult road it is to rebuild that trust. Sometimes it can't be rebuilt at all.
I think we can start rebuilding trust and integrity in our world by being trustworthy ourselves. You know I am really bad about breaking appointments. I don't show up and don't call. I know, it is awful! What a rude thing to do! I've done this with hair appointments, the dentist, the kids' doctor, speech therapy, Lucy's dance class, infant massage lessons, lots of things. It would take 2 minutes to call and reschedule the appointment but I am too lazy to do it. Bad Becky. This is where I am going to start today. I am not going to do this anymore. It wastes other people's time and money. Hole in ceiling = be a person of integrity.