Love your neighbour

WE recently had a job in our kitchen which required different teams of men to come and attend.

One thing I realised was how they did the bare minimum possible. They broke cabinets and promised: “We will come tomorrow and fix” (lie!).

They “forgot” to bring things they promised and then came up with lies that the stores were out of stock (as if every store in our city didn’t have stock).

They promised to come a day after but they didn’t show — leaving me with a half-done mess and inability to use my kitchen for a week.

They made messes and had no problem leaving them with no regard that we had to live in the messes they created.

Clearly, there was zero thought to how their actions were affecting our family.

They grabbed buckets without asking and used them to mix cement and left the cement without cleaning.

Buckets that I was using to collect rainwater are completely spoiled, filled with unused, uncleaned hardened cement.

I could go on and on with lies, half done job, things that went missing while they were here, etc.

Bottom line. No integrity! No compassion! No desire to do their best. No concern for how their actions affected others. Just get in and do the bare minimum — lie to make the customer think things will get better with time and get out of there.

I thought back to a conversation with my aunt over Christmas while in America. At 70, she and her husband decided they no longer needed the large childhood home they raised their children in.

It was time to downsize. She explained in great detail how she spent the entire last week living in her house before the new family moved in cleaning every inch.

The house was sold. The money was in the bank. The deal was sealed. There was no reason to be cleaning it. The buyer already liked the house and were moving in.

My aunt knew this was a young couple with a pregnant wife and young children. Her hands would be full and her back would be aching. Moving boxes and getting settled in was going to be hard enough. She wanted to give her the gift of not having to worry about cleaning the home.

Picture a 70-year-old lady in a double storey home scrubbing the stairs, getting on a ladder and wiping clean the tops of the shelves in the closets, getting on her knees and scrubbing behind the toilet, etc.

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