Incredibly incompetent licensed local repairmen we have endured. I don't yell. Today I yelled.

What was wrong with the lock on the door to the south battlement was that the painter's assistant had put the lock back on crooked and after a few weeks it broke. Turn the knob, the bolt would not move. Locksmith, professional locksmith from Los Osos arrives and decides that the way to remove the brass plate set in the frame is to pry it out with a screwdriver, thereby savaging the third of an inch of wood between the plate and the inside of the door, and he leaves a jagged piece of wood underneath so you could take off most of a finger on if you ran one up from below. I stopped him before he tried to hammer the plate flat by putting in on tile on the battlement. When I finally told him what a sloppy job he had done he lied--he had not used a screwdriver to pry against the wood, not him. Well, I saw him, just too late to stop him, and let him know I did not like being lied to and hated unprofessional work. Someone else wrote him a check.

Now, our Cayucos electrician is a god among men, but all the others . . . .

The plumber who used his power screwdriver to put up the laundry sink we used for 5 months while we were working on the kitchen and broke the plastic, when he could have screwed it in by hand.

Oh, the roofer putting back in a skylight who used a power screwdriver to force a screw in so tight that in a couple of weeks the glass cracked right at that point and all the way across.

On--this is to be continued, but the electrician--does he have to redeem all the others?