Finished!

Man I tell you what. Don’t enter into a contract with a crazy person. We had to redo our Eagle Scout project. So, basically we built it twice.

The woman we were working with has had some health problems, so: I’m choosing to blame that on her awful behavior. But she was sending pages of shrieking texts, to my 17 year old kid, multiple times a day. She had wild swings in her demands and issues with what we did. Luckily, when we finished the project the second time, her family stepped in and calmed her down. But there were multiple things on her end that she promised and didn’t deliver on.

We tried to accommodate her handyman’s bonehead instructions on placement, and her constant meltdowns, for over a month. We also were doing this during the floods near San Antonio and some days we were working in flowing water half way to our knees. We were able to get an extension from the council, as we finished the first bridge before his 18th birthday but couldn’t finish the second one in time.

It was likely that we could have gotten out of our contract, because of this woman’s wild, completely unhinged behavior. But I’ll be damned if this woman was going to take that feeling of accomplishment from my son.

Luckily, she’s only heard good things since we completed the project the second time and has stopped contacting us… but that was nuts.

Her final complaint photo she sent us was a bunch of things she’d highlighted, that were under the bridge… They were shadows. Yes. That’s what she went after us for at the end. Such a complete whackadoodle!

Definitely a lesson for my son, who saw an elderly widow and just wanted to help her.

My son wants to be a minister. He’s double majoring in ministry and engineering. This is a great way to show him that people can flip into crazy mode when they are scared or if there’s money involved.

We will be recommending to our council that this is not someone to do projects with, in the future. This woman should apologize for the angry stuff she sent my son, (She continued even after we put my husband in the texts and eventually blocked her number to my son’s phone because she wouldn’t quit attacking him.)

However, I am super proud of what my kid built with zero building experience and that he taught himself autoCAD in two days and had the blueprints ready, to build this golf cart bridge. The only thing wrong with the first bridge were the ramp angles and the handyman told us to set the first posts at an angle that would have hit a tree. Further proof that if you have a solid design: don’t let people you don’t know adjust your plans.

As a parent, I’m definitely going to be more involved in the “yay or nay” in choosing a beneficiary for my younger son’s Eagle Project.

This was a really negative experience and we are all just grateful to get away from this woman.

Here’s my son’s final project. For a seventeen year old, this was an amazing project to design, and finish, twice! Super proud momma!

I hope she gets use out of this, as it was: started, continued and finished; with only the idea of service and kindness, for an aging woman. That was what was driving the whole thing forward.

There were a lot of points, when we agreed as a family, that we were on the verge of quitting. Praise God we didn’t. Now my son can take people here and show them what he built. And no angry (and possibly nuts person) can take that from him.

Warning for future Eagles: use this cautionary tale when selecting someone to help. If your beneficiary takes you around their property and only has super negative things to say about all the (14) scout projects they’ve had done: run! They aren’t going to like yours either. She hated everything she showed us!

In the end: this woman spent as much money on this project as we did (because we did this twice, we went ahead and purchased the second set of supplies without asking for help, even though she wanted different materials used the second time.) That is not part of what should be expected of a seventeen year old and a bunch of his scout buddies, because she changed the parameters and moved the goal posts, and then ended up unhappy with the results.

Just such a bad experience. So glad it’s over and that my son built two (2!) really great bridges.

Nah nah nah nah nah lady. You can’t be nasty to us anymore! (If you follow this blog you will see this is the first negative entry I’ve written in twelve years of blogging. You have to be on another level to piss me and my family off, and boy was she.)

I’ll meet you outside and we’ll marvel at this generation’s perserverence, honor and strength! Go scouts!!!

Crazy Green Thumbs