Argh - When a good intention goes awry

When I was growing up, there were opportunities for kids to be entrepreneurial. Our neighborhood had two kids who vied to do your lawn mowing (we lived in Silicon Valley, so snow shoveling was not an option), and one went neighborhood by neighborhood painting or refreshing the numbers painted at your curb. (Not to mention my own path, a paper route)

Now, that sort of neighborly efforts are damped, and more formal.

And that gets me to my rant of the day.

Every 5 years or so, a small troupe rolls through, and one day they hang a flyer on your mailbox saying that on such and such day, they will be painting your numbers on curb. This is a “free” service, but they “suggest” a $20 donation.

I don’t mind that, granted that $20 is a lot for a 10 minute job, but hey, it helps them, and I am sure from the short time I was on NextDoor that many of my neighbors will likely stiff them.

All cool though.

The painting

They came late in the day they mentioned, and did the job. My wife paid them, while I held the barking dogs at bay.

Later on, I walked out to the curb to see if they had painted.

The good news: Yes, they painted.

The bad news: They painted the WRONG numbers.

This is clearly visible from the street, where they were laying down the white background, and then spraying over the stencil the number.

And this is what they put on the curb.

What the actual fuck people? There is no 279 on our street.

The aftermath

The next day I stopped by Lowes, bought a set of stencils, and two rattle cans of white and black paint, and did an admittedly lousy job of fixing this.

Adulting is hard.

Here’s a picture of Lizzie as a palate cleanser: