First Comes The Concrete Leper Colony. Then The Framing

You might expect the published rules for building a house to resemble some form of instruction book. You’d expect wrong.

This is what it looks like. (it’s a pdf)

That’s just an addendum or notification or supplement or appendix or amendment or notification of pending imminent continuing forthcoming wonderfulness. The actual body of the code is much less straightforward and succinct, and it’s six inches thick. There’s a delightful entry among the gobbletygook atop page two on the linked pdf — don’t miss it, it’s a howler. It asks for an estimate of the fiscal impact of changing and adding a bunch of laws about building every sort of structure in a whole state, and it just says “None.” They double down by asking about any effects on small businesses, and they aver once again, “none.” I guess the rubber stamp that reads: Who Gives A Sh*t was sent back to the print shop to be resoled from overuse, and they had to settle for the None version.

The “CMR” on all such pages stands for Code of Massachusetts Regulations. That’s right, you’re reading legislation if you want to build a house, or more precisely: statutes.The Building Code is part of this CMR, and it’s mired in Dogeared Dewey Decimal Land in the 700s. If you’re curious about whether politicians have decided to cast their laser-like focus on whether gasoline-soaked foam rubber makes good wallpaper in a nightclub, you can look at the amendment of the section about what kind of chair rail  you can use in your basement in a flood zone.

If you’ve ever wondered if ADHD is a real thing, the CMR is the scientific proof for it. It’s a very real condition, or syndrome, or affliction, or whatever you need to call it to get your speed pills paid for without a co-pay. You apparently catch if from touching ballots in state representative elections in Massachusetts. The general public, and even poll workers don’t suffer from it, because they handle so few ballots, but the winners of the elections get the germs all over them by stuffing so many into the ballot boxes when no one’s looking. They should probably wear gloves.

I promised you a big secret on Saturday, like everyone does on the Intertunnel, but here it is Monday, and no secret, and now we have to go to UMASS Dartmouth first. Sorry. Don’t get me wrong, you can’t learn much of anything useful about your house by going to that august seat of learning; but you have to take a test.

UMASS Dartmouth is the perfect place to take a test about building things in Massachusetts, because it is, without question, the ugliest warren of structures of any kind in the world. It’s not uglier than Boston City Hall, because that’s impossible, but it’s built in the exact same brutalist low-bidder concrete-fetish style, and there are dozens of buildings exactly like it at the campus. If Boston City Hall is just one hobo with a giant carbuncle on his nose, bumming money from you as you hurry to work, then UMASS Dartmouth is a leper colony.

So a couple times a year, they’d schedule test for the license at state colleges. I had the “book,” I read it (shudders) and signed up. I walked down a hallway in some Fuhrer bunker masquerading as a classroom building, and as I walked, the bow wave of air from my passage pulled down all the various photocopy fliers kids in college stick on corridor walls with entreaties to Party! or march on Washington or whatever, and they skirled on the vinyl tile behind me like autumn leaves. The heavily textured block wall wouldn’t allow any hook, and were too rough to hold even a duct-taped flyer. I thought to myself, right then, for the first time, that  I was in an insane place, doing a crazy thing, among daft people. It turned out I didn’t know the half of it.

The arena where I was directed was crazier. It was one of those lecture halls that holds hundreds, the chalkboard turning into nothing more than a billboard in a flea circus by the time you reached the back row where I was seated, because the room was full. And there were people taking the test in other halls like this on campus. And on every state college campus at the same time. And they did it multiple times a year. I was agog. I began to wonder if every single person in the state was going to have a Construction Supervisor’s license, and mine would be worthless.

I have a habit that goes back to elementary school taught by nuns. They introduced competitive aspects to learning that are now out of favor. They taught us that it wasn’t enough to get an A. If you could get an A, you could get every question right, and should try. If you could get every question right, you should work on your penmanship, and get every question right in perfect, florid cursive. And if every form of competitive testing is already covered, you should try to finish first on top of everything else, too. I was determined to try, because I still flinch when I think of the nuns.

(to be continued, with a secret, I promise)