Weeks Events

So, I just finished a very cathartic blog/journal whatever you want to call it. I'm enjoying the experience. I like Myspace so far and think it'll end up offering a wide varity of services and advantages over other similar sites. I may get to a point of taking this blog to a personal web page run and hosted on my own server, but who knows. We'll see where this all goes.Long week. Stress up the ying yang. In my business life, I had a great accomplishment today. I was able to keep 6 families in their homes and the local government at bay in their attempts to move them out. A very bad developer converted a small building in NJ. He had plans and specifications drawn up and delivered those to the building department and after renovating the building, had an inspection and received a Cert of Occupancy. He then, without telling the building department, performed construction on the building and substantially changed the buildings configuration prior to a set of new owners purchasing into it. These changes created conditions of blocking fire exits and escapes, installing faulty equipment and shoddy construction practices. The owners of this building hired an engineer about a year after they moved in because they discovered these problems. The engineer confirmed their findings. I wrote a letter to the buildings developer and asked for a meeting. He turned me down. The owners hired an attorney. He wrote a letter to the developer, again turned down. Finally the owners asked the attorney to write a letter to the State. The State responded by asking for a meeting (yeah). The meeting was held at the building today.The local building code official looked around, and then not wanting to admit he did something wrong, he b lamed the owners for the problems he noted (in front of 2 State building inspectors). He proceeded to say that he issued the certificate to the building as it was designed. The modifications he found today were obviously (?) made after the fact and as such it would be the owners responsibility to fix them immediately. In fact, these are serious findings and the building needs to be shut down right away.I was dumbfounded. A person would want to cover their ass by foresaking the homes of 6 families. I intervened and asked if I could get the fire department to sign off of the building would he still condemn it. YES. Son-of-a.... If I have my crews start work here right now to correct the most urgent of problems, will you still condemn, , well... okay, start getting stuff done and expect my letter next week. He walked out as if nothing had happened. Sheesh. what a day.