He wiped his hands on a rag and called out, you still keeping your little diary, buddy. So I said I was, and it had gotten pretty thick, and then I told him the code enforcement officer had all eight months, and had scheduled his own inspection of the operation for Thursday morning.
Because I had quit talking and started building a file. Photos of the customer cars, videos of the air tools screaming at seven in the morning with the time on them, and a picture of the oil sheen reaching the storm drain we all share. Eight months. Running an unlicensed commercial auto shop in a residential zone, plus the storm-drain contamination, is a serious stack.
For eight months the only thing I had lacked was proof it was a business and proof the oil reached the drain, and the moment I had eight months of customer cars, timestamped noise, and an oil sheen photo, the man I was supposedly jealous of became a documented zoning and contamination case with an inspector booked.
He had the gift of gab and I was the reserved sort, so the sympathy ran his way, while his wife greeted me extra warm whenever there was an audience. But a code officer does not read charm, and a storm drain does not care who tells the better story at the block party.
I did not argue. I said, the code officer has eight months, the customer cars, the seven a.m. air tools on video, and the oil reaching the storm drain. He inspects Thursday. An unlicensed commercial shop in a residential zone plus drain contamination is a serious stack. You can call it my little diary, but the city is going to read it now.
The file was the file. There is no jealous-of-a-trade-ing your way out of eight months of customer cars and an oil sheen in the shared storm drain.
The city did what my one decent talk never could. The inspection confirmed the unlicensed commercial operation and the contamination, and the man was ordered to shut the shop down in a residential zone and clean up the oil reaching the drain, with the environmental piece taken seriously.
The street went quiet again. No more seven a.m. air tools, no more customer cars lining the curb, no more oil running to the drain. My wife can hear her hospice patients on the phone in the mornings now, which is work that deserves a quiet house.
He can turn a wrench on his own car like anyone; he just cannot run a licensed-shop business out of a residential driveway and foul the storm drain doing it. Eight months of that ended not with a fight over a rag, but with eight months of a quiet file and a Thursday inspection, and it turned out the man I was jealous of was just a neighbor whose shop was drowning out a woman caring for the dying.