…except I really don’t find stupidity amusing.

You know, if you’ve ever received poor services from a professional, some wisecrack may remind you that for every doctor or lawyer or CPA or whatever to finish in the top half of his (or her) class, there is a doctor or a lawyer or a CPA or whatever who finished in the bottom half. The same goes for architects and engineers and designers.

Half of my problem is that I went to a really good school, the kind of school that makes you think. It was not enough to design an adequate road system or an adequate bridge or an adequate sewer treatment facility. No, you also had to look at cost, convenience and common sense. Major engineering failures are well-known, generally for the catastrophic loss of life, but it is the minor engineering failures that cause us the biggest trouble in our daily life. Most of us can get in our cars and quickly find a badly designed parking lot or intersection. Perhaps you don’t really know why it doesn’t work, you just know to avoid that area because it’s a nightmare. Well, a degree is a degree and at some point potential employers stop asking you for a college transcript and an account of your GPA. My guess is that most parking lot designers for shopping centers were not in the top fifth of their class…but that’s just a guess.

And so I live in housing on a military post. The housing is new – my house is less than one year old. But the neighborhood style is not new – this is the third neighborhood like it built on this post by the same private firm. You would think that by the third neighborhood they might have made some design changes. Surely, surely, families who live in the other neighborhoods have had similar complaints.

I won’t even bore you with construction complaints like the creaking hallway floor, the bathroom door that sticks (and sticks again a month after my husband shaves down the edge), the drafty windows and doors, and the carpet padding with obvious holes in it. OK, I just did. My bigger complaint, though, lies with the poor design of the house itself.

Overall, the layout and the size of the rooms are good. I think the closet size in two of the bedrooms is ridiculously small, but they meet my young children’s needs (I wouldn’t want to live here with teen girls, though). We have an attached garage and a five foot tall privacy fence that locks in the back yard between my neighbor’s garage and mine. There is no gate to the fence.

Problem number one: the phone/cable/internet hookup is on our outside garage wall – which is in my other neighbor’s backyard. When the poor phone guy came to install our connection he had to climb the next door fence three times (6 times if you include the return trip) to access the box, since we had no neighbors at the time. And if we had had neighbors, they would have had to allow this person access to their yard for my sake.

Problem number two: I have a laundry room between the garage and the kitchen. This laundry room has a single electrical outlet for the dryer. There is no place to plug in an iron. No place to plug in chargers for cell phones and other electronic leashes (even though it makes the most sense to have them there, since it’s right by the garage where they want you to park your car). No place to plug in any of the rechargeable household things that some people (not me) may have.

Problem number three: the hot water and furnace and blower for the A/C unit are “conveniently” located right there in a closet between the kitchen and the family room. I’m not sure who finds this convenient. If I needed work done on my furnace, I’m not sure the middle of my living space is the best place for someone to park themselves, especially since that kind of work is usually dirty and done by filthy men (no offense, just an observation of the nature of the business) and that section of flooring is carpeted. But the worst part of this location is the noise, which seriously, seriously reduces quality of life every time the heat or A/C kicks on.

Problem number four: speaking of carpet, the eating portions of my kitchen and my dining room are carpeted. I really prefer hardwood floors throughout, but if you’re going to be cheap, I’d really rather have linoleum in the eating areas. Not carpet. Do you know what tacos can do to a beige rug?

Problem number five: I guess the specs called for two outside water spigots on the house. So they gave us one in the front and one on the side. But the one on the side was on the same side as the attached garage. The only way to access the backyard was to get a really long hose and wrap it from the spigot by the front door, across the threshold and around the other side. Unsightly and inconvenient to say the least. They finally, begrudgingly, corrected this after six months.

And today pops up problem number six. Last week, I received a letter informing me that a contractor required access to my home this morning for an unspecified purpose, and that they would come in regardless of how I felt about it. I just wonder, if I am not at home and my protective German Shepherd gets a little too defensive of home and hearth, would I be liable? They followed up with a phone call, and I said that I would indeed be home (I have no life). I should have asked the nature of the business, I suppose. When the doorbell rang this morning, the dog, of course, had to let the people at the door know that she was here and she did not like visitors. Not knowing where they needed to go, I put her in the backyard.

Guess where they needed to go? The backyard, of course. They needed to get to the electricity meter in the backyard right next to the phone/cable/internet box. But that’s not my electricity meter, it’s my neighbor’s. Mine is in my other neighbor’s backyard.

Soon, the powers-that-be will begin charging me for my electricity and water consumption (that’s right, I don’t pay a single red penny right now, which is good since the drafty doors and windows have me cranking the heat up quite a bit). The water meter is on the side of the house near the front. It is easily accessed without bothering anyone. But to reach my electricity meter, you have to enter a home. In my case, it is my neighbor’s home, although some of the houses do happen to have them in their own backyards. They really should have just installed them right next to the furnace in the middle of the house. Or next to that water spigot at the front door – why not? It’s not like these designers have to live here, right?

And that, ultimately, is my biggest complaint. Nobody who designed these houses had to actually live in the models they built. They couldn’t have, since quickly certain flaws would have been corrected. In addition, I don’t believe these houses were actually designed to be lived in at all. Not really. How many neighborhoods today are populated by people who spend sun-up to sun-down at work, or school or daycare? And the weekends are so packed with errands, or sports or mini-vacations that they’re never home to notice that the furnace drowns out the TV or to realize how difficult it is to fill a kiddie pool without a water tap in your backyard.

It is terrible, I know, especially during this season of Lent, to be complaining about my adequate house when there are people starving in the world and living in shacks. I should be grateful for the roof over my head and my “cushy” lifestyle that permits me the luxury of sitting at a computer with a fancy high-speed internet connection typing away with the heat cranked and no job to go to because I have a husband with a good enough salary to keep me home by my choice. And that, really is part of the problem. Having finished near the top of my class, I should be out there affecting change for the good instead of backseat-driving all the hardworking schleps out there. That guy who has to go through my house to read my neighbor’s meter? It’s all my fault. At the minimum, if I were working, I wouldn’t be around to notice all these pesky problems.