Manufactured Housing Resources George Porter

 

"The very best recommendation I can give as further training is needed or additional assistance in developing training programs is required, my decision will be easy - Let George do it!"

Robert J. Henry
Home Installation Manager Fleetwood Enterprises, Inc.

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Mother Nature Doesn't Listen

By George Porter

Mother nature has her own rules and she doesn't listen to us. The fact is that every once and a while she slaps us in the head to make sure we are listening to her. When I went to high school there was a teacher who used to whack his students when ever they were not paying attention (This was way before the age of lawyers, kids carrying guns to school, etc) The thing was that you had to pay attention or you got a wake up call in the form of a high speed flying eraser or a rolled up news paper on top of your sleeping head. The guy, known to us students as "tank" because he was rather large, would be burned at the stake by the A.C.L.U. today but the interesting thing was that we may have actually learned something.

This method of teaching is still used today but only by Mother Nature. When we decide what we would like to do when we set up a home because it fits our time, budget, or interest in the whole project Mother Nature sends an eraser our way. The problem is that sometimes it takes so long to arrive that we don't recognize it as our fault. Did you ever kick your dog on Friday for eating your shoes on the previous Monday? He gets the most bewildered expression on his face and probably figures that he is having a bad day and there is nothing he can do about it. Hopefully we are more intelligent than the poor pooch but sometimes we act the same way.

Everything we do to a home has an effect sooner or later. It may take years to produce the result but if we study the thing we can probably trace the problem back to something we did in the beginning when we set it up. The more time we spend paying attend in "moms" class the better off we will be. The effort we give to promoting legislation to "make it easier" for us to do it right by shifting responsibility to the customer solves nothing. It will come back to haunt you and probably with a vengeance.

Whenever I see a home standing in a field of water I can just hear the customer saying to some dealer "my floors are bulging and the thing isn't level! what are you going to do about it"? The dealers replay is that they will send a man out right away to re-level the home and fix the problem. Of course the real problem is the water, the lot should have been graded so the home would be sitting high an dry but the dealer didn't have enough money in the deal to do that and neither did the customer so they just skipped that part.

The problem will never be fixed with a jack and the customer will eventually get used to the idea of bowed floors or if he doesn't he will call a lawyer, state official or someone and hate and discontent will result. Probably none of these people will grade the lot and there will be some sort of money settlement (lawyers don't make much money grading lots) and the problem will continue. Like I said, Mother Nature doesn't listen to lawyers, dealers, customers, or anybody. Maybe that's why she is known as Mother Nature instead of Father Nature. (Just kidding ladies please don't write in.)