by Suzy Banks
Inspector
for a Day
It’s 7am. I’m burning my tongue on hot coffee at Ruta Maya. I haven’t
been up and mobile this early since… well… since I used to stay up this
late. But the early hours will be worth it, for today I ride shotgun with Robin
Camp, Residential Building Inspector for the City of Austin.
We meet and she takes me immediately down into the labyrinth where
Inspector-types spend their first waking hours. The basement in the City Hall
is filled with tiny cubicles where the inspectors congregate for about an hour
in the morning, taking calls and assigning inspections. The computer was broken
yesterday and today there might be something wrong with the phones, because
Robin and the other inspectors assure me it’s usually much more busy than this.
Robin leaves with a meager six inspections for the day.
Today is her one-year anniversary as an inspector.
We cruise her area – roughly from Barton Springs Road nearly out to Oak Hill,
up to I-35 and as far flung as Loop 360 in Westlake – in an aging narc-car, one
of those banal sedans that’s so boring everyone notices it. She’ll get a pickup
as soon as the new fleet arrives in a few months. But I’m not sure the cab of
the new truck will be big enough to hold her arsenal of personal communication
equipment: dispatch radio, mobile phone, and beeper. She says the mobile phone
is a life saver, but some of the other inspectors won’t use them because one
fellow is convinced the electronic waves they give off will give you brain
cancer or something.
We check a stair railing at a remodel in Barton Heights and a foundation for
an add-on to a house off Kinney Avenue. As I watch the nervous contractors
shuffle through plans, jabber incessantly, and scurry around faster than the
White Rabbit, I marvel at how much calmer the world is on the other side of the
red tag. I’ve been one of those jittery builders myself, and I must say, I like
this power thing much better.
We also conduct a final inspection of a condo in a project off Rabb Road and a
rough framing inspection of a house in a barren subdivision off William Cannon.
The condo has some minor code violations and the house in Wasteland Estates
could use some doubled studs here and there; otherwise, they pass muster.
Except that one is sinfully ugly and the other is cramped and overpriced.
Robin, who was trained as an architect, and I, who was trained as a house snob,
cringe at the common style – if you could call it that – of new construction. I
think whoever decided a two-story arch of cathedral proportions over the
entrance of a modest home would lend a touch of elegance to these vapid
exteriors should go back to designing trailer house interiors and Vanna White’s
wardrobe. Robin can’t understand why people put up with the cookie-cutter plans
for three bedrooms, two baths when the demographics of households today are so
different from those of the “three-bedrooms, two-baths” era of the 1950s. If I
were the Queen of the Building Universe I would rewrite the code to include
Aesthetic Requirements for Delightful Freedom and Cozy Entrances. I wouldn’t
abuse my power, but boy, would those red tags fly. And you could always reach
me on my mobile phone.
You can reach me now at Suzebe@aol.com or PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765.
(Oops. Last week I called bau-biology “biobiology.”
I guess my chi’i was
bungled or something.)
This article appears in September 22 • 1995 and September 22 • 1995 (Cover).