Using the system can pay off

You know, sometimes it takes a little creative thinking to make the rules of any government agency work for you instead of against you.

I was listening to a couple of local folks talking about the FEMA downstairs enclosure and flood insurance fiasco we’re all currently embroiled in whether we like it or not.

They had probably had one cocktail too many, or not enough, but the conversation was fascinating to see how some minds operate.

A few years back, or after every major storm, FEMA offers grant money to harden your home against storms. After Hurricane Georges in 1998 for example, they offered big dollars to lift homes off the ground and put them on stilts.

That, says one of the creative pair, was a place where many of us went wrong.

If we had taken the money, even for a home already on stilts, because the feds were giving it away like candy, we could have raised single-story stilted homes to the limits of the county’s height restriction. In many cases, that would have put homes some 14 feet in the air from the ground. Most inland homes, at least in this area, are already about three feet or more above sea level at the ground.

We could have left our downstairs enclosures in place and still would have been above base flood elevation with that extra five or six feet in elevation. The downstairs would have been legal at that point because it would have become the first floor of a stilted home.

Pretty ingenious I think.

The garage could have remained the garage by just building a ramp, and there was plenty of free fill lying around after any storm. The recreation room could have become a legal man cave with pool tables and foosball tables and loud stereos and beer coolers and wet bars and we would still have lost no living area that the wife and kids might be using.

Just kidding, dear wife.

And when seas level rises to cover our lots, we would all have built-in boat launches in the first floor to get to the store in the absence of roads.

But that doesn’t top the move I saw a lady make after Hurricane Wilma. After that storm, all the federal agencies had a storefront set up at the Habitat building as a one-stop shop for local residents.

The lady of whom I speak had been sitting around waiting for her turn for a little over an hour. It was hot after Wilma. It was dry. No one was in a great mood.

She noticed, as I did, that the agents were trying to be nice to older, partially infirm clients as the day and the heat dragged on.

When the wait got down to the last two such individuals, she went to her car, pulled out a sweater (why she even had one in that heat is a mystery to me) and used a towel from the back seat to wrap around her shoulder in a sling-type setting.

She was the next person shuffled to the front.

Whenever there is a mass need for paper shuffling, it seems there is a sure-fire way to make sure your paperwork rises to the top and gets noticed first.

You don’t give it all.

The first thing government paper-pushers do is check to make sure that everything is there. The ones that are incomplete get placed on the top of the pile for the first calls.

Send the paperwork one sheet at a time. That way, your handler has to look at your package every day to update the status of the remainder of the paperwork.

After a few days of that, they will become so used to seeing your folder at the top of the pile that they will assume you are to be worked on first and will complete your request ahead of anyone else.

It’s all about perception.

And a little bit of Pavlov’s syndrome.

The other way, I’m told, is to ensure that you don’t make any mistakes and are approved first time, every time, in all evolutions.

When the time comes that you have a borderline request, the paper-pusher will automatically assume that everything is stellar and just approve it without thought.

It’s all about perception.

And a little bit of Pavlov’s syndrome.

Speaking of Pavlov’s syndrome, where’s the waitress with that beer?

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