The oven tray arrived, the dough ran out; wisdom arrived, the life ran out: Contractor Trump vs. Subcontractor Zelensky

I have been in the construction sector for years. Almost all of this time has been spent in the field of education.

In addition to this, I have served as both an expert witness and a mediator in construction sector disputes that ended up in court.

Because we were from the academic community, the courts trusted professors the most.

Contractors and subcontractors were constantly fighting.

The contractor would say, 'I paid a lot of money, but the subcontractor didn't do the job well,' while the subcontractor would complain, 'I worked very hard, but the contractor didn't give me what I was owed.'

Sometimes they would come to blows, and even weapons would be drawn.

During these processes, I tried to assist the judges.

Judges who could never find their way out of a case file would do whatever I said, hoping I would condense tens of thousands of pages of dispute records into a single page so the problem could be solved.

But constant new evidence, witnesses, and objections would drag the process on and on.

The parties, trying to swindle each other, would constantly occupy the courts and exhaust the judges.

For the mediators, however, it was a breeze.

The arbitrators, fed through the hoses attached to the parties, wanted the fight to never end.

Because as the fight intensified and the process dragged on, the amount of protein—along with the wining and dining—would increase.

Anyway, these life-consuming processes often ended with the victory of the contractor, the expert witness or arbitrator would be over the moon, while the subcontractor would both complete the project and go bankrupt.

The judge's mind, meanwhile, would be in total disarray.

But the subcontractor would take the heaviest damage.

Because when signing the contract, the subcontractor would mortgage everything they had, effectively becoming a slave.

They would turn into a monkey in a cage, just to earn a few pennies.

While trying to make money, they would lose what they already had and end up in the cardiology department of a social security hospital.

First a few stents, then a bypass.

And before long, they would be on their way to the graveyard.

Watching Zelensky's White House scuffle yesterday, for some reason, I remembered the contractor-subcontractor fight.

Let's hope the ending isn't the same.