The Field Marshal

Of Rivets and Responsibility Recently, news of people rushing to retrofit their windows with new rivets started to resurface in our media as the deadline for retrofitting draws nearer. Being one of those who are affected, I note with some concern over my dad's, who's the head of the family, lack of reaction to the impending change in legislation, which essentially makes the owner of the flat liable if the window rivets have not been changed to approved specifications. After much cajoling, and a lot of noise making on my part, my dad finally called up HDB to check if we needed to have our rivets changed. His initial resistance to take action partly due to his 'anti-establishment' mentality as well as his misguided 'gut' feel that our rivets are safe since we had changed our windows before. His argument was that why should the government penalise the flat owner for problems with the rivets when it was the government, a la HDB, would fitted thousands of flats with substandard rivets in the first place. On this count, I have to agree with him. Firstly, how can HDB tender the building projects to the lowest bidders and expect the contractors to build the flats with the best available materials? Only a fool of a businessman would do such a thing when profit margins are razor thin. Lowest bids would only mean shoddy materials, those that just barely pass the specifications. Like the saying goes, when you pay peanuts, you get a T T Durai. So, when the government pay peanuts for thousands of flats, we get aluminum rivets, not steel ones. So, it should not come as a surprise when our substandard rivets start corroding and windows start raining down HBD estates. If my memory serves me right, I think one of my kitchen windows threatened to commit suicide some years back. It was then when my home got a new set of windows, which thankfully are not supplied by HDB contractors. Going back to the story, my dad made a call to HDB to check on whether our rivets needed to be changed. Basically, what he did was to inform them that our windows were not the original, crappy set, installed by HDB, and asked how we can verify if the current set of rivets would meet the new specifications. I am not sure what to make of this, but HDB told my dad to try scratching the rivets with a piece of metal. If it doesn't scratch, it is ok. He scratched, and the rivets stayed pristine. However, does scratching the rivet really show that it is made from steel or aluminum? If you happen to be a materials engineer, please let me know if that's true. And if there's a lawyer reading this post, I would greatly appreciate some free advice on whether we can use the defence that we followed HDB's advice on this. And if our rivets should turn out to be made of aluminum at least we have some form of recourse. My fear is that with no written record, we are bound to lose any appeal if the garman decides to slap the ridiculous $5000 fine on us for a stupid defect which was not of our doing in the first place. The more I write about this, the moreI smell the stink in the system. How can we be expected to dig ourselves out of some crappy problem generated by HDB? Why should the onus fall on us, the homeowners, when the 'problem creator' gets off scot-free. How can the Ministry of National Development simply solve the problems by passing a bill which made it mandatory for the homeowners to bear full responsibility while absolving the responsibility of HDB from the defects that came with the flats when it sold them to people like my dad. Tell me, where's the logic in this. On hindsight, the hotlines and media onslaught reminding us to do the right things is all one big ridiculous ruse to coerce us into giving up our right to question HDB, and the government, on what they should have done. Instead we are made to feel like criminals who have to needlessly worry about breaking the stupid law which shouldn't be passed if not for shoddy workmanship. This is so 1984.