....
I came from the hotel service business where hard work made persons happy. I went into appraising and worked hard but my results did not often make people happy.
I can relate a little bit. My first jobs were in the mechanical / manufacturing field - then a mechanic in the Navy - I entered real estate appraisal 1992 while I was working my way through college for a degree in computer science - after college, I was a programmer. I went back to the appraisal field because it allowed me to set my own schedule and be more involved with my kids.
In all of those other jobs, pride in my work = higher quality = higher approval from either your boss or customer. I never really thought about it before, but along with being taught correctly at the start, maybe my pride in the accuracy of my appraisals and thoroughness in my reports is more important to me than customer satisfaction.
So maybe Skippy isn't an evil person at heart - I suppose not too many of us see ourselves that way, and ultimately we all tend to defend / make excuses for whatever actions we feel we must take to survive. Maybe a better analogy of Skippy is that of a cancer cell. It started out good, got it programming a little out of whack and is now just doing what it must to survive - but it's putting toxins into the body and replicating itself to the point where it's own bulk is creating pressures on other tissues, cutting off circulation of vital nutrients, and breaking down the body's defenses against other invading organisms (i.e. rabid MB's)
Despite its lack of malevolent will, it must be removed from the body, or the body will continue to suffer and eventually die. The appraisers out there whom either know what the rules are and break them as a matter of course on a regular basis for the sake of getting the easy fees, or were trained by a bad apple and don't know the way they work is corrupt, have got to go.
It seems to me (and I freely admit my perspective is far from all encompassing) that most of our resentment and desire for regulatory intervention is focused on the drug dealer (rogue sectors of the lending industry). Why don't we, as a profession, also aggressively go after the user (Skippy the cancer cell)? We can't just sit back and let this continue - at some point, we have to clean up our own house and start targeting the vermin within it. Asking the State boards to fix the mess without actively pointing out the culprits is like someone calling 911 to report a homicide they just witnessed, but won't identify themselves.
