Vinyl Fence Directions from a Dummy

Among the many freelancers who congregated at eHow.com back in the era of the content farm were those to whom the site's laissez-faire attitude towards factual accuracy were financial catnip. For some, it was possible to "earn" tens of dollars per hour rewording authoritative (and sometimes no so authoritative) information and reformatting it to fit Demand Media's style. As for accuracy? Too many were as sloppy as Marsanne Petty, who used one source to give some poor fool "instructions" on "How to Install a Vinyl Fence From Home Depot."¹

Petty, back for her third award ceremony, went straight to the source: Home Depot's own instructions for installing the fence (from the Canadian HD website, for some unknown reason). Unfortunately, she botched the instructions in the copy-reword-paste phase of her post. For comparison, we've put the original text on the left and Marsanne's version on the right:

Lay out the fence with mason's line and batterboards. Mark all the post positions on the lines with pieces of masking tape. Drop a plumb bob from the tape, and mark the ground with powdered chalk.	With an assistant, pull a chalk line along the fence. To do this, each person should hold the end of the chalk line at the ends of the fence, and one person should pluck the chalk line. Follow this line when you are installing the vinyl fence.
With a posthole digger, dig holes 12 inches in diameter and 6 inches below the frost line...	Dig the holes for the vinyl fence posts with a pair of post hole diggers. Each hole should be 6 inches deep and 12 inches in diameter.
Add another 6 inches of depth for a gravel bed to provide drainage. Pour in the gravel and tamp it with the end of a 2x4.	Pour approximately 1 inch of gravel into the bottom of the hole and tamp it down firmly with a piece of 2-inch by 4-inch lumber.

Fit the rails of the assembled panels into the holes of the first post, put the next post in place, and slip the rails into it too. Plumb the post and support the rails on blocks.	Insert the first fence post in the hole. Slide the rails of the vinyl fence panel into the predrilled holes of the first post. Position the next fence post in the corresponding hole and slip the rails into their holes. Place a pair of bricks under the bottom rail of the fence to help support it until you have poured your concrete.
Verify that the post is plumb, pour the concrete into the hole, and let the concrete harden.	Starting at the first fence post, scoop concrete into the hole, using a shovel, until the hole is filled.

Truth be told, we weren't all that impressed with the Home Depot's instructions, which seem to have omitted anchors (if any) for the posts as well as the post caps. They're still, however, far better than what Marsanne published.

Among Petty's many... misunderstandings of the project are her conflation of a mason's line with a snapped chalkline, her failure to correctly transfer the specifications for the depth of the post holes, and her complete ignorance of making certain that the posts are plumb. A do-it-yourselfer foolish or unfortunate enough to attempt to follow Marsanne's half-baked instructions would end up with a fence that very likely wouldn't follow a straight line, a fence whose posts are only approximately vertical, and a fence whose posts would likely heave out of the ground after a winter or two. And here people wonder why freelancers like Petty are such Dumbass of the Day award magnets...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7979856_install-vinyl-fence-home-depot.html

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