Tuesday, July 1, 2008

The missing stove, or How I wasted a whole day

A certain home-improvement store made it to the top of my Bite Me List today. (Hint: The name starts with an "L" and ends with "owe's".

They were doing okay on my list until last week. We bought some appliances there last month, and two of the three had to be ordered special. Who knew bisque was such an "out" color right now? Three weeks to wait for the dishwasher and microwave, they'd call when it came in and schedule the deliveries. We got a message about a week and a half ago that our order was in, and nothing else.

Last Thursday, around 9:30 a.m., the phone rang. It was the installation department. Fun conversation:

"We'll be installing the stove around 12:30."
"Um. . . wait. 12:30 today??"
"Yes, today. Weren't you expecting us?"
"No."
"Is today okay?"
"No, it's not." (*)
"We can reschedule. How about next Tuesday?"
"Sounds good."

* Three hours or so notice was so not sufficient. You have to go through the living room to get to the rest of the "house" and the LR at the time was a certified disaster area. No way was a stove going to bop through to the kitchen.

And then I called the installation department back, contacted their subcontractor, and set the microwave & dishwasher delivery for Friday.

Silly me thought that the rescheduled installation would, you know, be added to a calendar or something.

Got up today and had an early call from the store, asking how the installation of the dishwasher and microwave last Friday went. Fine, I say. I kept waiting for the installation guys to call and say they were on the way; the other crew had to call for directions to our building last week. (GPS will only go so far.) At 1:00, after the library run, still no word. At 2:00, I called the install dept. and left a message on their voicemail. Ditto for 2:30 and 3:00. Then DH (who took a vacation day and ended up feeling sickly all day) called the main line and talked to the guy who sold us the stuff.

Get this. He didn't know where the stove was. In the warehouse, on the delivery truck, who knows. Had to call us back (two hours later). Apparently, the stove was on the truck last week when the crew called, and it just got stuck in a corner somewhere after we rescheduled things. The new delivery date never got noted or written down anywhere. No one knew it was supposed to be installed today.

Yeah. So I spent the day sitting around waiting for nothing. Couldn't do laundry in the kitchen, couldn't get online until they called, zilch. I did fire up the stove to cook lunch, figuring that would surely have them knocking on the door as soon as I hit the mid-cooking point of no return.

They're supposed to be here in the morning to take care of the new stove. If we weren't getting free installation (a rebate, actually) already, I'd be asking for it, to make up for all this hassle.

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