Monday, December 13, 2010
"Some things have to be believed to be seen."
-- Ralph Hodgson --
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If you look around the house, you'd wonder what I've been doing for the past two months. Yeah, I have been taking it easy. The longer I live this minimalist style, the easier it will be to NOT move down a lot of junk that previously seemed to be essential.
But I have (really!) been doing a lot more than it appears. It's just that the tiniest thing seems to take forever.
For example, you see that simple white cotton cafe curtain hanging on a pressure-mounted rod in that window? Wow. A whole 10 minute effort, right?
No. I didn't exactly just reach out my arm, snap my fingers, and the rod and curtain appeared.
- Measure the windows in that room.
- Locate the measuring tape.
- Locate the stepstool.
- Discover the width at the bottom is different from the width where I want the curtain.
- Go measure a bunch of windows. Yeah, they're all like that. Stupid builder....
- Decide I need three sets of 36" long cafes for the one wide and one narrow window.
- Go online to locate the local Target and other department stores.
- Go to Home depot for the rods.
- They have the long one, but not the short one. Buy the long one.
- Go to Target. It's huge. Wander until I find curtains.
- They have no pressure rods, and they have only ONE white cafe set. I don't buy it.
- Go to another store. Also huge. Wander. Find curtains.
- Also no pressure rods, but they also have ONE cafe set that matches the one at Target. I don't buy it. I need three matching.
- Wander the highway until I find a third department store. They have a short pressure rod, and ONE set of cafes that matches the first two. Buy the rod and the one set of cafes.
- Go back to second store. Buy the second set of cafes.
- Go back to Target for the third set. Apparently they have already sold it. No, no one will go to the back and see if there's any more. "All we have is out there." Too busy with Christmas rush, I guess.
- Back to the second store. Return the first set of cafes.
- Back to the third store. Return the second set of cafes.
- Head home. Discover another department store on the way. They have ONE set of those cafes. Don't buy them, but go to the second store to see if they can give me back the ones I just returned.
- They throw me out of store. (Not really, but I emerge unhappily cafe-less.)
- Go to liquor store. Buy the makings for B-52s.
- Get home. Try rods. The long one bends with only 1/2 inch of tension.
- Back to Home Depot, exchange rod.
- Get home. Make B-52 and sip it.
- Go online and attempt to locate cafes. Find many in various colors, or white with colored embroidery, or too sheer. About the eighth site I try has --- the very same ones I'd been trying to buy, and they assure me they are in the warehouse and I can pick them up this evening at the local Sears. Order three sets.
- Make B-52 and celebrate.
- Drive to store. Pickup area says they don't have them, they're out of stock, that I had been send an email canceling my order.
- Go home. Yep, email had been sent after I had left the house. (And give me no crap about "if you had a smart phone....")
- Make B-52 and chug it.
- Online search again. Turns out Sears can ship them from Timbuktu or somewhere in five days for a hefty delivery charge. Order them.
- Go to bed.
That took the whole day, and I didn't even end the day with curtains.
Then there was the day I went to Pier One. I had checked their online catalog, and chose a table and lamp I wanted, both on sale. I called the local store and asked if they had them in stock. Yes, they did.
This is going to be a quick trip, right? Just go get them.
I went, and got the last table they had (
this one, but when I got it, it was on sale at a significant discount), the display model, already assembled. I went to the lamp area. They had only one left of
the chosen lamp, and the shade was oval rather than round and a bit darker than I expected, but I liked that better anyway. When I passed the rug area, I saw one I loved, so I grabbed that, too. Wow. This was quick.
Then I tried to pay for them.
The table was no problem. They even gave me a small discount on top of the sale price because it was the floor model, even though there was nothing wrong with it.
The lamp was a problem. That was not the shade that came with it. There was a real hardass manager behind the counter, and she said they couldn't sell me the lamp with the wrong shade.
The clerk searched the shelves and the back to find another of these lamps with the correct shade, but this was the last one. Then she tried to find the lamp this shade was switched with, but there were no more of that lamp left. They finally figured that someone else had bought the lamp this shade went with, but had had switched shades. The hardass manager repeated that they couldn't sell me the lamp with the wrong shade.
I was finally able to convince her that if someone else had bought a lamp with my shade, and now I want to buy a lamp with her shade, it would make no difference to their inventory records. "Pretend we both were here at the same time, bought the lamps with their original shades, and then traded shades in the parking lot. Same result."
Ok. She accepted that. By now, I had been in the store well over an hour.
Time to pay for
the rug. I heaved it onto the counter and asked how much it is, "There's no tag on it." The clerk looked it up in their hardcopy version of the catalog, and when she said 46" by 68", I said no, this one's smaller. I unrolled it and held it up to me, and it was shorter than I am tall. Proof, as far as I'm concerned, that it's not over 5 feet long. Also, the one in the catalog looks flat brown, mine has longer shag and a golden sheen to it. We finally had to measure. It was 35"x 56", or something like that. Anyhow, they couldn't find it in their system, they couldn't find ANY rug in their system that was anywhere near the same size and texture, and without a skew number (or however that's spelled), the hardass manager refused to sell it to me.
I am very proud of how calm I remained. They'd been waiting on other customers in between trying to figure out my lamp and now the rug. Three hours have passed. I'm not kidding. Three hours I've been in the store.
At one point, after they'd called somewhere and got no assistance, I turned around and said, loudly, "Ok, guys. You can turn the cameras off now. We got them." To the manager, "That was fun. I'll just take my rug back to my car now." She didn't think it was funny.
I think the manager was hoping that I'd eventually just give up. She doesn't know about my stubborn streak.
The end finally came when I said to the manager, "Look. This rug is not in your system. You apparently don't sell this rug. It isn't in your inventory. You don't know how it even got here. For all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist. If it were to disappear from the store right now, no one would ever notice. That makes it free, right? So just name a price, and use the proceeds to buy cookies for the staff."
She didn't think it was funny.
She turned to the clerk and told her to sell it to me for the price of the larger rug that was in the catalog, $99. The clerk rang up my total, did the credit card bit, and when I looked at the receipt, I was surprised. She had charged me only $40 for the rug. She held her finger to her lips and shook her head.
So, three and three quarter hours after walking in, I walked out. Three hours and forty five minutes to just "go and get it", not even "shopping".
And that's why it doesn't look like I've done much of anything around here.
Mostly, because it takes me two days to recover after I DO do something.
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