Phasor Burn

Yeeeee haawwwww

A cow-orker had this experience today. Yet another victim of the overheated Calgary economy. This wouldn’t have happened if the labour shortage wasn’t so acute.

What a disaster today has been. I am about ready to kill someone.

To start things off, the Brick was supposed to deliver my new kitchen suite and bedroom suite today. They called around 9:30 this morning and said they would be over between 12-3. The guys showed up at 11:30 and that was pretty good, but it wasn’t the Brick, it was Two Amigos moving company who had been contracted out. They dumped everything in my living room and tried to leave. I told them I had paid for the delivery AND installation service and that they were going to install everything. I am not going to install, setup, move, and unpack a new bed, night tables, dresser, and storage chest all by myself.

Grudgingly the guys started to unpack everything. They unpacked just the bed and the rails and then stopped. They said they didn’t have a drill, they didn’t have screw drivers and didn’t have the time. They told me that my sales man lied to me and only said that everything would be setup to make the sale. They leave. I am mad.
I call and speak to a customer service rep. She says she will have someone there to install the stuff right away. She ends up sending back the same two clowns, this time with a drill. They begin to set everything up but aren’t reading the directions, or paying attention to what screw goes where. The get about 20 minutes in, have the frame set up very weirdly and then say they cant continue because the parts aren’t fitting together right. They help me unpack the dresser but refuse to do anything else and leave again.

I call back and demand to speak to a manager. None are working. I am starting to get irate again and talk to the other lady I spoke to before. She says she will have a professional installer come out to do it but that it might take some time to get ahold of him.

Well in the meantime I start to look at how they have setup the bed. The screws are in the wrong holes and stripped, the headboard is stripped, there are scratches on the footboard from where they slipped with a screw driver…. And I still don’t have a place to sleep.

I call back and demand to talk to a manager. I am passed to her voicemail…….

At this point I want them to bring and setup a new bed and all the accessories with it. This is bullcrap eh? Does anyone have any suggestions for me (other than not shopping at the brick)…? I am demanding that they refund the delivery and install fee…

At this point the guy may have to come out tomorrow to install this crap. I have already told them I have missed enough work due to this and that I am not happy whatsoever.

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH, now its 4:30 and I am still sitting here with no answers and nothing but a headache and a bad mood… Lovely…

Sorry, needed to vent…

It had to happen sooner or later . . . instant-deploy condoms.

Fred says it again:

The whole business looks remarkably like malign vaudeville, like mummery intended to accomplish two things. The first is to persuade the foolish that the nation is At War. Actually only the president is at war. The second, and I would like to be wrong about this, is to train the public to obedience.

The formula is simple: Keep’em scared and you can do anything. It works. Americans are rapidly becoming accustomed to Soviet-style surveillance, to the state’s power to search and spy without restraint, to being barked at and ordered about by low-level federal employees. People deserve what they tolerate.

Read the entire article here.

Just don’t drag us down to your level any further, USA. We’d really rather not be bothered with useless big brother security measures.

So there we were, standing in line at the till in Walmart. The guy ahead of us has two flats of cat food, 24 tins per flat. The cashier wiggles one can loose and proceeds to wave it furiously past the barcode scanner until she gets 48 units registered.

The guy asks her, after she’s about 6 swipes thru, if she can’t just go “times 24″. The cashier burbles something to the effect of not possible and she’s had to do a hundred or more of an item this way sometimes.

I’m just struck dumb by this stupidity.

At the very least, a flat should have its own barcode.

If I had enough boredom points and time to kill, I would go to Walmart and try this with the same or another cashier and then insist on a supervisor being brought over to witness this stupidity and find out if the cashier is just not versed in the more esoteric aspects of running a till, or if Walmart really has such a brain dead point of sale system.

Unbelievable.

I’m very much suspecting the cashier was more than a few bricks short of a full load. Even if the system were that stupid, there is no need to wave the items furiously at the scanner. The scanner only read and beeped about once per every four or five swipes.

It obviously is set up to not accidentally scan a single item two times. Knowing how these sorts of things must be set up, and if I were saddled with a must-scan-every-individual-item-misfeature, I would slowly scan the item back and forth on about a two seconds left, two seconds right, kind of cycle. No need to get RSI waggling the thing back and forth at 60hz.

Yep. Lights were on but nobody was home.