Last week, we were supposed to get a new HVAC unit installed at The Estate At Louisville. The installation date was pushed back a week — to today — in order to take care of some older folks whose heat went out completely. It sucked for us not having heat last winter so I understand and sympathize.
This morning, though, the installer called and said that his supplier did not have the unit that my parents ordered in stock for installation today, and instead suggested that the installer sell us a lesser unit. The installer, to his credit, said what I did — “We ordered what we ordered and that’s what we want. Anything else is unacceptable.” So now we’ve got to wait until at least Thursday to get the new unit in.
And, The Wife’s computer is still under repairs, nearly two weeks after I took it in for repairs and was told the motherboard was fried and would need to be replaced. (The fact that The Wife makes me call the computer repair people twice a day to check up on whether it’s ready or not has probably not made me popular with the repair people.) I sure understand her frustration with not having a computer of her own to do her school work on.
So after reporting the information about the HVAC system to The Wife, she flipped. I mean I seriously thought she was going to burst a blood vessel. I got to listen to a ten-minute rant from her about how customer service here in the South sucks, how no one here cares or gives a damn about anything, how people are all incompetent and lazy and stupid. We might as well just buy a new computer because her old one will never get fixed. We might as well not bother buying a house here ourselves because no one will ever deliver us anything to fix the place up and even if they did, they’d do a half-assed job installing it. Haven’t I seen myself how the court systems are lackadaisical and slow and stupid? Haven’t I seen myself how my own law office is so poorly-run that it wakes me up at night afraid for my own malpractice liability? She concluded by saying that we ought move back to California because we never had problems like this in California. When I said, “You want to move two thousand miles because of bad customer service?” she said that we should at least consider it.
Okay, first of all, if I’m going to pack up and move my family back to California I need a better reason than flaky service providers. I remember quite clearly that there were plenty of flaky people in California, too. They just charged more for their tardy services.
Mainly, though, I’ve gotta tell you that there are few things that make me feel more happy, fulfilled, competent, and able to handle the world than listening to my wife yell at me for ten minutes straight about something that somebody else did wrong.
One good thing, though: we will get that new computer. I’ve had to travel with the office’s laptop one time too many. That thing weighs so much that it leaves a bruise on my shoulder after a day of toting around on an airplane. The Wife’s friend and fellow paralegal student just got a six-pound notebook with a built-in wireless connection and a mouse; maybe I can get one of those. Maybe it will have the graphics card I need to play my new game. With the proliferation of WiFi hot spots everywhere, it will be handy and useful to have. So I’m off to KnoxHell to talk to the techno-geeks at Best Buy about what will meet our needs and how to set up the system I want here.
I vote with The Wife. You should come back to California. Probably not for the customer service, though. On Saturday, husband had a fruitless shouting match with a cable stooge. It was the fourth time we’d had to wait around Saturday for a repair guy in the two months we’ve been in this house. They previously told us that when the cable box goes out, unplug it and replug it in. Sometimes that works, but last week it stopped working. But three days later, when stooge got there, of course it worked for him. So, he said there was nothing he could do because it’s working now. In contentious customer service situations, I’ve found both genders tend, on average, to be more accommodating to men. That makes me more dependent on husband than I’d like, and I sometimes find myself arguing my side to him, rather than to whoever screwed up. However, that slight male advantage does little to compensate for a rock-headed or lazy rep or company. Sometimes a husband/wife good-cop/bad-cop team can be effective.