Sears, Your Subcontractors Are You

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Newstove_070402That spiffy new oven/stove you see to the left was just installed in our kitchen.  Our old stove (and I mean old) was a Jenn-Air style that had inserts you could put in to do things like grill indoors.  A neat innovation for 1942 but it meant we had a small oven compartment because a grease trap took up the left quarter of the oven space.  You’ll notice that our air vent in the new stove is in the middle of the cooktop, or in other words is a down draft.  Our old stove had a similar set up, which means the ventilation runs beneath the oven, between the floor joists and through the wall to the right of the stove.  When we decided to replace the stove (the stove top started spontaneously heating) Celeste did some research and found out that unless we wanted to completely re-do our ventilation system we had exactly two stoves to choose from, both of which were Jenn-Airs.  For those not familiar with stoves, as I was, let me tell you that "Jenn-Air" = "four times the cost of your average stove."

So early in March we went to Sears to buy our new stove and a new dishwasher (our old dishwasher couldn’t clean a nun’s conscience). Celeste knew that if we waited long enough one of the stores that carries Jenn-Air would run a special and if we were patient we could take advantage of it.  It just so happened that Sears had a special "12 months with no interest" financing deal on newly opened Sears credit cards in early March, and since she knew they carried one of the second mortgages, er, stoves that we needed for our kitchen we needed to steer our mini-van to Hanes Mall.

At Sears we were told by our salesman that we would get the dishwasher within a week but the stove, of course, had to be special ordered and wouldn’t be in the store until March 12.  We said "fine" and went our merry way. Some time around March 15 we began to wonder where our stove was and Celeste called the store and talked to our salesman.  He looked it up and said, "Huh, the stove’s here so I’m not sure why the installer hasn’t contacted you.  I’ll get hold of him and have him call you."  A couple of days passed and we heard nothing.  Celeste called again and the same thing happened, so when she called the third time she talked to a different salesman and he gave her the installers name and number so she could talk to him directly.  She called on March 23 and 25 and both times he promised to call back and never did.  I finally called on the 27th and he said he’d install it today (April 2).  He also said he’d call yesterday to get directions to our house, which he did. 

Unbenknownst to me Celeste had called Sears on Friday and asked to speak to a manager.  She filled him in on the situation and he promised to talk to the installer himself.  I’m not sure if the installer reacted because he was talking to a man, which would be ironic since anyone who knows our family would tell him he that when he talked to me he was NOT talking to the person who wears the pants in the family, or because he got a call from the manager.  Either way we finally got our new stove.

My message for Sears is this:  Your salesman’s customer service left something to be desired and your subcontractor, who is you as far as I’m concerned, left a lot to be desired.  Thankfully the installation went well but that cannot undo the ill will bred by the lack of responsiveness from your representatives.  Five calls to get something like this scheduled is plainly bad and honestly we’ll not be shopping at Sears again any time soon.

It’s Called Communication People

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MailboxroadexpansionWe woke up this morning to find that the road crews who have been working diligently to add a narrow shoulder to the road that runs in front of our house (Concord Church Road) had reached our block.  We also found that our mailbox, as well as some of our neighbors’ mailboxes, were in the way so they were removed.  That’s our mailbox in the foreground of the picture to the left.  I don’t have any complaints about the removal, yet, since they didn’t break it, yet, but they could have let us know they needed it removed and given us the option of doing it ourselves.

It’ll be interesting to see if they re-plant it, and even if they do I doubt they’ll give it a concrete footer like we had before.  They’ll likely just stick it in the ground which means that if we don’t add the concrete ourselves it’ll literally tilt over in a stiff wind.  Ack.

Great News: Eating Popcorn in Bed is Okay

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One of the blogs I subscribe to is published by MentalFloss and they had a little post today that in turn borrowed from a column in Bottom Line Personal that busted some health/nutrition myths.  I’ll let you read the rest at their blog, but I wanted to share the single most important busted myth I’ve ever come across:

MYTH: Eating after 8pm causes weight gain.
REALITY: “There is no evidence that calorie ‘burn’ is slower at
night. Weight gain results from overeating and lack of activity,
whether that occurs in the morning, afternoon or night.”

Honey, you bring the candy ’cause I’m bringing the popcorn to bed.  I’ll just skip one of those 22 other daily snacks.

Ironic Realtors

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This morning Ed Cone posted about a site hosted by the North Carolina Association of Realtors that is dedicated to defeating a proposed tax on home sellers’ equity. Ed got a comment on that post he considered golden enough to justify it’s own post.   Hopefully Ed won’t mind if I share it here:

"It’s appalling to think that somebody can require payment of a fixed
percentage of the price just because you are able to sell your home.
Fixed, non-negotiable percentage skim-offs are no doubt a huge drag on
the marketability of real estate. ®ealtors are so right to lead the
struggle against fixed, non-negotiable and onerous percentage charges
to home sellers!"

As I’ve written about before, I’m not a big fan of the realtor business as it’s currently structured (note I didn’t say realtors themselves).  Want some interesting reading?  Check out this recommendation on the DOJ site dated Nov. 2005.  Here’s the introductory paragraphs:

1.1 million real estate agents in America(1)
average only six home sales
per year.(2)
  Each works about forty hours per sale,(3)
which amounts
to 12% of the work year,(4)
or five hours per week.  Most of the
balance of hours is devoted to getting new business.(5)
  Brokers
receive a median $52,800 income yearly.(6)

The average couple selling the average home will need to work five
weeks each — ten weeks total — to pay the commission of the agent
who will work only one week on that transaction.(7)

Oh, and for the record I’m against the proposed tax.  I already pay property tax every year, and I don’t see why I should pay a tax if I happen to realize a gain on the sale.  Also, if I have a house I buy for $200,000 and during the time I own it I put in $40,000 to improve it and then turn around and sell it for $230,000 because that’s all the market will bear and then pay a 1% tax on my "gain" I don’t think that’s quite fair.  I’ll have to check on this but I don’t think I get a tax break on improvements I make to my property over the years, which means I’d really be getting hosed on the deal.

* *Update** Got an email from my mom who points out that when you sell your house you can deduct the improvements you’ve made from any gain you have in the house.  That’s a good point.  Also, upon further reading (see this article) it looks like the proposed tax would be up to 1% on the value (i.e. sales price) of the house, regardless of gain or loss.  That’s a royal hose job if you ask me, because you’ve been paying property taxes all along so to pay an "exit fee" when you sell your house seems like a nice case of double taxation. 
 

So I agree with the realtors but I have to say that their position is somewhat ironic.

Just Show Up

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Most of us have heard the saying that 90% of success is just showing up sober (I’m paraphrasing here).  Personally I always equated that saying with success at work, and it never occured to me that the saying also applied to my personal life until Celeste and I attended a small event at the youngest’s school last week.

All the kids in Justin’s class had written some short stories and parents were invited to sit in and listen to the kids read the stories out loud on Friday afternoon.  When we arrived we found the kids divided into small groups of about five and the parents were asked to sit in with the group that included their child.  Celeste and I were the only parents in our group so we heard Justin read his story and then the four other children read theirs.  We were encouraged to ask each of the kids questions about their stories so we learned that the one girl in the group enjoys fantasy stories (i.e. pre-teen, chick-lit), one of the boys will only willingly read books about skateboarders (thus his report about Bam Margera) and the other boy was from Mississippi and had moved here after Katrina (his was an autobiographical account of his family’s experience after the hurricane). With our own son we learned that he has an unbelievably strong grasp of fantasy weaponry ala Halo, and a kind of Sgt. Rock bravado in his imagery.  I for one was stunned by his ability to paint such a vivid picture of his own fantasy world, and to be honest I was shocked by his fatalistic acceptance of casualties among his troops; he fully expected people to die.

Given the trouble we’ve had with getting Justin to write anything even semi-expressive in his reading response journal this year it really was a surprise to hear him read a story he had written that contained so much oomph.  He’s a quiet kid and not often open to sharing his thoughts and it was obvious he was embarassed reading his story out loud, so it was great to find his work to be so expressive.

The biggest surprise of the day came right before we left.  The kids wanted to show off their prowess at a multiplication game that features two teams of equal size, a teacher shouting out a multiplication question to a representative of each team and the two kids racing to see who can shout the answer first.  The kid who answers first stays in place for the next question and the other kid sits down.  The team that has someone still standing at the end wins. Justin’s class is undefeated in the competition, but the shock to me was that Justin was considered one of the fastest in his class.  For two years Justin struggled to finish written multiplication tests in the alloted time and only towards the end of last year was he able to do it consistently, so for him to be one of the fastest in his school is quite an achievement.

Of course Justin told us nothing about all this.  We’re lucky he gave us two days’ notice about the reading and if we hadn’t attended the reading we never would have known that he’d gone from struggling with multiplication to excelling at it.  In other words, by just showing up we learned something new and great about our youngest child.

Hopefully this lesson won’t be forgotten, by me in particular.  I have an infamously short attention span and I’m known to spend a lot of time "in my head", but if I can remember to just show up and pay attention I might not totally screw up my kids’ teenage years.  If nothing else I’m sure I’ll learn exactly how much they dislike me and how big a dork they think I am. 

The Snotmobile

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Right now if I could invent anything it would be a car engine that could run on snot.  My sons have been generating massive amounts of mucus for the last couple of months (not sure why) and now that it’s allergy season it’s my turn.  I figure by myself I’m producing gallons of this stuff a day, so fueling our vehicle would be good for the pocketbook and our contribution to the "war on global warming."  I could also share the technology with all parents of toddlers, those little 24 inch humans who would be the equivalent of Saudi Arabia in the snot economy.

Speaking of the "war on global warming", does it bother anyone else that we continually declare war on everything?  We have the "War on Drugs", the "War on Childhood Obesity", and the oxymoronic "War on Domestic Violence."  Will someone please declare war on the practice of declaring war on the banal?

Keeping Track of Congress Just Got a Lot Easier

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One of the frustrations I’ve had in keeping tabs on what my Congress-critters were doing was that I was pretty much dependant on news outlets to keep me abreast of the action in Washington.  For one thing I didn’t know anyone who had the time to wade through all the information unless their job pays them to do so.  For another, until the advent of the web you had to subscribe to the Federal Register to access all of the info, and even after the web came along it was a tedious process to go and browse the online information.

Now thanks to a project called OpenCongress you can subscribe to RSS feeds dedicated to any Representative or Senator and have their every action sent to you as it’s updated.  I just added the feed for Virginia Foxx to my Netvibes page and now I can see how she’s been voting recently, and in the future I’ll be able to see her votes as soon as they happen.  Even better, OpenCongress has pages that pull together information, including descriptions of the bills, articles about the bills and other data on each bill in one easy to read page.  So here’s one of the recent feeds for Madame Foxx:

Rep. Virginia Foxx [R, NC-5] voted ‘Nay’ on the question: On Passage: H R 1362 Accountability in Contracting Act regarding H.R.1362 Accountability in Contracting Act

If you click on the link to the Act you can read all about it which makes it easy to see how my representative voted and to determine if I agree with her.  Since I think she’s a dingbat I doubt I’ll agree with her much, but at least with this tool I’ll be able to make my judgements based as much on her votes as for her less than appealing public appearances.

Local News, Bloggers and Media

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We’ve had two big local news stories over the last week and a half.  One was about a local TV news anchor who allegedly drove drunk, ran over a man and killed him and the other was about a Boy Scout who got lost in the woods for three days.  The latter became a national story and happily the Boy Scout was found alive today and reunited with his family.

An interesting thing happened with the first story.  A few days after Tolly Carr allegedly commited the crime of driving while intoxicated and running over a pedestrian rumors started floating around that Carr had commited suicide.  We heard it from our son, who’d heard it from his bus driver, who in turn heard it from a friend via a cell phone call.  We checked the news and saw nothing about it and quickly we forgot about it.  The next day I was reading the blog of Ken Otterbourg, the Winston-Salem Journal’s managing editor, and he posted a piece about the rumor, how many phone calls they received about it and the effort they made to run it down.  What made this so interesting is that the rumors never made the newspaper itself, but because he has a blog that discusses the inner workings of the newspaper Otterbourg was able to "cover" the rumor from the paper’s perspective.  It was fascinating to me that the rumor had become so widespread that the newspaper had to investigate, and it was also of interest to see how a professional news organization handles such a case.

The Boy Scout story generated some interesting developments as well.  I was in the barber shop when one of the news reports mentioned that the boy had been left behind with one of the counselors while the rest of the group went for a hike.  One of the men in the barber shop instantly said, "Why they leavin’ a young boy alone with a Scout leader like that? I think we have an idea why that boy might have run off."  The implication, of course, was that the scout leader had been doing something untoward with the boy and the boy fled the scene.  Later that evening I was catching up on my blog feeds and I noticed that one had a post about the Boy Scout case and made the same assertion that the barber shop patron had made.  The difference, of course, is that the blog was out there for the world to see and from my own experience I knew this post would be read by others and the writer would be taken to task for publishing such accusations without a shred of proof.  Since I consider the writer a friend I was going to write him and advise him that he might want to re-think the post, but when I clicked the link for the post it had already been taken down.  It turns out Ed Cone had beaten me to the punch, as he writes in his post Local Blogging and Responsibility.

I can’t help but notice the relationship between these two cases.  One features a mainstream newspaper editor using a newly found tool, his blog, to delve into the evolution of a rumor and how his organization deals with it.  The other features an "amateur" writer with a local readership and a newly found responsibility to think twice before tapping "publish" or risk becoming intimately familiar with the terms libel and slander.  Somewhere in there I think we’ve found the face of local news in the future.