This was supposed to be a weekend of getting things done, but instead it was a weekend of me wanting to strangle someone.
As you may know, two weeks ago we had a service technician from Sears out to look at our malfunctioning washing machine. That technician determined it was the electronic control board - the "computer", if you will - that needed replacing. He ordered the part, to be shipped directly to us, and scheduled another visit the following Saturday to install it. He assured us that shipping would only take two to three days.
The following Friday, after UPS had come and still no control board, we called Sears to let them know it had not come in. Turned out they had only shipped it the day before, so they rescheduled the installation for the next (this past) Saturday. It did come in, and a new technician came Saturday morning to install it.
This is where it starts getting really ridiculous. The new board would only run a basic, normal wash cycle, and would not select any of the specialized cycles this machine is supposed to be capable of. Either the first technician had ordered the wrong one, or it was defective. The technician left the board in for now, so that we could at least get some of our mounds of backed up laundry done, and promised to order another board and schedule another installation next Saturday. It remains to be seen whether this board will be delivered in time, or we end up having to reschedule again. I feel they should at the very least expedite the shipping on this one, if not give us a discount on the whole repair for how much they've screwed it up. I mean, three, possibly four weeks to get a washer fixed? Come on! Oh, and to further demonstrate their incompetence, Sears called me about an hour after the technician left Saturday, to let me know he was running late and would be there in another fifteen to twenty minutes.
Oh, the story doesn't end there. The other thing we wanted to get done this weekend was hanging the rest of the vertical blinds that had come in for the office and bedroom. Despite a lot of frustration with extremely hard moulding that did not want to accept screws very easily, Chris made it two-thirds of the way through this job before running into a show stopper. The bracket set for the final set of blinds was incomplete - no screws to mount them, and no clips to hold the freaking blinds.
The packing list had a number to call for missing parts, but we didn't want to wait so we called Home Depot to see if they had them in the store. They sell the blinds right off the shelf, so they should carry the brackets to mount them with, right? Wrong. The brackets only come bundled with the headrail; they don't sell them separately. So after going in to the store to confirm this, we tried Lowe's instead. They only had the brackets for another brand of blinds, which actually do fit but the headrail hangs half an inch lower than with the other brackets, which just isn't going to work.
While we were there, we remembered to look for new, deeper curtain rods for our valances so they would clear the blinds. We found one rod with the projection we needed (5 1/2"), but only in the longer length for our double bedroom window. The shorter rods were only available with a 2 1/2" or 3 1/2" projection. By now I was swearing out loud in the store (not that there was any store staff around to hear me). Is it really so hard to fathom that someone might need a deeper projection for a smaller window just as much as they would for a larger window? Aaarrgh!
So, the replacement brackets are on order, and the old blinds are back up in that last window for now. I found online that Ace Hardware carries the curtain rods we need, but we're going to check the local stores before ordering online. We got some laundry done, and the washer no longer beeps incessantly for hours on end, and we're fortunate that most of our clothes get washed on a normal cycle anyway. Let's hope we have better luck next weekend.
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