OK, it's now Thursday afternoon and I need to vent, and you can all chime in on the Life of Su opinion poll: who is in the right, the psycho bitch or Mr. Appliance Repair Company Owner?
Last night, that storm system dumped, I don't know, 8-10 inches of snow on us (thank goodness Eric and I got to the store for the frozen waffles yesterday). Early this afternoon, two young men with shovels and their dad's snowblower came by and cleared our sidewalk and driveway for twenty bucks. Seeing by the neighbors' still-full trash bins that our trash collectors had not yet been by, I decided to dig out the cars so that they could be moved, thus clearing a path by which our overflowing trash bin could be taken to the curb. I put on my big snow boots and headed out to start clearing.
At this moment, my housecleaners, Dawn and Don, arrive. So does the guy from Action Appliance who was here yesterday to figure out why our dryer has been leaving scorch marks on clothes; he was supposed to come today to put in a new thermostat. I asked Dawn and Don if they would mind parking in the street while I dug out the car and garbage can. They said, "Sure," and Don said, "Do you want me to ask this guy to park in the street, too?" I said, "Sure, that would be great, thanks." So Don says to Mr. Action Appliance, "She wonders if you'd mind parking on the street because she's trying to dig out her car." Mr. AA, without saying a word, drives off. We all figure that he has gone around the block or something and will be right back. About twenty minutes later, Dawn says to me, "What happened to the appliance guy?" I say, "I don't know."
An hour after he drove off without saying a word, I called the Action Appliance office to find out what was up. The receptionist told me that they can't park on the street, so when I asked him to park on the street it was like telling him he couldn't come here. I said, "Is he coming back?" She said, "He's on another job now; he'll come when he's done there." I said, "Can you give me a time?" "He'll come when he finishes," she said. I said, "Can you give me a rough idea of when he'll be here?" She said, "He'll be there when he gets there." I told her that I thought him driving off without saying a word was pretty unprofessional; if he'd said, "No, I can't park in the street because the truck is too big," I'd have let him park in the driveway. The driveway, you will remember, had been snow-blowed by Wally and The Beav. Albeit not very well. But that's another story.
The receptionist acted like it was perfectly reasonable for Mr. AA to drive off the job without speaking, without telling me why he was leaving (or even that he was leaving), and without giving me any idea when he was coming back. The more I thought about it, the more ticked off I got. So I called another appliance place and arranged for them to come finish the job tomorrow, and called Action and said, "Don't bother coming back." The receptionist put the owner on the phone, who couldn't understand what my problem was. I said, "My problem is that instead of doing the job, he disappeared without giving me any idea when or whether he was coming back." Mr. Owner says, "He had your thermostat, of course he was coming back." I said, "Not the point. The point was, all he had to do was say he couldn't park in the street, and I would have let him park in the driveway." Mr. Owner says, "Well, there were adverse conditions." I said, "What adverse conditions? The street was passable; the driveway had been cleared; I was standing on the porch, for crying out loud, in full view of him. He did not respond when spoken to; he did not answer the question he was asked. He just drove away." Mr. Owner thinks I'm a psycho bitch. I am wondering whatever happened to people apologizing when they give bad service.
The thing is, if at any point any of them had apologized, I would still have given them the job (I have laundry to do that I can't do because he left my dryer in pieces yesterday). All they had to do was say, "Sorry for the misunderstanding." But they preferred, "What is your problem, lady?"
I hope we can afford to keep Don and Dawn. They do such good work, and see what needs doing and do it without needing to be watched. Today I spotted Dawn washing door frames where they had gotten dirty from dogs rubbing against them, and when they leave Don tends to back out of the house with a dustrag in his hand cleaning tops of doors and door handles as he goes. When we used to have the house cleaned some years ago, the woman who did it did pretty good work, but was not nearly as thorough as these two, and there were some things I could never get her to remember to do even when I reminded her over and over.
I had to laugh at them the first time they came. They kept trying to do a final walk-through to see if they'd missed anything, and they'd get to the living room and see that there was, say, some bird food on the floor, and they would patiently get the whisk broom and sweep it up, and put the whisk broom away, and start their walk-through again, and they'd get to the living room and see that there was some bird food on the floor... I finally said, "You'll never get ahead of the birds. You did the floor once, and you need to just call that good enough."
Since Dawn made my kitchen spotless two weeks ago (though there is some grubbiness that nothing short of a fresh coat of paint will cure, I think), I have been diligent about keeping it up. I have even--get this--been sweeping and swiffering it every day. It's good to feel like Eric can crawl in there after us without risking his life.
I also have been vacuuming the rug he plays on every day. Sometimes twice a day if some cat drops a bunch of hair hunks. Before we had a baby, I was very worried about how I could possibly keep the floor clean enough, with eight furry animals and four parrots in the house, for him to play on his stomach or crawl. But we are finding that with a little creativity, it is possible. For instance, for the time being the vacuum cleaner lives at the end of the couch. It takes me four minutes by the clock to unwind the cord, plug it in, run it over the floor, unplug it, re-wind the cord, and put it away. This is the thing that seemed so impossible to me--and it takes four minutes a day. Eight if I do it twice.
The cats love Eric's toys. Eric got a shape sorter for Christmas with six blocks: two each of red cylinders, green squares, and blue triangles. I am going crazy keeping track of the blocks because not only does Eric fling them around and push them under furniture, but the cats play with them, too. The other day, both blue blocks were missing. One is still gone, God only knows where (and I mean that with all reverence: it's not just a figure of speech), but I found the other one under the basement stairs when I went down there to get a cat carrier to take Mitch to the vet. Under the basement stairs, almost completely buried in six years' worth of shed cat hair. I was so not expecting to see it there that I was halfway up the stairs before my brain registered what the glint of blue peeping out of the dirt had meant. I'm hoping Tupperware sells block sets separately because I need to buy about six of them so I can relax, already. That was the trick with pacifiers: get enough so that I couldn't keep track of them all, and it didn't matter anyway.
I just hope I don't have to resort to buying Eric only toys that don't have parts to counteract my compulsive and futile desire to keep track of every little piece.
Some of you already know that Juno's biopsy showed that she has lymphosarcoma. Except that she is not eating well (though she does like it when I scramble her some eggs), she seems perfectly cheerful and well, not at all like a dog who would be dead in a matter of weeks without treatment. We are going to Rochester Hills on Monday to a clinic that specializes in veterinary oncology, to discuss her prognosis and treatment options, and I am signed up to teach an extra class in the fall so that we can pay for chemotherapy if we decide to pursue that.
Eric's second swim lesson went much better than his first one. David got him up early on Saturday so he would go down for a nap early. He did, and woke up just in time to have a bottle and go swimming. Rested and with a full tummy (and in his stylish Swedish swim diaper), he thought swimming was just fine. He did spend some time being quiet and watching, as he often does in an unfamiliar place, but he enjoyed being bounced in the water and by the end of the hour he was splashing happily.
Posted by Su Penn at January 31, 2004 07:04 PM | TrackBack