Words you never want to hear a contractor who is working on your home say:
“Oh, that was dumb.”
At long last, our flooring guys arrived this morning to tear out the carpeting in the living room and hallway and install the vinyl planking. I naïvely thought it wouldn’t be too disruptive to work from home while this was going on, but within minutes realized I’d vastly underestimated the amount of noise and clouds of dust this project would generate. When I heard the foreman, Todd (what is it with guys named Todd??) utter those words, I figured maybe he’d put a chip in the wall or scratched the paint. You know, something minor.
This is not something minor.
What it is, in case you can’t tell, is a giant hole in the screen door that once housed a window. Once as in, earlier this morning.
WT ever-loving F.
“Umm, sir?” Todd asked. “Got a second?”
Funny how I’d just been Mark up to that point but was suddenly elevated to sir. When I stepped out of the office and saw the sheepish look on Todd’s face, I knew this was going to be bigger than a chip in the wall or scratched paint. But I was not expecting to see the entire tempered glass window full of spiderweb cracks. The thing was shattered. Wish I’d gotten a picture, but I was in a mild state of shock. And then Todd had the nerve to say, “I don’t know what happened…maybe a bird flew into it?”
MAYBE A BIRD FLEW INTO IT?! Even a freakin’ pterodactyl couldn’t break a tempered glass window, dude.
I could tell ol’ Todd was scrambling for a way to avoid blame. He even asked if the window had been like that already, even though he was the one who opened the door and was going in and out all morning!! Finally, he conceded that his jam saw must have picked up an errant tack nail from the baseboard at the top of the stairs and flung that sucker through the air with such velocity that it took out the window pane. Which is an awfully specific scenario given that moments before he had “no idea” what happened.
Good hell. Someone could have been killed.
To his credit, Todd did end up admitting fault and took care of the problem immediately. On his lunch break, he brought the broken window to a shop in town and paid for a replacement. It’s going to have to be ordered, but at least we don’t have to deal with the hassle of taking care of it ourselves, sending him a bill, and hoping we get reimbursed.
In any case, the new flooring looks great!
What there is of it anyway. Because, wouldn’t you know it, the installers ended up a few boxes short. Ironically, this same thing happened the last time we bought a house. I guess flooring is the kryptonite to our manifesting.
Everything was measured correctly, but Home Depot apparently didn’t load all the boxes onto the truck. Even worse? Todd said this happens all the time. If we’re looking for silver linings, at least the flooring is in stock. They’ll be back tomorrow morning to finish the job. And they originally quoted us two days anyway, so no harm, no foul. Or, if I were addressing Todd: no harm, no fowl.
And then Monday, I get to do this all over again when we have carpeting installed in the bedrooms, which will be even more disruptive. Oy, vey.
It’s been a pretty weird week to be honest. All the comments I was leaving for my blog buddies were being hijacked by the WordPress spam terrorists. I’d type up a comment, go to post it, and then — poof! — it was gone. I’d then type up the exact same comment, go to post it again, and get the same result.
I learned later, from the WP support team, that you should never do this. Duplicate comments are flagged as spam, and then you are blocked from leaving any comment on that person’s blog. Going back periodically and commenting with “test” or “testing” only exacerbates the problem. It turns out there was a small glitch earlier in the week, right about the time I was catching up on blogs, and as a result, my comments on multiple sites were flagged as spam.
How rude.
And then, adding insult to injury, when I emailed one blogger directly to let her know what was going on, she shared the system-generated response with me.
I can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t the work of some robot overlord I pissed off with my anti-AI diatribe. Skynet exacting revenge or something. Everything’s working fine now and I didn’t have to pay anybody a ransom, but still. The timing is suspicious, ya know?
Because the flooring isn’t quite done, power tools are scattered everywhere, and everything’s a dusty mess, we’re headed to Mr. Brew’s Taphouse tonight for bar trivia. Last time Booze Clues finished third, so wish us luck!
Mark My Words 
Leave a comment