Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The Bar Situation

If you've been reading this shit for a while you may remember a few month ago when my dad stopped my by our house and randomly gave me a brand new 40 inch LCD tv. After determining that the tv didn't fit in our family room entertainment center, this tv motivated us to finish our basement. It was already finished, but it was empty. So, we put the tv down there. We got a nice new sofa. For christmas I got a home theater system and hooked that up. We ordered a bar, and planned a Super Bowl Party. Two weeks ago the bar arrived. The delivery guy said he wouldn't wait around for me to inspect it and told me to sign for it as "to be inspected" to protect myself. When he left I opened it and it was a disaster. Cracks, out of place panels, more cracks, gashes.

I'm not going to go so far as to say Kym likes dealing with Customer Service, but she's good at it. She has lots of practice. She has delt with Comcast's customer service for like 9000 hours. The company immediately had a new bar sent out. Yesterday we got home from work and the side bar was sitting on our front porch. I opened it and of course, it had out of place panels and a giant crack down the side. Kym got on the phone and they sent out another one. The main bar was sitting at the shipping place today and they opened it there, declared it to be ok and will be shipping that today. I'm sure we'll get it and it will be broken and we'll have no bar for our Super Bowl party on Sunday. Plus we now have one and a half $1300 bars sitting in our garage that we were told to dispose of. Meanwhile it's 3 degrees outside every morning and my car freezes while a broken bar sits warm in the garage. I hope the story has a happy ending in which the bar that will arrive today is good, the 3rd side bar will arrive Saturday, we get it all for free for our trouble, and we sell the broken bar on craigslist for a couple bucks. But I'm not holding my breath.

12 comments:

Holly {ArtistMotherTeacher} said...

Anybody ever heard of using packing material or perhaps writing "FRAGILE" on the box? I think that's Italian.

Christina said...

I ordered new plates from Amazon. I ordered 20 place settings because we were having 20 people over for Christmas dinner. Each shipment came with broken dinner plates, or broken salad plates, or broken soup bowls. And each one had to be replaced by more broken dishware. By the end of it, we ended up with what should have been about 36 place settings, but with an odd number of bowls, salad plates & dinner plates. This story has no real point other than some packing places are just stupid.

dizzy von damn! said...

i want a broken bar at which to drink away my broken dreams.

Unknown said...

Good thing you have Kym to fix your things, otherwise you would be using a broken bar

Lisa said...

Tim:
I'm sorry to hear about your broken bars. You should really think about using the broken bars for kindling since it's colder than brass balls over there, and you should get busy making your own bar out of popsickle sticks and old egg cartons.

What are you serving at your (almost) bar?

Tim said...

pix - yep, and when it arrived I thought it was a bowlign alley.

tb - Kinda like this whole post has no real point?

mk - ha!

ss - that's very likely

kristine - that's not a bad idea. We'll take agruments to the Outside Bar.

leezer - Miller Light and probably Sam Adams. Miller light and something heavier of which I haven't yet decided.

BeechballBeatsCancer said...

Man, I would be so pissed off to get not only 1, but 2 broken bars.. that's just ridiculous! Some places are so stupid.. we had a similiar situation with our big flat screen Tv. dented. weird light on the screen. scratched. Come on people, common sense - we wanna buy good stuff that's not broken! Man, I'm getting annoyed on your behalf - needless to say, I am not so good with customer service people, lol! Good luck, hope your party is a blast!

Melissa said...

What is with men and customer service? James nearly has a stroke any time he has to deal with those people. Seriously, veins pop out. We're having a Super Bowl Party also but our bar is going to be a disposable ice chest that we're going to decorate with streamers and balloons. I mean, it's a party, right?

Anonymous said...

It sounded like that delivery guy knew that he broke it the first time. Was it UPS? When I lived on the 3rd floor of a condo, the UPS guy was delivering what was obviously an HP printer to my neighbor. He came up the stairs, and, while on the landing inbetween the first and second floors, he tossed the printer up onto the 3rd floor landing (he obviously couldn't be bothered to walk up those last few steps). Then, he saw me, so he trotted up the steps and moved the package a little, maybe thinking I was brain damaged, and I would think he actually didn't just throw a printer 10 feet up over a rail. I said to him "I totally just saw that." He looked embarrassed. Consequently, the printer was damaged, and we were able to blame UPS pretty easily.

Sorry about the bar. I'm having my basement finished in a few years. I've got a guy who can do a great job, pretty cheap (using undocumented workers). I'm all about illegal immigration when I can have my 800 square foot basement finished, including a drywalled ceiling, for less than 10,000 dollars.

Put the bars in the driveway, and your car inside. My car, for the first time since I bought it in 2000, is in the garage. She likes it. My wife wants to clutter up the garage with stuff, but my mantra is that a garage is not a storage locker, it's a car cave.

Sorry about the long comment.

Oh great One said...

That really sucks! Can you salvage enough pieces to make one GOOD one?

It's me, @Moustachio said...

Tell Kym to use a sexxxy voice, and things will happen faster.

EuroTrippen said...

Maybe you're just a bad person and that's why all this bad stuff keeps happening to you??

heh