Take Two

Sometimes I get the feeling that nothing will ever be done right the first time; that I will always have to go back to the drawing board to fix a flaw. This relates mostly to home improvements. I’ve had some annoying experiences that would confirm my belief that there is always a problem and that nothing ever goes smoothly initially for me.

The latest thing to happen is with the new bed we bought. It’s a Sleep Number and the bed itself is fine. However, when they delivered it, the delivery guys walked into our bedroom and said, “You don’t have a frame?” I guess not. Nobody from the store told us we had to order a frame separately. I just assumed that with the price we paid, a frame came with the bed we ordered. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable assumption. We went from a queen to a king so our old frame is useless. So now the bed is sitting on the floor.

Yeah, I know, we bought an expensive bed and there’s a slight flaw, #firstworldproblems and all that. But now we will have to take the bed apart partially to fit it on the frame, which I’m sure won’t be fun. I will be complaining to the company and try to get a discount because at no point did anybody at the store tell us we would need to order a new frame even though they knew we were going up a size. The guy tried to upsell us on all these other bed accessories but you think it would be part of the training to take 10 seconds and ask, “Hey, do you need a frame?”

I’m not despondent but annoyed. When there was a problem with this bed, it was more of a sigh of “It figures.” This is especially true because just a week earlier, our new deck furniture delivery was delayed because of course, the glass top of the original table was broken so they’d have to come back. It was slightly inconvenient as I had to work from home on another day to accommodate them.

We always have trouble with this kind of thing. When we got our new HVAC system, they guy had to come back the next day because the central air wasn’t working. It was 82 degrees in our house at night and getting hotter. I had a moment of nausea because I thought, “I paid all this money and it’s still an inferno in here.” No, the guys just didn’t turn on the coolant so only the fan was running. How about getting it right the first time?

Several appliances have gotten screwed up. There was the great dishwasher saga of ’10, when the first dishwasher (so they said) wouldn’t fit with our pipes so I had a dishwasher sitting in a box in our dining room, with a non-working appliance under the cabinet. It took several visits to Best Buy and phone calls before I canceled the order and went elsewhere. Our oven also broke soon after we got it and they had to repair it (admittedly that was my fault). We had a leaky faucet and the plumbers had to come back twice and fix it. Then there was that weird leak with the roof when the roofer and the plumber had to come back a few times to investigate.

It’s really just an inconvenience and it doesn’t happen everytime we need some work done on the house. But when it happens, it’s enough to make me sigh and grumble. Sometimes nothing is fixed unless the scene gets at least two more takes.