Reheated
Well we have a new water heater in place. It didn’t come without it’s fair share of drama. Early Wednesday morning there was a barrage of phone calls between me, the installer and Lowe’s. For awhile it seemed like a three stooges routine. The guy that did the survey relayed the wrong water heater information back to Lowe’s. He managed to do this even though we had a print out from the Lowe’s web site that laid out exactly which model we wanted. So after a confusing and frustrating series of phone calls that included me telling a woman at Lowe’s, “if the installer comes out and has the wrong water heater, I am going to go ballistic..” the guy showed up mid-afternoon, with the correct heater, and installed it.
Ali said that when he was draining the old heater before removing it, the water was a disgusting brown color. No wonder every time Ali took a bath the water was discolored. Ali said the bottom of the old water heater was indeed rusting out, piece of shit. The new Whirlpool unit is nice. It has stainless steel heating elements as opposed to copper elements to resist corrosion, it adjusts itself to maximize energy savings based on your water use pattern, it’s self cleaning and it has easy to reach controls that let you set the temperature as well as place the heater into various modes. One of the modes is vacation mode so you aren’t wasting energy heating water when you aren’t home, pretty cool. When I got home last night I wrapped it in the insulation blanket I bought over the weekend to further our energy savings.
I called and left a message for the company that built our $17,000 pool cage yesterday regarding the section of screening that is not attached. Of course I received no call back. I fully expect this to be a major pain in the ass. My plan is to start out leaving a message every two days. If I get no response after a week, it will be every day. The messages will get increasingly angry as we go along.
Work has been uncharacteristically stressful recently. We implemented a new cashiering system in the past 6 months and now that tax season has started, it is crumbling under the volume. The system is constantly hanging up, requiring us to give it a figurative kick in the ass several times a day. When it goes down, there is a near instantaneous avalanche of phone calls from clerks hung up with impatient customers in front of them. I have been doing nothing but trying to diagnose the problems for a few weeks to no avail. I try something, it appears to sort of work for awhile and then inexplicably the instability returns. It’s very frustrating.
The vendor has been pointing the finger at the programming language our back end software uses, saying there is some sort of bug there that is causing the hangs. We have been buying that explanation, trying to address the issue with the vendor for our programming language. However yesterday out of the blue I decided to call an IT manager of a county on the east coast that also uses the same cashiering software to pick his brain. I told him about our woes and he didn’t act surprised at all. In fact he said that they have had a very similar experience, calling their last tax season with the product a “disaster”. They use a totally different back end than we do, yet they have the same issues with the cashiering application hanging constantly. This was a real eye opener. It made me realize that our cashiering vendor has been largely feeding us a big line of shit. I relayed this conversation I had with the other IT manager to my boss. I’m not quite sure what the end result will be. We have dropped a fortune with this company yet it seems that once they have your money and even though we pay additional money for support, we have become second class citizens since the big money is to be harvested from the lambs that have not yet converted over to this system.
Someone sent me an email of pictures from a 1977 JC Penney catalog. The fashion is just hilarious. Take a look.
The epitome of cool…
Is this guy ready to sling garbage cans or hit the disco?
I have no explanation for what the article of clothing on the right is. Man Dress comes to mind.
This suit should come with a warning that it could cause seizures if you look at it too long.
Wow, this guy had to get his ass kicked a lot….
These shirts double as game boards you can play on while traveling.
They look way too happy for being dressed up like rodeo clowns.
The hair, the outfit, this must be Miss USA 1977 and the runner up. Category – polyester wear
Nothing like a very busy one piece to flatten your figure, straighten your curves….. she’s looking right at his groin.
I swear there is a picture of me as a kid wearing this exact outfit. Thanks mom…. 🙂