Sticky Situation

I bought some red fiberglass rods at Home Depot yesterday to place at the edges of our lawn, so the snow plow will know how far over to plow. I then spent five or six minutes scraping the price tags off the rods. Why?

Because some dolt stuck them near the top. These are poles that are made to be buried at the base, and are meant to be a little more attractive than a stick stuck in the ground---therefore, it's reasonable to assume that people won't want a price sticker showing. So if the bottom end is made to be buried, shouldn't the label go there? Then no one would have to scrape it off.

This happened to me years ago with some drip edges I bought for the roof of a house I was building. The edges would show, and I planned to paint them to match the house. Of course, a price tag that was painted over would ultimately peel off, so I had to scrape the tags which, again, had been stuck on the exposed edges--not the part that would be covered by shingles.

I've also seen trim moldings that have the sticker on the finished face, light bulbs that have one on the bulb itself, and many other products where the clerk or associate applying the labels has stuck them in the worst possible place.

Now, you might say that the people doing this are just sort of slogging along, in a job they'd rather not have for a wage that doesn't seem worth any effort. But, as the tired old saying goes, if you're going to do something, do it right.

I worked as a busboy years ago, and teamed up with a guy named Guy (true!). Guy didn't like to work and I didn't like to sit around, so we decided he'd be the manager of the dining room we worked in (there were multiple rooms in this restaurant) and I'd be the "worker". He'd keep track of which tables were about to leave, and I'd get ready with a new set of dishes, glasses and silverware. If there was time, I'd do the clearing, then let him bring the dirty dishes into the kitchen while I cleaned and set the table. We'd stack up multiple paper placemats with the silverware between, cutting precious seconds off the time spent re-setting a table. We even stashed saucers inside an empty paper napkin box one time when saucers were in short supply from the dish washers, and told "competing" busboys from other dining room that we didn't have any. (Okay, not very admirable, but it entertained us.)

When things got really busy, Guy would pitch in more, but he mostly stood around and planned while I did the grunt work. I didn't mind---I liked keeping busy. He didn't. And Guy, despite being lazy, was a more efficient busboy than the other guys because he and I had a system worked out.

The owner, who believed everyone should always be busy, came in one time and found us eating cornbread and standing around. He went into a rage, but every time he said, "why don't you do [fill in chore here]," we'd point out that we'd already done that. He couldn't find anything we hadn't already done, and finally stormed away in a huff. (Why he didn't have the wisdom to have us train the other bussers is beyond me. We were 15-year-old efficiency experts.)

The point is, we had a menial job with low pay, but we found a way to make it fun and do it better. Is it too much to ask someone who is preparing products for someone who will be purchasing a do-it-yourself item (which almost everything in Home Depot is) to think about how they can make less work for that customer?

Years ago, I would receive magazines in the mail with the mailing label stuck right in the middle of the front cover, and the label would take off the surface of the cover if you tried to peel it off. Now they use removable labels, so at least the problem has been solved for mailed magazines. Stores can't do that, because people might switch labels between products to get a steal (literally), but couldn't someone write a memo and tell people to think?

Maybe, when the memo is ready, they could stick one on the forehead of each person with a tag gun.

In the meantime, I offer this link, in case you encounter something similar.

Long time

Well, it's been almost two months since I wrote my last blog. I've been concentrating on getting our house all finished---all the little and big things that need doing after twenty-four years. I want everything completed before I go back to concentrating on QlownTown. As a former contractor, I have some projects that were never finished, and I intend to do them all now. The plan to sell our house this summer, then this fall, has now been bumped to spring, but I'd like to actually live in a finished house for awhile anyway.

It's frustrating to have to repair things that have broken or aged after so many years, but of course they'd have to be addressed even if we were going to stay forever. And I am not allowing myself to do any half-assed repairs so I can sell the house: I don't want to have on my conscience that something might go wrong for the eventual buyers a few months after we're gone. (Nor do I want them coming to me and saying "Hey!...There's [fill in problem here] that you didn't tell us about.")

One nice thing that I did was to enlarge our shower. It used to be about 31" x 32". Yes, tiny, and closed in on three sides. Now it's three feet by three feet, with clear glass on two sides. The extra inches make a huge difference, as does the extra light pouring in and the view out through the glass. And instead of molded white fiberglass, the walls are tiny yellow-green tiles with pristine white grout. I wish we'd done this years ago. Some people say, "Aren't you sorry you did this if you'll be gone in a few months?", but I figure it'll be a big selling point, and we're really enjoying it now.

And I see any improvements made in this period as research for the next house.

 For example, our garage door was always this big, flat, fake-wood-grained slab. I added a post in the middle, creating the look of two doors, and added trim and windows to make it look like two sets of carriage doors. (Finished photos to follow once it's painted.) Now I know that I can put in an inexpensive door and, with some moldings and a little time, create a much more expensive-looking "set" of doors. I probably wouldn't have attempted it on a new house.

I was just looking for the photos I took during the process, and evidently deleted them. I had thought I might write an article for Fine Homebuilding, but now, I guess I'll need to do this again to get pictures.

So, until I get back to making the big QlownTown push: upgrading the site and store, submitting to newspapers, and working on a one-of-a-kind approach to the online presentation of the strip, I'll probably just blog about construction---which is my other big love anyway.