@#$#@% curtains

[jethrien]

Our windows leak a bit. They're single-paned glass, and not well sealed.

We decided a good, cheap solution to this would be to buy insulated curtains.

Seems simple, right?

We found a catalogue with some we liked. I tried to place an order - they're sold out, won't have any more until mid-December. (This is the end of October, by the way.)

All right. We head to Bed, Bath, and Beyond. No insulated curtains. We try the mall. Macy's. Nope. Sears. Nope. Penney's - yes. They're not gorgeous, but they'll do. We order two sets, of different sizes for our different bedroom windows. One set is available - they'll get here in a week. The other set is backordered - won't get here for weeks.

Ok. We order both. A week later, the first set come in. There's an entire complicated ritual required to get ordered merchandise. We get them. We bring them home. We try to put them up. We realize that we hadn't understood how the mountings work, and the curtains are too short. We try to call them to cancel the second set (which are also going to be too short) and reorder. We can't do that over the phone. We go back to the store. They happily take our new order for longer curtains, but tell us that they can't cancel an order that's backordered. We will have to wait until they come in, pick them up, and return them.

So we return short curtains #1. We order longer curtains. They'll come in in a week or so.

We wait. And wait. And wait. We half forget about the damn curtains.

I finally decide I'm going to call them yesterday. Before I can, they call me. The curtains have come in. Hurray!

I get home. There's a letter waiting for me, informing me that the curtains I'd ordered (the long curtains) have been sitting there for days, they've contacted me multiple times, and they've assumed that I didn't want them and sent them back.

No one had called me before yesterday. There are no messages on my phone. They just sent back my curtains!

We go to Penney's. There are indeed curtains waiting for us - short curtains #2, the backordered ones. So we have the short ones we tried to cancel, but not the reordered long ones. On a chance, Chuck asks whether they've actually sent the long ones back.

They haven't. All hail incompetence.

"Do you want these?" "YES!!!"

So we have curtains. We only have the rods and hooks, though, for the original short set. We can still use those, but we need another set of rods and hooks.

They have the rods. They do not have the hooks. Or rather, they have six other kinds of hooks, but not the kinds that our curtains require.

The salesman scratches his head in puzzlement. "We had loads of them yesterday. Try Sears."

We try Sears. We wander around Sears helplessly. We discover that Sears does not believe in staffing its stores, apparently. We track down one sales guy. "No, that's not my department. Try over there."

We find another salesman hiding behind a rack of small girls' Christmas dresses. He looks at us in bafflement as we describe what we're looking for. He wanders forlornly around the curtains section, occasionally getting lost. He clearly has no idea how to hang curtains. He suggests we come back on Thursday. Maybe they'll have hooks then.

Screw this. We go home.

We discover that we have enough hooks that, if used sparingly, we can hang both sets of curtains. Glee! We hang curtain set #1. They are wrinkly and I am afraid to iron the rubberized backing. But they are curtains. Huzzah. We hang curtain set #2, which are bigger.

Curtain set #2 falls on Chuck's head in a shower of screws and plaster. They pulled straight out of the wall.

!@$!@$ curtains.


In other news - Livejournal has started delivering notices of comments that people made on my journal two weeks ago. So if I ignored your comment from something last week, sorry.

Comments

[feiran.livejournal.com]

This is why I haven't decorated my room in the year and a half I've been living in my apartment.