F: “Hi, we’re going to deliver your table this Saturday at 7:00PM”
A: “Awesome!  Will the fact that I’m not going to be there be a problem?” (At this point I was just f—ing with them, I know they come in and set it up and do the whole thing, so there’s no way it’ll work)
F: “Uh… Well, looks like the next time we’ll be out there is sometime between November 20th and December 2nd.  Will you be home then?”
A: (thinks about the fact that this is a two week range) “Uh, I think so”.
F: “OK, someone will call you back then to schedule a new delivery.”

Still not holding my breath on this. The last two times they were missing parts (the same parts), we’ll see about this time around. I’m not angry or frustrated or anything, because you get what you pay for: Extremely high-quality human-made furniture from FLS at “Cost plus a Few Bucks” price. It’s a great place and they really treat you right, and the furniture commonly arrives for most people within 3-6 months… they just need to do a slightly better job of meeting customer expectations.

Anyway, hopefully we’ll see it in before Presents Day.

Also, I was having an AWESOME case of buyer’s regret recently. I purchased a really slick as hell laptop for $1600 (list price before discounts was like $2100), and it’s basically going to be my primary work machine: Dual Core 2.0Ghz Pentium 4mb cache, 2 Gigs of memory, 7200RPM 100gb HD, 15.4 Cinema-style display (which I like more than “square” for the work I do) with ultra-high quality screen, yadda yadda yadda.  My budget plans were $1000-1400, so I went over a bit, a lot even. Last time I had buyer’s regret like this was, thinking hard on it, almost exactly 10 years ago when I bought a laptop right before I went to Japan (Intel P2, 128 Hard Megs of RAM, 3 GB hard disk for all storage needs, etc) and that was like $2500 or something IIRC.

Anyway, I got this monstered out because for the work-work that I do (the tech side, not the web/translation/writing and hobby stuff) I basically need it to run VMWare with like 4 concurrent OSes running at the same time (the native Win XP Pro, plus 1 RH Linux server, 2 Windows 2003 Enterprise servers, and 1 Ubuntu host), so we’ll see if it can handle this load.

The sad thing is that the laptop should arrive before the table.

Also in the news, Orie gets back next Wednesday. Also, this weekend I will go to the MACE convention over in High Point. Literally the night they were set to deliver my table, I won’t be at home but I’ll be like 5 minutes away from FLS. Irony. Anyway, the saga continues.

-Andy