Day Fifteen
(wire for under cabinet light)
The two contractor guys only stayed at the house for about 3 hours today and worked some more on covering seams in sheet rock and sealing up gaps in the wall in preparation for cabinet installation, whenever that might be.
The first hour of their time was spent helping me schlep the not needed cabinets and trim pieces back to Lowe’s so I could get the refund money. They carried the big 24″ square base cabinet and the two pieces of 96″ long trim for the side of the refrigerator in their pickup truck. I put the 2 small cabinets and a dishwasher return in the trunk and then back seat of the Purple Whale. Upon arrival we piled all the items in the corner of the returns area and they went back to the house, while I got in line behind the one person needing assistance besides me.
The receipt I had was for the entire 78 item cabinet order with descriptions of each item that were sometimes long and always cryptic. The item numbers were also listed and because we had gotten the $1300 discount back when we ordered them, there was the list price, the prorated discount price, and the final price on there too. The piece of paper was over 4? long. Oh, and by the way, it was slightly incomplete as the cash register had run out of tape as it printed it. The very first step in the refund process is to scan the bar code on the bottom of the receipt to call up the invoice number, oops, that didn’t get printed because of the short paper.
She looked the order up using my phone number and we commenced to searching our respective lists, my long receipt and her on her computer screen. This process was particularly vexing as my receipt was not printed in any kind of order. For her it was difficult because she was looking at a 40 row high by 80 column wide CRT with item number and description in one narrow column that truncated it after about 10 characters. I would find my item and call out the item number and its description and she would page down, page down, page down until she found something that might be my item. After about 20 minutes she had five items for refund and printed out the receipt for me to sign. When I looked at it, it had 5 items, but one was a repeat, but inexplicably it had a separate price of 1 cent. So now I had to compare those 4 items to those listed on my 4? long receipt to find the missing fifth item. I did find it and good thing too, as it was $120 for one of those 96? panels.
We still weren’t done. I had the 24?drawer base that I needed to return to the store so they could order the replacement. The girl helping me out didn’t know how to handle it, so she tried calling someone from the cabinet department to get an explanation, but no one answered. No one answered her page either, so she called someone in the office upstairs and she was told to do a refund and have me buy the cabinet again. Of course as soon as she hit the enter key to refund my charge card, someone from cabinets showed up and said, that isn’t how it is handled, it was supposed to be handled internally. So she then had to call a manger over to override the refund internally at the store level, but it was too late for Visa, so I had to buy back my broken cabinet only to leave it behind while they contacted the manufacturer for a new one.
By time I was finished there were about a dozen, probably internally fuming, people in line waiting to return something.