Too often people and/or things don’t work. Let’s start with people. Two weeks a go I had a plumber come over, fix nothing and charge me $125 for a service call. With hardware and software, given my relative ignorance I often spend hours trying to make things act as they should or with incompetent help desk folk.
Today things generally went well. A garage door spring sprang Saturday night and it took 2 hour for me to get the door manually open so that we could remove my wife’s car from the garage. Called the repair guy Sunday Christmas eve day. Since this was not an emergency made an appointment for Tuesday morning. We have used the same one man shop for 12 years. He lives in a distant suburb and have contemplated finding someone closer. NEVER. This man shows up when he says he will, fixes what is broke, does it quickly and is always reasonable. He has talked me out of spending alot when he felt we could do as well for less. Once again he came, fixed, presented a reasonable bill and drove off into the day.
I then spent part of the day setting up Outlook to handle our email so that my wife could have her new Palm Pilot totally integrated. This was not the 1-2-3 process as I thought it would be but with liberal use of the help functions of both Outlook and our email provider I got it to work in less than a gazillion hours. This is all I ask of computer/software. That the help functions provide enough info to allow me to figure things out. Today I am smiling.
March 7, 2007 at 7:56 pm |
Frank Roche wrote: Dec 24, 2006 at 11:28 AM Reply Delete
There is something funny about those garage door springs. I’ve had four of them snap in the past year. One of them dang near went through the wall…I heard this gigantic SNAP! and when I went out there the spring was buried in the outer wall of my garage. Yikes!
And as with all things, there’s a trick to replacing those springs. Gotta do it in pairs…kind of like replacing windshield wipers. The first one always takes an hour, and the second one takes 3 minutes. Funny how that works. Hope the rest of your break is more of a break…and that nothing else breaks.
ubermench replied to Frank Roche’s comment: Dec 24, 2006 at 9:41 PM Reply Delete
I pay people to do that. This time the door seems warped. I am afraid I will be replacing the door and the rails system. There goes the HD TV.