On Poor Customer Service

We moved into a new house not too long ago, and have been settling in ever since.  The house wasn't quite done when we moved in, so there's been some wrangling with subcontractors and whatnot.  The most recent problem has been the cabinet maker.  We had ordered some built-in bookshelves, put together a design with the cabinet maker, and were expecting installation by the end of last year.  Well, the cabinet maker, Job, had a bad hand injury.  He almost cut his thumb off.  Then his wife came down with leukemia.  So he's running a little behind schedule.  That's frustrating, but he has some very good excuses so I figured I'd be a nice guy and wait for him to get caught up.

He was supposed to have everything installed by the end of this month.  Of course, there have been delays.  He was supposed to come out first thing this morning and finish the installation.   I got a call with "we'll be there right after lunch".  Around one, I got another call with "we'll be there in about an hour".  He tells me that they went to do another project first.  They finally showed up and are working on the project now, but they just told me that they won't be able to finish it today; some of the parts aren't ready.

This is getting a little frustrating.

The guy does good work; it just takes forever.  And getting told that another project is taking priority over mine, when my project is running 2 months behind schedule, is very frustrating.  The Wife and I were going to order some more bookshelves for the upstairs; but now I think we're going to go through another vendor.

Hansel and Gretel and Crap

The Wife and I went to the movies the other night, to check out "Hansel and Gretel, Witch Hunters".

It was not bad.  Not bad at all.

It was, in fact, AWFUL.

But in kind of a good way.

The basic plot (SPOILER ALERT) is that Hansel and Gretel, after their famous fairy tale adventure, grow up to hunt witches.  Despite living in what appears to be medieval Germany, they have semi-automatic and automatic firearms, grenades, and TASERs (oh, my).  They stop the Russian Cosmonaut from Armageddon from killing a (sort of) innocent woman.  Hawkeye from the Avengers is awarded appropriately.  Hawkeye and Jean Grey both demonstrate why they played supporting actors in their superhero movies.  Script?  What script?  Apparently George Lucas was the dialogue coach for this film.  The whole thing has a kind of steampunk/s&m feel, but they tried to jam way too much plot into an action flick, despite having almost no character development.  This would have done better as a season of TV.

Joe-Bob Briggs style summary:  Gun fu.  Tree fu.  Troll fu.  Steampunk TASER fu.  Head stompin'.  Tree fu.  Two, count 'em two, bare nekkid breasts.  Aardvarkin' under water.  Crossbow fu.  Dead bodies: too numerous to count.

3 stars.  Ted sez check it out.