2001-08-06 - 6:28 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Love Will Turn Back (the Hands of Time)", from "Grease 2". Wooo!

So, my weekend.

Good stuff first.

Saturday, we went out to the boonies again, had more good pizza and sandwiches, and Poindexter went riding. He got very, very dirty going through some puddles, and came back with his clothes all spattered with red clay, and dirt all over his face. He looked really, really, really cute with dirt on his nose. I am so in love.

I went looking for berries, but the animals had eaten them all. Poo.

We went home and did a lot of cuddling and talking -- "working on our marriage" -- and it was just very, very nice. Lots of laughing and fun. First weekend we've had to ourselves in what feels like ages.

Okay, now, the floor.

When the floor was going in, you'll recall I was upset about how there appeared to be a lot of cracks.

On Sunday afternoon we went to look at two neighbors' houses (all the houses are new and have the same type of wood flooring) and we found out what the REAL problem was:

Our replacement floor is the WRONG TYPE OF WOOD.

The wood we originally had was straight-edged, so that the pieces fit together and the floor is smooth. The replacement wood has an "eased edge", so that there are little tiny "ditches" on the long edges of the boards. In other words, big cracks.

I suppose some people might think this is nice, or something, but it's not what we had before, plus it looks like it's the perfect thing to catch dust. We don't buy TABLES that have patterns and cut designs in them because we don't want dust and crumbs catching in the cracks, so we certainly don't want it on our FLOOR.

In addition to the bad wood, there is just a lot of carelessness about the installation. They were installing misshapen boards rather than throwing them out, and were careless about nail holes, stuff like that.

So this morning we had a meeting with our general contractor, the floor manager-type, and the floor installer. I'm not really sure how it went. Poindexter didn't get worked up, so there's that.

Apparently the company the general contractor works for is sort of trying these guys out as their default floor people, so the floor guys have a lot of possible future jobs hinging on whether they do our floor right. Hopefully that will make them extra careful from now on.

Too bad we have to be the guinea pigs, though.

Update, later this afternoon: Before giving in and redoing, they tried to get us to sand down to below the eased edge (where, presumably, the boards are flush against each other) and refinish. I don't THINK so. That's what we're gonna want to do years from now, when the floors are scuffed from wear and tear; not a week after installation!

Here's what keeps bugging me: Why didn't the floor manager-type make sure he had the right kind of boards? There are three different types on the bruce.com web site. Did he think it didn't matter? That we wouldn't care? Was he unaware of the different types of boards available?

This is something that irritates me to no end about the way so many people do business. There is no way in hell I would be installing floors in people's homes without knowing as much as possible about the different styles of boards available, the differences in quality, etc. Why don't people CARE!? Why don't they NOTICE?!

There's nothing that irritates me more when people who work at a job and never bother to find out anything more than the bare bones of what they need to know. People who aren't interested in learning a little more, becoming more efficient, becoming more useful to their employer and to customers, and advancing their position. Why don't they care?!

At my job, I have to work with data sets that have a lot of errors in them. My company has made something of name for itself by being well aware of and even correcting errors so that we have a "better" data set. I am obsessed with making sure I know what all the idiosyncrasies are so that I can account for them and get the best answer possible. Yet there are people out there using the same data and they don't even bother to look for or consider the effects of these kinds of errors. It makes me crazy.

When a client comes to me with a vaguely worded request, I think about the question for a while, and go back to them: "Did you mean X, or Y? The data is vague about this; do you want to circumvent the problem with method P or Q?" I make sure I know EXACTLY what they want -- and help them work it out if they don't know -- and do it right the first time.

I know I'm not the only one. There are lots of people with this kind of determination to do things right. But why aren't there more people like this? Why is it so acceptable to be mediocre?

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