Silicon Valley Redneck

So much for this episode...

... of the oven saga.

Got a call: delivery tomorrow!

Joy ponders.  Wait: delivery?  What about haul-away and installation?

Call back.  Get a bit of a runaround.  Eventually get someone who tells us that, after the oven is dropped off, the installers will schedule the other stuff.

Which, after the past couple of months, we don't for a moment believe.

And, supposedly, that one installation "company" is the only one in the region that does appliance installations... except that it seems that they don't, in fact, do installations.

So now Joy's off to the store to cancel the whole thing, and look for another place to order the oven, for delivery rather than maybe-installation.  I'll try to recruit a neighbor to help remove the old oven and, after we finish cabinet prep, to help put the new one in its place.

Past Christmas, and still no sign of...

... yes, the oven.

Apparently it was picked up quite some time ago by the installation company's local gig worker, but we haven't heard back from the installation company as to when, exactly, we might expect it to turn up here.

They were, most lately, supposed to get back to us last Friday.  They, of course, didn't.  Then it was the weekend, then Christmas, and, today, still no call.

Joy plans on returning to the Big Box Store on the morrow, to rattle their cage and possibly even cancel the order.

Postal anxiety

Got two USPS parcel drops yesterday - first up to the house, then, in the evening, in the mailbox.

What we didn't get was the actual mail.  Still not there this morning.

Which normally wouldn't be a big concern, but there's supposed to be a paycheck in yesterday's mail.  I certainly hope it turns up today.

So, yesterday.

Very Monday.

Early-morning call from the vet.  That adopted cat who was having a health crisis?  His condition had apparently looked favorable Saturday, but then worse Sunday, and he died in the wee hours of Monday morning.  We buried him in the orchard yesterday.

Late-morning call from the appliance installers.  Yay!  But: seems the installation crew, when picking up the oven to bring it over, had noticed some discrepancy between the previously-measured dimensions of the cabinet and the dimensions of the actual oven.  Joy was discussing this with the caller when the line went silent for several minutes, then the call got dropped.  Um...?  Joy called back to the same number, but didn't get anyone who knew anything, and apparently the call center had no record of the outgoing call nor any information on the status of the order.

We haven't heard anything further.  No oven yesterday.  Looks like Joy will be venturing out in the cold today, once more visiting the store in person, to have another go at sorting out what the heck is going on.

And I had two, count 'em, two teleconferences, both short and neither resulting in more action items for me - a good thing, given that I have plenty of action items to deal with before the week is out.

Update:  In preparation for Joy heading off to make inquiries in person, I logged into my big-box-home-improvement-store account (whereoutof I had gotten logged when I shut down my computer neatly during that recent power outage).

It said my account was missing a phone number, and insisted that I supply one before proceeding.

Wut?

Did the phone number somehow get deleted from my account during the gap in the call, and that's why nobody's called since?  Had it somehow gotten tagged as a one-time number, so it evaporated on use?

The world is weird.

Update 2:  Joy got somebody maybe-helpful on the phone instead of showing up in person.  We still don't know for sure what's going on nor when our oven will be delivered.

Bonus weirdness: when she logged into the family big-box-home-improvement-store account (not the same as my account, for hysterical raisins), it complained about her phone number being claimed by somebody else, which silliness she had to sort out.

Update 3 (Wednesday morning):  Seems the installation contractor is based in another state, and handles - or maybe doesn't - installations in several states, using local subcontractors who may or may not have any competence and may or may not get paid.  Gets bad reviews both from customers and from workers.

Exceeding the limits of 6 bits.

Yes, I'm 100 years old today.

If, as Tom Lehrer put it, you're missing two fingers.

100₈, that'd be.  2⁶, like.

Household circumstances (father, various livestock, and other assorted responsibilities) don't allow for much in the way of celebration, but we had a slightly-above-average dinner, and Joy is busily concocting a cake.

Cake soon, then winding down.  Got a busy Monday, with two phone meetings, maybe the oven finally getting delivered, and all the usual weekday stuff.

Such a start to the day

Vaguely half-awakish at 0213.

House suddenly goes from mostly-dark to entirely dark, and very very quiet.

Then the beeping from the UPSes starts.

Mnfxt.

Go shut down the computers tidily, before the UPSes run down.  Silence the UPSes.

Check the outage map on my phone: one big red dot near here, several hundred customers, probably fixed 0430-ish.

Back to bed.

HVAC noises resume 0430-ish.  Good.

Eventually decide to wake up.  Turn computers back on.  Discover e-mails informing me of an Internet outage and restoration... just about the same interval the power was out.

Maybe someone drove a truck into a utility pole?  Or the electricity was out at a Spectrum router that doesn't have backup power?

Anyway, the lights are on, and the Internet is kinda-sorta alive but terribly slow.  First two news sites I checked didn't have anything relevant; third is taking beyond-forever to load.

Still and/or again busy

Household stuff: busy.  Mostly the usual, but on top of everything Joy was sick for a few days - crud brought on, we think, by having the house buttoned up for heating season and the heat cranked up.  I also need to do some weatherstripping, and move a last bit of dirt around before the lawns get too soft.

Work stuff: sporadically busy.  ToasterCo is having an end-of-year scramble, and sometimes I end up on the critical path.  Spent a focused hour this morning implementing a feature that turns out to be needed, if only as a formality.  Still got a few days worth of work to do on my own piece of the project (which I broke off into a separate source file over the weekend, so I can work on it in parallel with changes being made at ToasterCo).

Chickens: egg production dropped off when they started molting, and has remained low.  It didn't get this low last winter.  Anecdotes suggest that the current formulation of "16% protein layer pellets" is perhaps lacking something, even the fancy expensive brands.  I've started giving them some high-protein, high-calcium cornbread-with-random-veggies, and maybe production is up a little.  Could be that some lawn time would be good, and/or I can start sprouting chicken salads again.

Ducks: are strange.  Their wild cousins migrate vast distances twice a year, and yet these critters have trouble finding their way from their sleeping quarters, through the chicken run, out the gate, and back into their own day run.

Oh, look: it's a whole new month!

With some developments.

It looks like the level of help we could optimally use with my father doesn't exist, courtesy of Medicare's distorting effect on the services market.  But I think Joy managed to sort things out such that we'll be getting some useful help, and not the high-intensity not-help that the providers are pushing these days.

And: this afternoon, Joy went to inquire in person about the oven again.  Apparently the order had been put on hold, for unexplained reasons.  Eventually I got a call from the scheduling robot: we're on for the afternoon of Monday the 18th.

And Huckleberry has decided that a small stuffed dog is a cat toy.