bunsen_h

I'm trying to install a new bathroom fan.  The spinning part of the old unit gets loose on its axle and develops loud and complex beat patterns.  ("RA-ta-ta-TA-ta... RA-ta-ta-TA-ta... RA-ta-ta-ta-TA-ta-ta-ta-RA-ta-ta-ta-TA-ta-ta-ta...")  The new unit is much more sturdy and appears to be better constructed, with a more solid motor.

But the installation isn't going according to the manual.  This is because the instructions appear to be impossible to follow.  Since the joists are 16" apart (center to center), I'm apparently supposed to use wood screws to attach the fan to two of them... but the screw holes in the fan are only 11" apart.  I'm also supposed to slide a support strut into the body of the fan, but the instructions don't tell me to attach it to anything.  It also appears to be physically impossible to either insert the fan body through the hole in the ceiling with the strut already in place, or to slide the strut into its place after the fan has been pushed through the hole.  The strut would have to pass through either the ceiling or the joist.

I'm currently leaning towards cutting a couple of short lengths of 2-by-4, and screwing them to the joists so I've got solid wood on either side of the fan to screw it into.  And forgetting about that strut.

Is this another case of a company providing impossible-to-follow instructions so that if there's a problem, it's not their fault?
 

Doofes.  Rhymes with "roofies" and "Goofy's".

We had the 8 a.m.-to-noon "morning window" with Sympatico.  This required me to set my alarm for 8 a.m., which is much earlier than I tend to wake up these days.  (Yeah, I know, whine whine.  Regardless, I'm sleep-deprived and on lots of medication.)  The Sympatico doofes arrived at 8:35, which was quite reasonable under the circumstances.

( Bell, booklet, and candles )

I'm not holding my breath on this; I think it's likely that I'll have to complain to Sympatico and have either them or Rogers back.

If all he'd left screwed up was the disconnected phone jack in the bedroom, I'd have taken care of it myself instead of dealing with the hassle of getting him back.  But there are several phone jacks not working upstairs, and that's stuff that is much easier to trace with the equipment that he's got and I don't have.

At least we do have internet back, and the phone jacks we use most often are working.

Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?
 

A couple of days ago, the phone rang.  The line was full of noise and dropouts; I caught only one word: a guy saying "Hello?" with an Indian accent.  I asked, "What are you?"  There were several more seconds of static and garbage, then the line went dead.

Yesterday, I got a second call -- same crap on the line.  I asked, several times, "What are you selling?"  Eventually the guy replied, through the noise: "... Not selling anything.  We want to offer you a free cell phone..."

This afternoon, I took yet another call from an ADT salesthing.  As they always do, he started with a lie: "I'm not calling to sell you anything."  (This, of course, was in response to my usual greeting when a stranger calls, asks for me by name, and stumbles when trying to say it, or otherwise appears to be a salescritter: "What are you selling?")

He started into the usual spiel about how they want to give me a free alarm system, all I would have to do is sign a contract with them to monitor it. (And, of course, I can't take the "free" alarm system if I don't sign with them, and they'd take it back when the contract ended.)

So why, exactly, would I want to entrust the security of my home to a company whose official policy — I've checked — is to have their representatives lie from the get-go?

I just had an idiot from SpringMasters ring my doorbell, trying to sell me something.

No, damn it, they can't read.

<*facepalm*>

The creatures who work for Weed Man are presumptively Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons.  Or they wouldn't work at spraying toxic chemicals all over the place.

They are demonstrably illiterate.  Or they wouldn't have sprayed their crap all over my lawns last autumn, because they would have read the street sign right by my driveway, and would have gone looking for the correct street a block and a half away.  Several of my friends and colleagues have had similar problems with them: stubborn attempts to spray where they are not merely unwanted but abhorred.

So how do I keep these damn kids off my lawn?

Also, the creatures who work for Springmaster are the worst infestation of street spammers this city has seen in years.  Possibly ever.  I don't want them around either.

Over the years, I've tended to categorize salesbeings into three categories. As the man says, “Just a useful distinction, to clarify thought.” The categories aren’t hard and fast; poor business ethics, for example, tend to make me downgrade a salesbeing to a lower category.

Salespeople understand what their organization can produce, and what prospective customers need. They help to put the two together. Everybody wins. Sales people can be extremely important for a commercial organization.

Salescritters don’t understand what their organization can produce, or what prospective customers need. Or they just don’t care very much. The important thing is to make a sale and get a commission, or at least to remain employed and collect a salary. They may commit their organization to something that it simply doesn’t have the resources to do in the available time (or at all), or the customer to purchasing something they don’t need and can ill afford. They may claim that a product has features that the customer is specifically looking for, when it really doesn't.  They can cause trouble for an organization.

Salesthings don’t understand what is physically possible, and may attempt to sell something that not only has nothing to do with their organization’s business, and doesn’t exist, but violates the laws of physics. For example, a salesthing for a software company who tries to sell a mining-exploration company on a potential new product that they can just pour on the rock to make the rock go away, on the principle that “one of our guys is a chemist, I’m sure he can figure out how to do it.” They tend to cause a different kind of trouble than the salescritters, primarily by being so obviously incompetent and insane that they scare away clients who might actually be interested in what the organization can do.