If you've been keeping up, you know we have no usable oven. Gas guys condemned the old one. After way too much "fun" trying to locate something that fits in the cabinet the old wall oven still sits in, a spot with no room for any size adjustments without totally demolishing the kitchen, I finally located one which fits... pretty much. It's just a hair less tall, but they make a cover plate matching the oven finish. For an extra fee, of course.
After checking both locally and online, this was the only oven which fit our needs. It even came with a note in the description that it was meant to fit the niche left behind by older ovens needing to be replaced when nobody else makes something to fit anymore.
We had a choice of three colors: black, stainless, and white-by-another-name. We chose stainless. Or at least I thought we did. After calling the company and talking with their sales rep, I was informed the price was a couple grand higher than what showed on my screen. Could we send him a screen shot to prove our price? Ten minutes later it was managed. (Geezer delay.) While he went away to confer with a higher-up, I reloaded the page I had just shot, having mistakenly not opened a new tab to send that email. Lo and behold, the same page I'd just looked at had miraculously gotten an instant price increase.
The good news is our sales guy came back and assured us the company would honor the price in our screen shot. The better news is in getting back to that page, we'd gone past one for the same thing in black, for $300 cheaper. Having had a long enough wait to discuss it with Steve, we informed him we were changing our color choice to black, and thanks anyway for honoring your earlier price. We'd saved enough that our budget now included the warranty package, extending a few years past our intended use, and their guaranteed installation.
It is expected to be delivered and installed October 1. It turns out that this is plenty of time for the company to e-bomb us with all kinds of ads for other expensive products. Every day. Some days more than once. Craftily hidden in the barrage is the very occasional notice of importance, details on the delivery, for example. It's just often enough to make sure I can't erase their emails without a quick look. It stops there however, and as soon as we're done with them, it will all get marked as spam. We still haven't won the lottery, so our budget rules.
So I still read the e-bombs. The most recent one was all about reassuring us of the covid precautions their delivery people would be taking. They would be washing their hands at least twice a day (big whoop), hand sanitizing, leaving the machine outside the door for social distancing "as we requested" - though we're paying an extra small fee for them to put it inside the door - not in the kitchen, just inside the front door - since we've been having the vandalism issues. All kinds of reassurances on their part to make us happy we'd chosen their company.
All except one. There is no mention of their delivery people masking for the delivery. All the other stuff they mentioned isn't what really counts. Masking is what protects us.
So I sent them a return email, "suggesting" that they inform our delivery crew that we would appreciate them masking up. After all, we would be doing the same thing inside our house during the delivery, extending the same courtesy to them.
Turns out their email system isn't set up to receive any replies. It bounced back, unread.
Of course it did.
Sigh....
No comments:
Post a Comment