Costa potty

 We bought a new sofa!! It is a 4-seater [L] IF some of the 'seats' are very trim. On the last day of August, we went into town to pick up the missing part of our 1½ piece suite. When we put in the order a month previous, the (1) sofa was in the country at the EZLiving warehouse; the (½) matching footstool was still on the ocean wave between China and Dublin port. The Customer Comms. department of EZLiving the furniture emporium really managed to ruffle my feathers. 

1. It was a week between paying for the sofa, towards the end of July, and the window which EZLiving allocates to servicing the scut-end of Co Carlow. To facilitate communications with the delivery team we shared 3 telephone numbers and 2 email addrs.  So EZL and their robots can call us anytime, but we can only contact them 0818 222 272 Mon - Fri 9.30am - 5pm. Two days before delivery, I get a txt, to me, a €1,000 customer, including " . . . if you owe us money, you must pay before delivery . . .".  I felt obliged to call 0818 222 272 to confirm that we didn't owe them money and that delivery was scheduled for 10am-14pm on Monday. That miscomm caused me anxiety and cost me time (5 minutes) and money (34c/min).
   
2.  A month later, with 2 days notice, the footstool arrived, as evidenced by txt: " confirming your order is booked for collection on Friday 30 August. Our collection facility in the store is only open Friday from 10am - 4pm. Items will be held for 1 week only. Please call us on for any amendments queries."  That is a) a bit shouty b) contradictory (if it's only open Friday then if we miss one Friday, a week later, our stool will be on its way back to China).

We missed Friday (we have a life beyond the imperatives of EZL's logistics, shucks) but the ambiguity of the message had us calling 0818 222 272 to confirm that we could collect it Saturday. But that phone line (the only web-discoverable line) is closed at weekends. It's 40mins = 40kms to Town but we went . . . in hope. It was fine, we spoke to an EZL person, they took our name and order number in back and a smart young chap in a warehouseperson's coat came out with our multi-wrapped unbirthday present.

The reasonable fellow who had taken our money a month previous was behind the desk and I shared my gripes with him, saying it did not bode well for repeat business from us. He was quite candid about the peremptory [he used the word aggressive] messaging devised by EZL head office. The finance and logistics manager had gotten fed up with clients who ordered stuff for collection and . . . then didn't collect it . . . for weeks. The company has limited local warehousing and even the best furniture (designed for centrally heated Western homes) will deteriorate if left indefinitely in a corner of the warehouse and then the client will complain and it's all an unsatisfactory time-expensive, space-costly mess even though the furniture has been paid for.

The relief was so palpable (as was agéd bladder pressure) that we took ourselves across the car-park to Costa Coffee to celebrate. I've never knowingly been in Costa (or Starbucks) before and I was glad to be near enough the end of my life to be able to frippp away €7.20 on coffee and a modest lemon tart. €7.20!! At the other end of my life, that's the amount I got in my first pay-packet for working a [hard, cold, dirty] 40hr week riddling potatoes on a farm. The Beloved had similar and fortunately left using the facilities till afterwards: she came out of the Ladies blenched white: the floor awash, the toilet-seat "wet" - you may imagine the rest. On advice, I held on till we returned home and used the compost heap.

On the way home I did mention that Ladies jacks are always in worse shape than The Gents and that it was nothing to do with ignorance. When I worked in The Smurfit Institute of Genetics, the Head of Department decided it would boost esprit de corps if everyone gathered for coffee/tea at 11am. Petty cash to supply biscuits. It was fine, if you like talking about Big Brother or The Match. But at more-or-less 11am each day, all the women from the Ophthalmic Genetics lab on the top floor trooped past the free coffee and through the back gate of TCD to a convenient café in Lincoln Place. 

The problem was that, by 10:30 pretty much every day, the Ladies jacks were reportedly too foul to use. As everyone with access had at least 12 years of schooling and at least one degree, it was obvious that "basic shared-facilities manners" and "education" didn't overlap too good in a Venn diagram sense. They never did work out who took the opportunity, while sitting down in the stall, to ream out her nose and stick boogers on the wall . . . at nose eye level. 

Mais revenons nous a nos pouffes! It took several minutes of pass-the-parcel to unwrap the foot-stool we had just picked up. The silly little legs were secreted in a zipped compartment of the base. It required twelve bolts, 12 washers and an(other!) allen key. It's fine:

I think it's a pretty good compromise for having a 'corner-unit'; which the whole family has been hankering for since they became A Thing ~20 years ago.

Look Ma, the stool can go at either end! If we didn't have so many *$@!% books we could really have a corner-unit. The only thing is that we don't live in a ranch-style execuhome and the the footstool alone takes up 3% of the floor space (add the woodstove = 4%; desk = 7%; chest = 4%; coffee-table = 3%; matching sofa = 10% and two more chairs = 9%). Sum of furniture = 40%, so getting anywhere in the room takes on elements of assault course. Ah, the first world problems.