Adventures with furniture
posted on 13:51 03/16/2008 by idiot
Several years ago, my buddy/former manager gave me some of his furniture when he moved. It was all good stuff too. In particular were two awesome dressers from Progressive Furniture. One of the dressers was a horizontal job, with a big mirror that is supposed to attach to it. I thought, this is cool, the wife would dig this. The only problem was, my buddy had lost the connecting rails.posted on 13:51 03/16/2008 by idiot
Nice.
No big deal, the dresser and mirror still had the stickers on 'em and the name of the company, so it was just a matter of ordering some new rails. Well, I got as far as talking to a guy at Progressive Furniture and he said I'd need to send a money order or some inconvenient nonsense, and well to make a long story short, I never got around to it.
Fast forward a few years, we've moved to Manhattan, then Jersey, and this stuff had been sitting in storage back in Dallas. So we finally got it all up here and I set about getting this dresser in order again. I got in touch with the company again, got the stupid money order and sent it off with the part numbers to the mirror and the dresser. They said they'd send out the rails and bolts and whatnot to hook it all up.
About a week later we got the package, and I was excited. Here we go:
said mirror dresser and a rail
In the box were two wooden rails and a bag of the correct number of bolts and washers to make it all happen. But there was a slight problem:
the bolt, it does not fit.
So the bolts were too fat. I figured it wasn't that bad, I could probably get the correct bolts from a hardware store of some sort, but there was another more subtle problem:
this is not right
It's hard to tell / take a picture of an unconnected mirror being balanced precariously with one arm while somehow holding an incorrectly drilled rail BUT the holes are drilled too close to each other on these rails. The actual hole is about half an inch too high for these to work. I couldn't drill another hole, as it would have to intersect the one that was there already. So I contacted the company about doing an exchange. I sent them pictures of the dresser, the bolts not fitting, the stickers on the back of the furniture, everything they would need to identify the piece. "No problem," they said, "we'll send the correct rails right away, don't send the ones you have back, no worries." It was nice to not bother with a return, but now I had a useless set of wooden rails laying around.
Fast-forward a week and there's another set of rails on my doorstep. I went to set it up so my wife would come home and be all "you are such a manly man who is so manly and who is also a man."
x(
Unfortunately, the rails were exactly the same as the last set, and the bolts didn't fit. Now I had two sets of useless rails and bolts that wouldn't fit. I contacted the company again. This time then they raised an interesting question: "Did the dresser come with metal rails or wooden ones?" Now I had no idea. My buddy didn't remember. But we'd tried the wooden ones (twice) and they didn't fit, I decided to try the metal ones. Again, no charge or return, but again, I have a(nother) set of useless wooden rails and bolts I don't know what to do with.
Seriously?
A third set of incorrect wooden rails and bolts that don't fit arrives a week later.
So I was a little fed up now and I don't know what to do with these stupid rails. I contacted the company again and this time they swore they'd send the metal rails out. And they did.
Umm... no
You may notice in the picture above, aside from the "couldn't be more wrong" metal rails they sent out, that wooden rails are bolted and holding everything nicely in place. This is because at this point I did what I should have done from the start: I went to Home Depot and bought some wood, had it cut, got some bolts, brought it all home, drilled some holes and set the damn thing up like a a manly man who is so manly and who is also a man would have done from the beginning.
That is correct sir
Best of all, I got it all set up while my wife was out feeding grumpy ground hogs, so she got a pleasant surprise when she got home. I'm not sure what the moral is here. I got so caught up in a terrible customer support situation, I lost sight of the fact that this was a pretty stupid-easy do it yourself job. At least the outcome was better and faster than the singularly god awful Dell repair situation I'm currently dealing with. But that's another time wasting blog.
Excellent.
« Back to main