2018 Winter December 23 Sunday

35 degrees this morning, no walk, 84% humidity. 

Starting to feel better, hopefully can start walking again in next several days.  Still trying to get more sleep etc. until I feel “right”.  Feeling much better, still periods of feeling like I’m “talking in a tunnel”.  

Our finding of the general level of incompetent and careless work by businesses continues.  

First, yesterday we were in a store and thought we’d found some nice gifts.  However, we get home we realized they were defective to the point that someone was very careless in putting them back for for sale.

Of course, we were also negligent in not looking more carefully, instead of assuming the store wouldn’t put out defective merchandise.  

While of course the store gave us our money back, we had to waste an hour or more taking it back and hassling with afternoon Christmas traffic. etc.  

While in the parking lot, someone backed into our car, but fortunately no damage was done, it was very low speed.  

I really don’t know why backup cameras, and the basic safety items,  alerts for moving objects while backing, lane change alerts, etc. are required on all new cars.  It appears that public safety should mandate it.

Of course, I already know one reason, the large “contributions” from car manufacturers to politicians, probably a number of other items.  

However, those basic protections are so valuable, it is a shame they are’t standard on all new cars.  

Another example of inane incompetence is work performed on our retaining wall.  This was a wider project that also involved fence repair and some other minor work.

We thought we were somewhat protected, we when through one of the private “handyman” companies that supposedly hire the best contractors etc. to protect you from the scams and incompetence prevalent in the home repair industry.  

We quickly learned they don’t have much control over their contractors.  The first one missed numerous appointments, would show up when you didn’t expect him etc. 

Overall, he did a reasonable, but overall incompetent job.  On the retaining wall, he obviously had not idea what he was doing, and he disappeared, apparently scamming the company also.  

Of course, we were somewhat protected, since the company paid him and was responsible for his work.

After several months of delay, the company finally got someone to work on the retaining wall, and we were very disappointed to see yesterday the work was throughly unacceptable.  It was obviously just thrown together hoping we wouldn’t look at it I guess.  Of course we advised them the work was unacceptable, but here we go again, having to waste hours of time due to an incompetent contractor and business.  

That’s it for now, Sunday, December 23, 2018.