The one in which I complain loudly about tradespeople in this town....

Yes, well, I've had quite a day.

Our carpet was supposed to be laid today by a local carpet company. The quote process had gone fine, measuring was all done ok, and we arranged a time for the carpet to be lifted, then another time for the new carpet to be laid.

Thanks to the lavish but random tastes of the previous owners of our house, the carpet chosen to grace the main bedroom and study was a suitably expensive Cavalier Bremworth Sisal (yet they couldn't face the extra cost for proper suede finish paint for the living room, giving us their homemade sandpaper finish instead). So when we decided to finish of by carpeting the spare room (which had the rankest, dustiest old carpet ever) we were looking at around $950 to do approx 10sq metres.

The carpet layer arrived today (4 hours late).

He laid the underlay.

He laid out the carpet to be cut and put down. Then asked me "do you want the lines of the carpet to to be parallel to the door like in the other rooms?".

I'm like "What? - match the other rooms of course..."

"Um - well I don't have enough carpet to do that..."

So it turned out that the guy that had originally measured the carpet (and who, funnily enough, is no longer working for the company) had not made the obvious conclusion that we would want the pattern of the carpet heading in the same direction as that in the other two rooms done in the same carpet. So ensued an afternoon of talking to the carpet people, arranging for the correct length of carpet to be ordered ("should take about a week"), and arguing the toss as to whether we should have to pay for the extra carpet required (which I think the Consumer Rights Act says I don't).

Arghhhhhhh! What is wrong with tradespeople in this town?

This comes on top of:
- the wrong fridge being delivered to us (box was labelled incorrectly - unfortunately a lesser rather than better model)- making the total delivery time for the new fridge two weeks.
- the insulation debacle - which continues with a price increase (from head office of course) that has occured between the time we accepted the quote and the time we actually (after 2 months of emailing and leaving voice-mail messages) managed to get the stuff delivered to us (and which I am also disputing).
- tradespeople promising quotes, but never turning up to do them.
- and of course, the garden rubbish removal fiasco of last November (the $85 quote and $450 bill - don't get me started!!!!)

I really really don't know how people think that they are providing anything approaching good customer service when these sorts of things happen on such a regular basis. And I'm assertive (but not rude, I might add) about disagreeing or pointing out things that don't make sense!

What is even more frustrating is the way I am treated when I do this... in the case of the massively increased gardening bill of last Nov, it took me 25 minutes of arguing the toss with the guy before he would accept that I wouldn't pay the amount he had invoiced me, as I had a written quote for approximately a fifth of what he was asking for. Sure, I was happy to pay a bit more than the $85 as we had added to our rubbish pile - but not made it 5 times bigger in the interim, so I wasn't going to pay 5 times the quote, especially 2 weeks before Christmas.

Even today, the carpet people were not happy with me when I said that I would not be happy about having to pay the extra for the 0.3m of extra carpet that they failed to accurately measure for...

In other, more positive news, I finally made kiwifruit chutney today (a la the Edmonds cookbook). Note to self, do not use Eve apples in cooking - they don't soften up enough...and saute the onions first. And what is with the Edmonds obsession with DYC Malt Vinegar? I diluted the quantity they recommended with some cider vinegar, hopefully to improve the flavour of the chutney. It tasted ok upon completion today, but I'm going to leave it for a week to improve before trying it properly for the first time.

So how was your day?