Salesmanship

Jess and I have been thinking about replacing the windows in our house...essentially since we bought the house. We loved the house itself, but the windows are all single-pane, aluminum frame and a little hard to open and close in some places. We played around with a contractor before Tyler was born, but then decided to put it on hold until, you know, the whole baby situation got more stable.

Well since then I've noticed a couple of drips sneaking in around the windows, so we hit up consumer reports again to get some window recommendations and decided to go with Anderson windows. They do pretty darn high-end windows, but you do often get what you pay for, and they convinced us of the quality of their windows...mostly.

So when you call the Anderson guys up, they send out a guy to your house who does some rough measurements, computes a quote, and then, and this is properly obnoxious, gives you an HOUR LONG explanation on how awesome their windows are in your house. It's really over the top, and a little off-putting, but they do have really nice windows.

All of this is background so I can tell you this story:

The guy was out late, and Tyler was already in bed, and the demo had reached the point where he brought in little sample windows and proceeded to explain (in stupidly excruciating detail) every neat aspect of the windows. He had reached the part where he wanted to talk about how secure the windows were. He said: “One of the main reasons people buy Anderson windows is for security...” and then he reached down and with a single punch shattered one of the windows with his bare hands.

For an instant, I was incredibly impressed. “They are so confident of the safety of their glass, that they will break it with their bare hands, and so confident that you will buy their windows that they will replace that pane of glass after each demonstration. Astounding!” Then I looked at the guys face and realized that this wasn't really part of the demo, and he had just shattered a window in our library. And his hand was bleeding.

After we had sorted out that, no, that wasn't actually supposed to happen, Jess ran off with the sales guy to the bathroom to patch his hand up. We had just gotten some really festive band-aids for Tyler, and Jess was rather keen to use them. I vacuumed very thorougly and then walked around in my bare feet. If I missed a shard, I wanted it under my toes, not Tylers.

Anyway, we went with their windows, but if anyone who reads this ever feels like doing the same, you may want to stand back when they get to that part of the presentation.

I also got to travel to Charleston last week. It all went startlingly well, except for some paperwork shenanigans that nearly got me sent back home early. We got it all sorted out, though, and the tasks that we set out to do went off without a hitch. Which meant that there wasn't a lot of drama or excitement, at least not at work, but that's a pretty good tradeoff for success.

As for the rest of the city, it was pretty nice, in places. I got to have some fried chicken and grits several times. You know, like they do in the south. Also lots of fish, because Jessie wasn't there to help us pick restaurants. Charleston is really pretty and old in the places where it has been well maintained, and a condemnable bio hazard in the places where it hasn't. Stick to the nice places and you'll have a great time. We took some walks to go get some food a couple of times, and the City really looks nice, on foot. I'm sad we left before Saturday, there was a farmers market right across from our hotel, evidently. That would have been fun to see and eat my way through.

Tyler is getting better and better at being a toddler. He can run now, and get up to a fair clip for a guy whose legs are so short. He's becoming less and less fussy every time we drop him off at school, and he always seems fully engaged whenever we come to pick him up. He's becoming a little more of a picky eater, but that was bound to happen eventually. I'm sure we weren't going to just be able to feed him broccoli for dinner until he turned 18. He's also working a lot on copying our words, and rather a lot of them, though it's rare that these early attempts at language make repeat performances. We often quiz him on “who that is”, and he's pretty good at Mama and Dada at this point, but the real comedy comes in when he confuses the two. “Who is that?” “Mama—Dada!” He even shakes his head like, 'Wait, no, that's not right. It's the other one...Dada! That's right.” Those of you that have been lucky enough to skype with us may have seen him working on the splits. We'll make a martial artist out of him yet. He has also decided that the best use of the letter and number flash cards we got him is to take them out of our hands and throw them through the air and laugh uproariously, which is more interaction that he has done with those cards before, so I consider it progress.

-N