After this weekend, I’m thinking about possibly quitting the IT biz and going into home improvement.  Those of you familiar with my “skills” might find humor in this notion, but after some of the work we’ve had done out here I think I’ve got a future in it.  We just haven’t had good luck with contractors at all.  Every single project has had some issue, with varying levels of successful resolution.  This last one takes the cake though, at least in my book.  We had a patio cover put up a long time ago, like 2.5 years, and the guy installed two ceiling fans on it.  They’ve never really worked right.  They make so much noise we hardly ever used them, which stinks because A) they weren’t particularly cheap and B) it gets hot out there.  So, this weekend I saw a nice fan on sale at Costco, and actually had a pair of them in my basket.  But, they weren’t that cheap either, so I figured “Eh, I might as well at least try and figure out what’s wrong with the ones I have.”  So, I drug out the ladder and in about 30 seconds noticed all the blades were flopping around, they were barely attached at all.  Now, actually fixing it took me quite a bit longer.  I found a copy of the installation instructions online and started at the end, taking everything back apart until I got to the “Assembling the Blades” page.  The error here was so incredibly stupid I couldn’t grasp it for quite a while.  I’ve got to add a picture to even try and describe it.

Put the two screws through the two holes and screw them into the motor.  Yep, looks pretty straight forward.  Well, this guy had actually put the blade through that small space right above the plate where he was supposed to attach them, and then run the screws up through the holes.  The holes in the blade aren’t threaded, so they were just sitting on top of the screws, kept in place only because that space is too small for them to totally fly off.  Good grief.  For a while I told myself, “Eh, I do plenty of dumb stuff, I might have done the same thing.”  And then the more I thought about it, I concluded that for one thing, there is no way that even on my stupidest day I would have done that and then thought “Yeah that seems right, the blades are probably supposed to flop around on this fan.”  Even if I HAD made the same mistake, it was brutally obvious that it was wrong. And on top of that, THIS IS WHAT THIS GUY DOES FOR A LIVING!  IT’S HIS JOB!  I PAID HIM FOR THAT!  Yes, I was a little upset.  But, looking on the bright side, I enjoyed a nice cooling breeze from my new-ish ceiling fans while watching the Royals game outdoors that afternoon.  I’m still going to be mad about it for a while though.