Why isn’t anything ever easy?

Buying furniture – or anything that a store has and you’re willing to pay for – should be very straight-forward and simple. They have item X, you want item X. The price is fair to you and something you can afford. You purchase/order item X. You should get item X, right?

I understand that sometimes mistakes happen. Incorrect size or color. Damaged goods. Whatever…mistakes do happen, but since you, the customer are paying for these goods, the store should make it as easy as possible for you to really get what you paid for – at no extra inconvience to you.

And then there’s reality. Or maybe it’s just my reality…maybe I just have the worst luck.

At the beginning of February, I decided that I wanted to use my tax return money (plus some) to get a new dining room table and four chairs at Z Gallerie. I went to the store all excited, paid for the new set and then found out they were on backorder and wouldn’t be delivered until May. Talk about a buzz kill.

I patiently waited until they were delivered. On May 16th, I left work for two hours to wait for it. It’s funny that even with today’s cell phone technology, they still only give you a window in which you’re supposed to drop everything and just sit at your house waiting. The table and chairs came, and the delivery people set them up and left – all under what seemed like five minutes. As soon I locked the door behind them, I went over to admire our gorgeous new table. That’s when I saw a huge, deep scratch on the side of the table. I hadn’t noticed it when they set it up b/c of how the table was situated. They never asked me to look over the table to make sure it was ok – they practically ran out of my house.

I immediately called the Pittsburgh Z Gallerie to tell them about this scratch on my brand new table. The manager who I spoke with seemed very nice, understanding and willing to help me. He said he would call customer service and then get back to me – by the next day at the latest. Well, that came and went and a few days later I called Z Gallerie again and asked for Chad. He wasn’t working so I explained my situation to the person who answered the phone – only to be told that I’d need to talk to Chad since he’s a manager. I asked if she could please leave a message for him to call me. I never received a phone call back, and the previous situation repeated itself about four times.

Finally, a full month after the damaged table had been delivered, I got a helpful and empathetic sales associate on the phone. He said that he wasn’t a manager but that he’d work on it until he got an answer for me. I received a call from Z Gallerie cusomter service the next day to schedule a replacement table top delivery for the next week.

Once again, I had to “disappear” from work for two hours to accept the new table top. When they got to my house, I showed the delivery guy the scratch and he went back out to his truck to get the replacement. A few minutes later, he came back in empty handed and told me that the replacement table had a huge scratch in a totally different location. I asked him what I should do, and he recommended refusing the delivery and calling the store ASAP to get things figured out.

I did that and got a complete bit*h who claimed to be a manager at the Pittsburgh Z Gallerie. She was rude and her tone was almost accusatory towards me. Like I was behind these scratches in the tables or something! After assuring her that yes the scratches were different and that they were deep enought that they couldn’t just be sanded down, She said she’d have customer service call me again to set up a new delivery.

Then I went on vacation and missed their calls. When I returned and got a hold of customer service, I was told that the table had been discontinued and there wouldn’t be any replacement sent to me. I had two options – I could either return the table or get a $100 gift card.

I had chosen this particular table b/c it fit in my dining room and matched the chairs that I wanted and absolutely had to have. I couldn’t return it, so I took the $100 gift card to somehow compensate me for a damaged item that cost $700.

In the meantime, the new dining room table – which I do love and have situated so you can’t really see the scratch – didn’t go with our current living room furniture…so we went couch shopping. We found a gorgeous dark brown leather sectional at Macy’s. And, it would fit in our living room. (Because of the room’s set up, a sectional has to be configured with the sectional piece coming out of the right hand side, if you’re sitting on it. Or else our sliding glass door would be blocked, the basement door won’t open the entire way and the couch would face the dining room and not the TV.)

We ordered it and were once again told it was on backorder. Funny because three weeks before when we initially saw it, it had been in stock. But they said it should only take a month, so at least it wasn’t too bad.

I was so excited and had been preparing for our house’s new, great look for weeks. I bought accessories, built a shelf, figured out what I wanted to do on the walls and so far it looked awesome. We just needed the couch!

It came yesterday.

And it was configured wrong.

The delivery guys tried to call Macy’s to get them to help me – they could immediately tell the configuration was wrong and I’d be a complete idiot to order it that way. But the person they called told me to call my sales person. They said they’d wait until I talked to him, so I went upstairs to get his number. He wasn’t in, so I talked to some woman in the store who couldn’t have cared less about my situation. I went down to tell the delivery guys and they said they’d note that it was wrong and wished me luck. And, they apologized because apparently something had changed with their customer service to make it harder to them to get someone to help people on the spot.

I spent the next hour (that I had again just disappeared from work) calling Macy’s customer service numbers that I found online. I was transferred three times. ANd basically told different things with each person I spoke with. There was the 10% restocking fee I’m going to have to pay (WHAT!?!?!?!?!?!?!), that the configuration I need won’t be available for 90-100 days (Again, WHAT?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?) and basically I can’t do anything to remidy the situation until my salesperson gets in. Thank goodness it’s today, but if I don’t hear what I want, it’s going to get ugly.

I better have the right couch in my house in one week or less. I will not pay any restocking fees. If the right couch is not in my house in less than one week, they will come and pick up the couch that’s there and I will go to one of the MANY other fine furniture establishments in this world and give them my business.

I’m the paying customer. I should be right, right???

Crappy Headlines

In today’s 24-7 news cycle, everyone with a web site or TV channel is constantly vying for our attention – which means headlines and leads are more important than ever. But lately, I’ve been feeling that the media either thinks we’re stupid, or they are too lazy to try and come up with a good, solid and accurate headline.

For example, a couple weeks ago I read an AP headline: Dungy hopes Manning recovers quickly from surgery. Really? That’s absolutely shocking that a head football coach would hope that his MVP Super Bowl-winning quarterback would recover quickly from surgery. How is that even “news?” Even if this is just a typical update story on Peyton Manning’s recovery, couldn’t they have done better? I don’t know about you, but that headline irritates me so much that I didn’t even bother reading the article.

Friday, post-gazette.com had an article in prominent placement on their home page titled Poverty leads to playing lottery, study says. So you mean being filthy rich and having more money than you know what to do with doesn’t cause you to play the lottery?! Get out of here! I didn’t read the article – I just wondered who authorized and spent money on such a stupid study that really just stated the obvious.

Sometime last fall, it was all over the news that Elisabeth Hasselbeck was taking a maternity leave from The View. She was pregnant with her second child at the time. It had to have been a slow news week for that to even be considered news – or a headline. What pregnant working woman doesn’t take a maternity leave? Now there’s something to write about – and an appealing headline!

And, I could go on and on with examples.

Today, Adele handed me a section from yesterday’s New York Times, and as I was glancing through it, I couldn’t help but love every single headline I read. From Putting the Dream Car Out to Pasture to Blogging’s Glass Ceiling to The Breakups That Got Under My Skin – they all enticed me and made me want to at least find out what the article was about.

Wait a minute – isn’t that the purpose of a headline?!

Maybe I’m just weird (wait – don’t answer that). I don’t know if it’s because I’m a marketer/writer that I notice these things, but better headlines would make the world such a much more interesting place. Or something like that

Clarification: the road to (my) happiness

When I blogged today about my twenties being over, I hope I didn’t leave the impression that I’m unhappy. Because I’m not. I have a really good life – an awesome boyfriend of almost seven years, family, lots of friends, the world’s cutest puppy, a job, my health and so much more.

The purpose of examining where I’m at right before I reach 30 is to make sure I’m on track to remain happy. I used my career as an example to show how I got to where I’m at and if I’m happy enough where I’m at to keep going along the same route. Yes, today, I am happy with my career and how far I have brought it over the last six years. But for me to be able to answer that question the same way two, three, five, ten years from now, I think I need to consciously be aware of where I’m at and where I want to be.

Does that make sense? This was a lot of reflection for one day…

Who stole my 20’s?

Earlier this month, I started the last year of my twenties. Except for the occasional conversation with Gabby about how we should celebrate my 30th in Vegas, I’m not handling the whole getting older phenomenon too well.

I am now obsessing over different aspects of my life, like my career, relationship and financial situation, and starting to wonder where the hell my twenties went. Some days, I feel like I’m happy and right where I should be, and others, I want to cry for hours over the fact that I’m going to be 30 in less than a year and don’t have a whole lot to show for it.

Take my career for example. As I mentioned before, I majored in political science. I chose this major because I was going to be a foreign ambassador and speak several different languages fluently. Well, those language classes took up a ton of time, and the credits didn’t go towards fulfilling requirements, so I stopped taking them. Then my attention switched to law school, and I decided that I was going to be the next great prosecutor and put all the bad guys away. A personal situation involving the criminal justice system was enough to make me run away screaming from that potential career path – and to never look back.

Then, my senior year, I took a political communications class and fell in love with it. It combined my interests in government, politics and the law with my natural ability to communicate. I wanted to be a political consultant and work on campaigns, write speeches, deal with the press and all of that other fun stuff.

When I graduated, I decided to stay in Pittsburgh – and since there really aren’t too many political consulting jobs here – let alone entry level ones that paid, I had to figure something out and fast. I had always been good at marketing and PR and had done a lot of volunteer work in those fields. So, I thought I would pursue “communications” as a job to get experience in that part of political consulting.

I spent a year and a half in a horrible job as a marketing assistant for an insurance brokerage firm. It was straight out of Office Space. They didn’t have a lot of marketing needs. I was constantly bored and made things up to do, and the older women in the office treated me like garbage.

My next job was perfect – on paper. I did marketing communications and online business development for a large media company. I got a ton of really great experience, met smart and respected people in the field and built up a pretty decent portfolio. I left after three years for two main reasons: my boss was a narcissistic, micromanaging, menopausal bitch and the industry’s stability was constantly in question – therefore my salary and benefits weren’t great.

Next up – my current job is in online marketing and public relations at a very well known institution. It’s been great on several levels. I can take graduate classes for free at a prestigious university. My hours are flexible. I get paid competitively. But, I’m doing marketing and pr for an organization that, for the most part, doesn’t want publicity or exposure. And the few programs that do want and desperately need marketing, have no money to pay for it. I’m good, but I’m not so good that I can magically and for free accomplish what a $50,000 (or more) campaign could do.

This whole debacle got me thinking about marketing, pr, advertising, etc as a whole. Is this really what I want to spend the rest of my life doing? Spinning products or news to make something look good or stand out? The answer is no. Unless it was for something that I really, truly believed in.

So what do I want to do with my career? I spent my twenties saying, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” That seemed to work. It was true, and in the marketing field, there are a lot of different options of what you “can be.”

But now it kind of feels like I should have it narrowed down to more of a path or two. I’m just not entirely sure what those paths should be. I like to write. I think I’d like to teach college courses. But write what? Teach what? I have the opportunity to get my Master’s FOR FREE – but I don’t know what I want to get it in…I don’t think I want to pigeonhole myself into this marketing field too much more. I’m interested in other things like history and public policy, but marketing is where my experience is.

I’m panicking about this now because I’m completely afraid of waking up one day and being 40 or 50 and not happy with the career – and life – path I chose.