It's curtains for me, hopefully

[stephbg]

Got a call this morning from The Curtain Person who said she'd had a cancellation and asked if she could come over in half an hour. Since I was zombified (Husband had taken the call) and at home I said sure, but that I was not well and looked like crap. I have long since got over any shyness at being seen in my pajamas in my own home. She was lucky I managed to brush my teeth in half an hour, let alone make myself presentable.

After about an hour I assumed she was having trouble negotiating the crescent-and-cul-de-sac fun park that is my beloved Greenwood. After about an hour and a half I began to entertain serious concerns that she had had an accident of some sort, followed by the guilt that placed my concern for my curtains above the feelings of her family. I went back to bed, certain that this would deliver her to my door.

And so it did.

She'd merely been delayed by the previous client who had been tagged as a "quick" visit and was demonstrably not.

To the curtains. I'd picked a heavy woven upholstery fabric because my taste in interior design does not correspond to that of any standard known to curtainkind. All I wanted was a multi-coloured pattern design with middle eastern leanings (think persian carpet). It's a big room and I'm trying to cosy it down to size. It wanted a pattern. It needed a pattern, a rich, textured, luxurious pattern. Paisley, fractal, moorish, something interesting.

Ah, but finding the right pattern proved to be a challenge.

I'd found patterns that were conservative but acceptable, but they were all in shades of the same colour. All the multi-coloured prints I found were either deeply unsexy florals, abstract designs of the most nauseating variety, or Disney characters (similarly unsexy as I don't fancy Disney slash). Not to mention hundreds of abuses of beige and sundry dull stripes.

I also wanted to create a swag-and-tails frame on the wall behind the bed to give the impression of a canopy, but the fabric I'd chosen was too heavy to drape properly. Offered the "standard" samples I quickly picked a bordello-red swirly patterned weave, with extra-bordello tassles. Mmmmmm. Tacky. I told myself to never choose fabric in haste. I ignored myself.

It took an incredibly long time for the Curtain Person to write up the quote. It involved a huge number of calculations and cross referencing from a large file of codes and prices that was liberally decorated with post-its and scribbled updates. I was distracted by her enormous fingernails and wondered again how such people type or dial phones. I mentioned the complexity of the task and she said that the company had tried to get some software made but it had been a disaster. They're trying again. I hope so. The task that took a good 25 minutes to do manually (and featured a lot of "oops, I forgot to include...") should only require 2-3 minutes tops with modern assistance.

Luckily for me I'd stumbled onto some special promotion and scored a 40% discount on production costs. Unluckily for her, figuring out said discount took several additional minutes of cross-checking and recalculation.

Automate! Automate! I eyed off her file, designing data models in my head. I am such a geek.

I handed over a large quantity o' credit for the deposit (go those frequent flyer points) and received for my pains several densely written pieces of paper and a vague promise that I'd be contacted in 4-5 weeks. I went back to bed.


Now we wait.

Comments

[redbraids.livejournal.com]

They sure do sound like they need some software! I hope that the curtains work out well.

Those fingernails?

[(Anonymous)]

They've always bothered me - how do the women with those talons actually perform daily bodily functions, such as going to the loo, washing their hair, taking a shower? Let alone opening a car door.

Rhonda