Mark of unseen gables

The saga of the missing gable ends continues. I'd refer to it as a comedy, but I've long lost the ability to laugh at it - more I just shake my head sadly and sigh. And painful though it is to me, it doesn't yet warrant the status of a tragedy. I'm not sure what that leaves. Farce perhaps?

In an ironic twist my problem now involves an excess of gable ends as well as an absence. The issue, originally, was the lack of these mysterious items delaying the installation of my bedroom. My order turned to be short four gable ends. Let me repeat that: Four. It's not a hard quantity to grasp is it? A quick test shows a four year old has no trouble with it. So why then, when I requested these missing pieces of my bedroom jigsaw be dispatched with all due haste did only two turn up the following week? And why did it take so long, and so many, many phone calls, for an additional two to be sent to me?

But I've complained enough about that particular error in the past, and I now have in my possession - at last - four gable ends. So let's move on to a new complaint: They're the wrong gable ends. Perhaps the mistake was mine to begin with, in that I was expected - and for my sins continue to expect - a degree of competency in those I've been dealing with. Goodness knows I'm well aware of my own inadequacies in such matters, and part of the fault is mine. I examined the pieces when the arrived to make certain that they were all in one piece, and that nothing obvious was amiss. What I didn't do was to make certain they were the correct height. And they're not.

And so the whole soul-sapping ritual of trying to get things sorted out commenced again. More phone calls which in turn led to more requests that call I customer services instead. I now abjectly refuse to do so on the grounds customer services invariably tell me to call the store back and which point the cycle repeats again. Instead I hang doggedly onto the phone until they find someone who can help me. That someone then told me all they could do was contact customer services on my behalf, and then call me back later. They never did, and when I called back to find out what was happening, that person had left for the day. For some reason people at the store still refuse to believe me when I tell them this happens, continuing to insist that they always return calls.

All I can do is call back tomorrow.

Rinse, repeat, despair.