Tarkblog

We rented it this weekend. I’m going to summarize it for you, to save you the trouble of having to watch it (don’t read if you plan on seeing it).

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One of the joys of moving into a new (old) house is that you have to spend some time making improvements. We’ve been hacking out a little bit her and there and based on what we want to accomplish and how fast we are at accomplishing it I’d say we’ve got 5 years of work ahead of us.

A few weeks ago I cleaned out the gutters. Half of them I just used a ladder to get to, and a few others I had to squeeze out a window and shimmy along the roof to do. However, there’s one gutter in the very front of the house which I am unable to get to because we don’t own a tall enough ladder. I stuck my hand out the window the other day and reached up into the gutter and, sure enough, it was full of leaves.

We had been borrowing an extension ladder from a coworker, but when I got it set up and began to climb it was just too flimsy and not quite tall enough to make it all the way up. So, we decided maybe we’d call in a professional.

We had the following items to be done:

Clean out gutter (note that it’s singular…all the rest are already clean)
Optionally, based on price, install a gutter guard in that gutter
Install a chimney cap

Where to turn to? Since we don’t have an Angie’s List for our area, I consulted the next best resource I knew: the yellow pages.

Now, in the handyman/housework area there was a list of 20-25 local people/businesses that offered these services. In an attempt to narrow it down, I used the best option I found:

I picked the 3 largest ads.

The wife called these people.

1 never answered
1 she left a message with
1 she got in contact with and he would come by that evening to check it out

The guy who came by didn’t bring a “tall enough ladder”, so he had to come by again the next day.

He did, and quoted the following:

$100 for the chimney cap
$100 to clean out the gutter
$200 for the gutter guard.

Ouch. I’ll pay for the chimney cap because I’m not climbing to the top of that thing, but $100 to clean out the gutter? Cmon, that’s less than 15 minutes work. The gutter guard is probably a little more intensive, but I can’t believe it would cost more than 30 bucks for this particular length of gutter. Highly inflated.

I’m quite surprised to have no heard back from the other two people. Seems like if you’re a handyman, you’d have a tough time getting work if you don’t return calls. But whatever.

So, tomorrow, I plan to buy a big extension ladder for the approximately $300 we would have paid for the gutter work and do it myself.

And as a bonus, I get to keep the ladder.

I started my grad school program in January of 2003 and finished in May 2005.

Here’s the progression of the cost of (1) 3-credit hour class at purdue. This assumes the “streaming video” option, meaning that you “attend” class via watching the lectures over the internet at your convenience.

2003 - $1598 a class ( $533 per credit hour )
2004 - $2144 a class ( $714 per credit hour )
2005 - $2377 a class ( $792 per credit hour )
Today (2006) - $2845 a class ( $948 per credit hour )

Wowza, that sure is a hefty increase. Almost 100% increase in tuition in just 3 years.

I’m glad I got it over with when I did.

No, faithful readers, this blog isn’t about cars. It’s about customers.

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We ordered a pizza the other night and had a coupon to get free breadsticks and two free drinks. That reminded me of this blog:

In high school, when I’d go to a certain friend’s house we would always order Papa Johns because his parents would give us money to do so. He found out that if you called Papa Johns and told them you had a coupon for something they would just honor it since they didn’t track the coupons they handed out (and they handed out a bunch). So we would always just do something like:

“Yeah, we have a coupon that says if you buy a large one topping you get a medium one topping and a 2-liter of coke for free”.

And they would deliver it, no questions asked, and never even ask for the coupon.

Obviously, the trick is you couldn’t go overboard (”Yeah, we have a coupon for buy 1 get 10 free”). But we did a good job staying within the limit.

Later in high school, when I worked at the telemarketing firm, we were very close to the Papa Johns. One of the guys I worked with also was a delivery driver and was notorious for ordering pizza while he was off duty and pulling this “no-coupon” trick.

One day, Papa Johns wisened up. They installed a computer system that kept track of valid coupons and used that when creating orders. No more of this made up coupon deal.

That was a sad day for all of us.