The Borders Bookshelves Fiasco
August 1st 2011 21:00
Photo by Specious. Used in accordance with the terms of Wikimedia Commons’ GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
To paraphrase Fred, one of my dreams was to own a set of Borders bookshelves. It couldn’t be an ordinary bookshelf but a Borders one.
During their last week of operation, I was seriously considering buying one of the ones that almost touch the ceiling. My plan was to borrow Fred’s trolley and wheel it from Bondi Junction to my place.
“You’ve got rocks in your head,” said Fred. “I’ve done it for a few blocks and even that was difficult. How high is the bookcase?”
“About nine feet.”
“That’s taller than me! How are you supposed to see where you’re going?”
“Oh, I was going to wheel it from behind me. That way I could see.”
“You will have a million people screaming at you for blocking their path. And what if the bookcase falls over and breaks? You’ll probably throw the thing on the ground and there goes your one hundred and fifty dollars.”
“I already thought of that and worked out a route. I will walk on the side of the road where there’s few pedestrians.”
Fred relented. He said I could borrow his trolley. That said, when I measured the walls of my unit, they were just under nine feet high. There was a two centimetre gap. I rang my removalist and he said he could deliver it for $45. Man, if I had known it was that cheap, I wouldn’t have bothered with the trolley idea.
But after discussing it with Fred, I realised the removalist would have to tilt it to get it inside my unit before moving it upright again. There was no way he could do this with a two centimetre gap. I would have to pull it apart.
In the end, I got one of the shorter bookcases. That said, the removalist still wanted me to pull it apart. And because Borders asked me to move the removal forward, my removalist had to charge me double as originally he had to be in Bondi Junction anyway for another job, hence his low quote. Now, he was in BJ just for me.
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