The Squeaky Wheel

Yes, the squeaky wheel does eventually get greased. But sometimes, it has to squeak loud and long before that happens. In a blog post a couple of weeks ago titled Stair Rails And Carpet Woes, I told you that we have been unhappy with the carpet we had installed in our house three years ago. Within a few weeks after installation, it was starting to come loose and ripple in the center of every room.

Repeated calls and visits to the store to complain were ignored until we stopped in a while back, and Terry let the owner’s nephew know exactly how she felt about their shoddy installation and lack of customer service. There were other customers in the store, and she made a point of telling them that they might want to look elsewhere. That got the owner’s attention and he came out to the house to look over the job. While not admitting any wrongdoing on their part, he said he would send someone to make it right.

That was scheduled for yesterday morning between 8:30 and 9:00, and at 9:01 two employees showed up and spent several hours moving furniture, stretching the carpet, and reattaching it. It looks good and we hope it will stay that way. The guys were polite and efficient, and it’s not their fault that someone else did a crappy installation job the first time around, or that the company didn’t address the problem when it first came up. So I gave them each a $20 bill as a tip and told him to enjoy lunch on me.

So, as I said, the squeaky wheel does get greased. It just takes a while.

Before the men could start the work, we had to move Terry’s collection of Aladdin lamps and some other breakable antiques into another room out of their way and out of danger. After they left, it took us a couple of hours to get everything put back in place, and by then it was mid-afternoon.

I have not been sleeping well the last few nights, averaging four to five hours of sleep a night broken up into bits and pieces. It was just over four hours the night before, so I really wanted to spend some time in my recliner napping. But I also needed to get some work done, so instead, I knocked out two more chapters in my new Big Lake book, for a total of somewhere around 4,750 words before it was time for dinner. I am about at the ¾ point in the story and hope to get it wrapped up pretty soon, so I will be back at it again today.

Many people have asked me where I get the ideas for my books, and I tell them they come from everywhere. It might be something I saw on the news, or an idea picked up from a true crime story on TV, or maybe it’s based on something that I covered in my small town newspaper publishing days. Sometimes it’s just a snippet of conversation I overheard somewhere. And now and then a story idea seems to come out of thin air. This happened Sunday night while I was formatting yesterday’s blog when an idea for another Big Lake book hit me out of the blue. I rolled it around in my head for a while as I was finishing the blog and then taking my shower and getting ready for bed, and before I knew it, I had the makings of what I hope will be a pretty good mystery to share with my readers one of these days.

Another question I get asked quite often is how many more books do I plan on for the Big Lake series? As long as my readers keep enjoying them, I plan to keep writing them. Including the story idea that came to me just the other night, right now I have plans for at least fourteen more books in the series. And that doesn’t include at least another ten books in the John Lee Quarrels series. And let’s not forget my Tinder Street family saga. I want to do ten more books in that series, too. Since I normally write between four and six books a year, that’s at least seven more years if no other new ideas come to me. And I seem to get new ideas all the time. Since I’ll turn 69 in October, I’ll probably keep writing until the orderlies in the old folks home eventually take my crayons away from me.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – I used to have superpowers, but my psychologist took them away.