Everybody Staze...

Nobody leavz...

Journey’s of a salesman

By

UPDATE 10/30/2011: Found out today that Penguin has gone out of business. While it’s sad for a company to lay off workers, it’s also not something I’m going to cry about given their sales practices. They may have had a great product, but they were doing it a disservice by “selling” it the way they did.

Also, here is a huge thread of people having various things to say about the whole process they experienced. Some had a good time, others were like me. No idea the breakdown.

Tara and I had the highest pressure sales situation we’ve probably experienced. I’ll wait until the end to tell you what company…

So, last week, a guy came by during the day and and Tara if we’d like a free quote on vinyl windows, and if we did it, we’d get a free $25 gas card (should have been clue 1). Said it would take 60-90 minutes (should have been clue 2). She said sure, and they set up an appointment for Dec. 1, at 7pm. She double and triple checks that there’s no obligation, that we’ve thought about Vinyl windows, but we are short on money right now, so we can’t really buy anything. Guy says cool, and continues his walk, knock, and talk. For the record, our neighborhood is about 60/40 Vinyl to Aluminum windows… you’ll hear why later.

So, we leave town and go to Walla Walla for Turkey day, and Saturday morning at about 10am, I get a call on my cell to confirm the appointment. Though, I’m really confused because it sounded like he was talking about 7am, not 7pm. But, anywho, I confirm, hang up, and try to go back to sleep.

So, we’re back at home Monday, and at about 6:45pm, we hear a car pull up and someone rings the bell. Okay, so he’s 15min early (clue 3). We let him in, and he seems very introverted or something… just kinda stands there and doesn’t say much. Says he’s driven from Vancouver, that the Eugene office isn’t open yet, etc. So, after probably 10-15 minutes of chatting, he goes around and measures the windows (and makes all kinds of comments about the windows sweating, there being some mold on the kitchen one, etc), takes temperature readings (with an IR thermometer… which I wouldn’t think would be very good at telling the temperature of a pane of glass since clear glass is pretty IR transparent (to my recollection)… which, comes into play later. Anywho, all the windows are about 4F cooler than the surrounding walls (which is kinda good, means none of them are really worse than the others). And, we have 10 windows, plus a sliding glass door that would be replaced (we have a window in the garage too, but we’re not really thinking of replacing it anytime soon).

Okay, so, he then sits down and shows us all this marketing material about their company, the windows, etc. Then he does some basic numbers, and shows us the price range for various windows. So, by this time, we see about $23000-$27000 for how many windows we have. We play it cool, and keep going. Then he breaks out the samples of windows (builders grade, superior, etc). Has us boil some water (which took 10 minutes (couldn’t he have mentioned this a while ago?)) and then drops in succession each of the competitor window frame samples in the water. About 7 seconds later, pulls them out, and smooches them. Wow, go figure, Vinyl gets flexible when hot… who didn’t know that that’s ever sat on a school bus on a hot day (PVC seats) or tried to bend PVC tubing and reached for a heat gun/blow dryer). *sigh* didn’t have the heart to tell him I was a Chem major. anywho… then makes a big deal out of the fact that their windows have a fiberglass skeleton and has us try to bend that after about 5 minutes in the water. wow, it doesn’t bend! *head desk*

Okay, so now, he takes this IR lamp (like a bathroom heat lamp), which he had earlier put on one side of the sliding glass door, and had us feel the heat coming through, and turns it on with a BTU meter pointing at it. Then gets it to top out at 450BTU. Okay, so then he takes a single pane glass sheet, and sticks it infront. Great, 350BTU. The he takes a a two pane sheet (air between the panes), and does that. About 250BTUs. Then one with some low-e coating, about 150BTUs. Then wall insulation pressed between two sheets, 20BTUs, then their window sample… wow, 30BTUs! Okay, so they’re good… though again, glass is pretty IR transparent I thought… so maybe there are multiple low-e coatings?!?!

Then he shows us a small version of their windows, and does this thing where he stands on the window… wow, it doesn’t break! Tara then gets to pick colors, and after deciding…

He sits down and crunches the numbers. By this time, it’s around 9:15. So, 2.5 hours later. Takes him like 8 minutes to crunch the numbers, and what do you know… $38k. *head explodes* I tell him that’s about 1/6th of what we paid for the house, and he admits that’s high. So then there’s a 5% discount for winter… which is about $1900. Then there’s thing thing that’s called a success discount (don’t get me started… it’s smart, but still very sales-y), which is 11%. So, we say, he should apply them the other way around… he then says “well, they’re actually applied at the same time”, so he does it again)… note: 38000 – .05(38000) = 36100 – .11(36100) != 38000 – .16(38000) = 31920. *head desk*.

So, when he’s all done with the discounts, he’s got it down to about $32k. *head still explodes*. And does the math for financing, and it’s like, $500/month for 10 years, or $400 for 12 years. We tell him our energy bills, averaged for the year, are about $50/month (that’s with the cost of me running servers, though I don’t run nearly as much computer equipment as I used to). With the 40% savings they guarantee ($20/month), that means it’d take 150years for the windows to pay for themselves. I also tell him our energy rates (4.63 cents/KWH) haven’t increased in 10 years, and that putting in forced air already decreased our energy bills by about 50% from last winter (SUB in Springfield is about 2/3 the average cost of someone in Eugene… which I think is why 40% of the people in our area have not changed to Vinyl windows… it just isn’t cost effective). Just FYI, PGE is 5.13cents per KWH. The average in California, 12 cents/KWH!!! This guy was from San Fran… no wonder he didn’t understand why we didn’t jump on it!

He sees that we’re still freaked by $32k, and then goes into his next schtick. He calls the office, which still has someone there (that sounds extremely sales-y) and says that we’re obviously freaked, and the guy says “okay, cut it to $29k”. So, at this point, it’s like 22% or something off the original quote. Which is cool, but it’s still as much as I paid for my car… which, I tell him, we really can’t afford anything like this until the car is paid off. He asks when that’ll be, I say like “3 years” at which point he says something like “which reminds me, never buy a Prius”. STRIKE 3, you’re OUTTA HERE!!! “We basically tell him that’s what we have” and you can see his heart just sink completely out his shoes. He tries to argue the batteries only last 10 years, that the resale isn’t worth it, etc etc. He’s done. He calls the guy at the office back, guy tells him he should sell us on a partial (where they do like, 4 windows and defer payments, etc. We tell him no, and he calls back and says we’re escorting him out the door… at about 10pm. *sigh*

So, 3 hours later, we have a quote for a LOT of money… and after he leaves we realize “wait, we paid about $30k for our car, and put about 6k down. So, 24k, 60 month loan, we pay $400 a month”… why the hell is a $32k, 120 month loan, $500/month? Figures, I didn’t ask about interest rates…

All and all, the experience was good, yet tiring, and extremely frustrating since it was apparent that the company is very sales driven, and the guy much have been under pretty strict orders not to accept “no” without a fight. *shrugs* I really did feel sorry for him because the guy that came door to door didn’t relay the “we really can’t afford it now” bit… or the fact we had a lot of windows. About 250 sq ft of glass.

So, the moral of the story… if you have a guy from Penguin windows ask to do a free quote, either tell them no, or clear your schedule for the evening. Because he probably would have been there longer if we didn’t shoo him out around 10pm. God knows how long he would have been there if he just came during the day when Tara was home… stories online talk about 4.5-5 hour visits… and they all say that the door to door guy tells them 60-90 minutes. I guess that the actual measurement and quote time did take that long… it was all the rest of the crap that took hours. It’s like a whole infomercial in your house… and you can’t change the channel.

Guess we’ll see if we actually receive our $25 gas card… at this point, that’s 1.5 tanks of gas for our “worthless” Prius. =P

I hate the smell of drying plaster…

By

So, on the non-work side… it has begun. Last Saturday, Tara’s sister left after spending a week with us (that was a lot of fun), and her mom made a comment about us scraping the ceilings (something we needed to do, but you know… us == lazy). So Sunday, wild hair… we scraped the upstairs hall, then the dining room, then the living room. Took about 5 hours. Not too bad, but it took our previously very clean house, and turned it into a mess. 

Since then, throughout the week, we’ve been fixing imperfections in the ceiling, buying a hopper sprayer, and a few other things. Last night, we spent about 3 hours texturing (well, maybe 60 minutes texturing, the rest of the time was taping and plasticing) the ceiling with “Orange Peel” (that’s the look, not the material). The house is now really really dusty, and there’s the smell of plaster everywhere. And, we still have more to go. We had to fix a few more issues with the ceiling (drywall tape marks, low spots in the plaster, etc). We’ll probably do the rest next weekend, or the weekend after when we scrape the vaulted ceiling area. I’m just happy at this point, at work, I don’t smell, taste, and am not covered in plaster. I’m also happy that my 14.4v DeWalt drill is beefy enough to stir the 5gal bucket of plaster to the consistency needed for doing texture. 

Also, on Tuesday, our floors came!!! About $2500 spent a few months back, and we now have 1800lbs (21 boxes at 85lb/each) of Jatoba (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jatobá) (Brazilian Cherry) sitting in our garage. Now we get to finish the ceiling, rip up the carpet, fix any subfloor problems, then lay the floor, and then paint the walls, ceiling, etc (theoretically in that order). 

To that end, we’re heading to K-Falls this weekend to go to Tara’s Aunt and Uncles, to have him (her uncle) help us make the bull noses for the stairs. You can’t buy them for this wood (at least, from our distributor), so we are going to rip some of the boards, laminate the result, then router the edge to make a nice nose. We purchased extra wood for this purpose… so it’s just a matter of the time needed to make them. 

While I’m down there, I’m also going to try to get some work done on creating a script to send out quota warnings on our system. 

Will try to post again from K-falls…

Upgrade Report

By

So, I got the upgrade done, but it’s a mixed blessing. 

We have 2 Xserve RAIDs, which each consist of 2 controllers, 7 drives each, except the one that’s for Metadata. So, that means we have 3 controllers for data, which means, basically 3 LUNs. Xsan really wants even numbers of LUNs. So, when I set up the “new” SAN, it stuck 2 LUNs in one “storage pool” and the other LUN in it’s own. Which blows. It means that Storage Pool 2 is filling faster than Storage Pool 1. 

This was partially my fault, because I used the stupid wizard for “home folder storage” rather than custom. But, it doesn’t really tell you at any point what it’s going to do, it just bitches that “you really should have even numbers of LUNs”. Gar… Xsan 1.x didn’t do that crap… *sigh*. Basically, later in the summer I’ll have to do this again to fix the issue. Also will use this time to fix some other mistakes the wizard made… like, setting the stripe breadth too small at 64 blocks (should be, for a 2 LUN pool, equal to 128 blocks ( breadth = (transfer size (1M) / LUNs ) / block size (4k)). It set all of them to 64 blocks… the 1 LUN pool should be 256. 

So, we’re on Xsan 2.1. Quotas work, but are off until the week after next (getting ready to send out the email to users that are using more than 4gig each). Yeah, interesting statistic… about 7% of users on our system (about 100 out of 1400 users), use nearly 40% of the storage. Cool huh! Small file storage does seem to perform better, so overall, things are better, but not as good as they could be. 

Overall, the upgrade took all weekend. Copying stuff off took about 12 hours, then removing the SAN, and recreating it was quick, then copying stuff back took about 20 hours (which partially had to do with the split LUNs), and therefore decreased bandwidth. *double sigh*

On the positive side, the new fiscal year starts Tuesday. So, we can start spending money! We already have some stuff ordered… PCIe FC card for our FCS system, another copy of Xsan2, a really cool APC UPS serial multiplier (lets you hook the serial output of a UPS up to more devices (in this case, 8). That means I can finally hook the RAIDs up to the UPS, so they’ll be able to shut down gracefully incase of an outage. 

On the super positive side, we are applying for a grant that would get us a Promise Vtrak array. That would be awesome because I could put some 15k SAS drives in it, and move MD to it…. as well as buy 7 750gig ATA drives, and fill up the current MD side of the Xserve RAID with drives, and have an even 4 LUNs)… which would give about 320MB/sec performance… would be pretty cool. The rest of the Promise would be for other stuff… not sure. Might be inclined to move user directories to it, and put video stuff on the Xserve RAIDs… but who knows.