Author: ocracokewaves

A now sane individual who escaped the world of selling technology, now living in the rolling hills of the North Carolina Piedmont. I have been at one time or another, a farmer, a director for Apple, and a vice president at Wideopen Networks. I continue to pursue my love of photography and writing. I have great memories of boating, fishing, kayaking, swimming, and hiking the beaches along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks where we lived for fifteen years.

The Automatic Sprinkler Syndrome

Summer Rain
Summer Rain

Modern life is a mine field of behavioral traps that can turn intelligent humans into people who don’t even understand when it is raining.

While I respect the right of people to waste as much of their money as they want, I find it hard to remain calm when I am walking in the rain and notice someone’s lawn sprinklers running.

Once in a while, everyone goes off on a trip and leaves their sprinklers set to run.  As fate would have it, rain usually comes on days when you are traveling and your sprinklers are set to run.

It is not the unlucky travelers that drive me crazy, it is the folks who are too lazy to turn off their automatic sprinklers after a major rainstorm has passed through our neighborhood.

I often walk by a home where the sprinklers usually run three times a day no matter what the weather is.  The homeowner has drilled his own well and installed his own pump so it is his money.  However, unless I am mistaken he has drilled into the same aquifer that supplies our county with water.  So while he is spending his own money, I would argue that he is wasting “our” water.

I wonder whether the homeowner doesn’t know how to turn off his sprinklers or whether he is just too lazy to do it.  Recently I saw his sprinkler running during a storm that dropped nearly two inches of rain on us in just a few hours.  Even worse his sprinklers were running the next morning after the storm.

The homeowner isn’t alone.  I am surprised by the number of people who either don’t care enough to turn their sprinklers off or just don’t know how to flip the switch.

Did the invention of sprinklers make modern humans unable to understand how to tell if the ground is wet?

It is a little like the problem of  remembering phone numbers that has been brought about by the increasing use of cell phones.  If all your phone numbers are stored in your cell phone instead of your head, there is very little likelihood that you will remember any of the numbers.

Is it a good thing that modern conveniences strip us of some of our skills?  I doubt it.  While I know that there are people who are unable to mow their yards because of physical problems, I have to question if the typical riding lawn mower has been a good thing for modern men.

Once you start using a riding lawn mower it is hard to go back to pushing one.

Between GPS devices that have gradually taken the place of maps and web based driving directions, few young people have the skills to read maps.

Society will continue to hunger for the quick and easy way to get things done.  Unfortunately sometimes the device causes more harm than one might imagine.  I wonder if the folks who have lost the ability to turn off their sprinklers will eventually forget how to use a garden hose?

That is it from the Crystal Coast where summer is in full swing, and our new book, “A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide” is now available.  It is a great way to plan a wonderful family vacation in our Coastal Paradise.

Customer Feedback Should Not Be Ignored

Navajo White Paint
Navajo White Paint Label

We had an interesting experience recently.  It illustrates one of the biggest problems in both small and large businesses.

In spite of all the customer surveys and all the social media listening opportunities, businesses tend to ignore valuable feedback because solving a problem is often harder than just ignoring the problem and letting your customer continue to deal with it.

Our home is for sale and was under contract.  The Saturday before our contract fell apart, we took all of our old paint and chemicals to a special hazardous-materials collection.  That left us with no paint for touch-ups as we were preparing to get our house back on the market.

My wife hired a painter that we have used many times to do some minor painting that required matching one room’s paint.   Since it was such a small job, and he was squeezing our work in between coats of paint on a neighbor’s front door, she agreed to get the paint that was needed.

One paint that we required was a Benjamin Moore paint and another was Sherwin Williams Navajo White.  Our painter told my wife that she could save some time by just going to the Benjamin Moore paint dealer, and they could mix the Navajo White with their paint computer.

Sure enough my wife came back with a small can of Benjamin Moore paint labelled Sherwin Williams Navajo White.  The picture at the top left is from that paint can.   Our painter tried it on the spot we were trying to fix, and it looked terrible.  We thought perhaps our wall had faded, but my wife had a Sherwin Williams paint strip with Navajo White, and it matched our wall perfectly.  The other Benjamin Moore paint that had been matched with a Benjamin Moore paint chip worked fine.

My wife headed back down to the hardware store where she had bought the paint.  They completely ignored her request to try to fix our $22 quart of paint.  Their comment was that if our can of paint was computer mixed, they were not prepared to fiddle with the paint. I guess the computer is always right, and the customer just has to live with it.

A day or two later we stopped by Sherwin Williams and bought a gallon of their Navajo White paint.  That evening I painted the small area that needed fixing.  The paint matched perfectly.

I decided that we needed to get a refund on our Benjamin Moore Navajo White paint so I put a drop of it on the Sherwin Williams paint strip and headed off to the hardware.  I took the can to the front desk and asked for a refund.  First the lady offered to remix it, but I told her it was too late for that.

I showed her the paint strip which demonstrated how far off their Navajo White was compared to the real Sherwin Williams Navajo White paint.  She was completely uninterested.  At first she told me that if I wanted Sherwin Williams paint, I should shop there.   I told her that she should not sell Sherwin Williams labeled paint if it didn’t actually match Sherwin Williams paint, but she didn’t seem to care about my observation.  However, she did go talk to a manager.

We got our money back after the discussion, and I appreciate that.  However, they were uninterested in fixing the problem we uncovered.

I guess giving us back our money is easier than fixing the real problem of a paint matching computer that doesn’t work properly.  Still we ended up making three trips just to get the cup of paint that we needed.  Of course I won’t buy any more paint from that hardware store.

Hopefully they get few customers looking Sherwin Williams Navajo White paint, but my guess is that the next customer will be just as unhappy as we were if they are trying to match some paint already on the walls.

Like many businesses, our hardware store chose to ignore the real problem and leave a trap set for the next unsuspecting consumer.