Getting a shower door installed and other impossibilities

Nice house we live in but whoever built it saved a few bucks on decent shower doors. So, as I am never loath to take a trip to Lowes (which I vastly prefer to Home Dept which is closer to home), off we trot to pick some new shower doors. I could probably do the job myself but it's also probably worth a couple of hundred bucks to have them professionally installed which will save time in the long run.
Five minutes looking at what's on offer and we've decided more or less on what we want so time to find someone. After pressing the "Special help required in the bathroom department" button, we wait. And wait. Eventually someone turns up and mumbles at us while biting his nails. Soldiering on, we explain the doors that we want and he asks a couple of relevant questions. He gives us approximate prices and we go home to wait for a call from the installer who will come to measure up. The next day, the installer calls. "Can I come at 5 pm to measure?" Sure. At 5:30 he calls to say he can't make it. "Can I come at 7:30?" No - that's putting kid to bed time. "Tomorrow during the day then?" Perfect. Next day he calls to say "How about 7:30?" Since we have not disposed of kid since yesterday, that is once more bedtime. Two more broken appointments later, we call Lowes to ask them to send someone who gives a toss about customers. The following day a pleasant young guy turns up, asks a number of questions, offers advice on what would work best with out showers and that, if we'd care to go into Lowes in a couple of days, they will have all the details.
Two days later we go back to see the nail-biter. No trace of any paperwork anywhere and the people in the sales department (which, from the length of time it takes him to walk there and back, is in the next county) don't have any paperwork. And they're not there anyway. We'll call you next week.
For some unfathomable reason, we didn't get a call the next week so for an even more unfathomable reason, we called Lowes to ask if we could pretty please, if we really grovelled, buy some shower doors off them if they weren't too busy. Well, that really stirred them into inaction. So, when we called back 3 days later, they said they would send a new installer round to measure. He was due here at 8:30 this morning. at 9:45, I called Lowes to get back the $50 deposit and to tell them that I was going to buy the sodding doors from Home Depot and install them myself. At 10:30 the installer called to say he had gone to another job instead of coming to our place. He seemed to be surprised to be told we had no desire ever to see him within a mile of our house.
It's nice to know that so many "professionals" are over-employed but don't expect ever to hear from us again.

The whingeing pom

I've been in the USA for 3 years now having previously lived in New Zealand and my native England. Time to start whingeing on an irregular basis. Where to start? I'll try to keep it trivial, at least on a global scale though I am prepared to bet that as the 2008 election gets nearer, I'll depart from those good intentions.