Bought Ceiling Texture Supplies and Carpet

After work last night my wife and I went to Home Depot to set up carpet measuring for the second floor. While we were there I thought that we might as well pick up what I needed for the ceiling texture since my attempt at using the paint / texture mixture failed. I really don't understand why I don't go to a different store sometimes. Sorry, I realize that was hopping around a bit, but for some reason it took a good 40 - 45 minutes to set it up for someone to come out to my house to measure the areas for the new carpet.

We ended finding a good deal there for the carpet. We're going to pay a little over $23 per square yard for some pretty plush carpet. This was our second carpet trip to the Depot. The first one we talked to a pretty knowledgeable sales person named Christina. She was the one who showed us the smaller display with carpet samples we could check out and take home. We ended up with a color called Root Beer. I know the name is kinda weak. One of the main determining factors for the color choice was the color of our dog's fur.

After waiting to get the carpet measurement set up, we picked up the stuff for the texture ceiling. This is the stuff I grabbed;

• 12 ft x 400 ft of 1 mil plastic - $42
• hopper and sprayer with 3 nozzles - $64
• box of joint compound - $7

So if you count the ceiling texture / paint I used before the total comes to $131 so far.

The junk about my home improvement ends here. The rest is me ranting about retail and software development. First off, I used to work a retail job and did so for a pretty good chunk of time, like 7 years. Now I work for something like a utility company doing computer related stuff. The person who setup our order had done so only once before. Half the problem seemed to be the fact he was new, which can be expected this close to the holiday. The other half of the problem seemed to be the unnecessarily long and repetitive process he had to go through.

Part of my job is watching how people work, and trying to improve the ease at which they do their job. So when this person started to help us, I couldn't help but observe the amount of extra work he needed to do interfacing with what looked like an AS/400 terminal on their windows machine. They upgraded the hardware, but didn't spend the time to increase productivity and sales by creating a more streamlined process. In fact there was another person sitting near us that was waiting for 15 minutes for the same thing we were having done. Another idea would be to train holiday staff using the same program in a training mode so none of the transactions were real, but the could get the experience working with the older system.