Tuesday, June 26, 2007

"Jonathan... these people don't even know how much money they have!" ~Dave Fay~

In case you didn’t know, I work for Dave Foster in Lake Placid NY. Many of the employees are people that I know. Dave Fay is Dave Foster’s head carpenter, Rodney Shumway is the manager of the landscaping crew, and I am the… well I work for Rod. That comment that I posted in the title was something Dave had told me when I found out one of the jobs that we were doing had been quoted for one million (count’em $1,000,000) dollars. This particular job had a tennis court on it that hadn’t been used for probably 30 to 40 years. The people wanted all that trees and shrubs that had grown up ripped out, and they wanted the tennis court redone. That was why Dave Fay told me that, I had made some comment to him about all the money it must be costing to do this. It is also interesting to consider this about these rich people. First of all, every place that we take care of (I use “we” collectively meaning the whole business… and that business being White Barn Designs) is just a “summer camp”. None of these rich people live here year around… most of them have homes all over the US. They like to have rooms redone in their “summer camps” (keep in mind that there is nothing “campy” about these places… they are multi-million dollar homes) and what I find interesting about the rooms that they have redone is once the room is finished, these people realize that the furniture doesn’t match, so… they buy new furniture. And do you know what they do with the “old” furniture? (Here you’ll notice the word old has also made it into quotation marks… I say this because while the furniture might be old in age, it is very young in looks. Because these are only “summer camps”, this furniture does not get used so it’s practically brand new.) They throw it out! So I keep my eyes open for free stuff. Finally one more piece of info for you. As I have stated these people are rich and one of the many services that we offer to them is trash service. This is where I keep my eyes open for furniture. But do you know what I found the other day in the trash? A laptop. Yup!... a Dell Latitude Laptop. Let me give the specs (just incase you are computer savvy) it had 512 megabites of RAM, Windows XP Professional, and an Intel Centrino Mobile Technology processor. This machine was top of the line (for those of you who aren’t PC savvy). Sadly it didn’t work… (huh… weird how it made it to the trash cuz it didn’t work) Bud (Leah’s brother) and I took it apart, and we found that something got spilled on it. I think it was Coke or Pepsi. But even though it didn’t work, all the components in it worked. We didn’t get to check everything, but the RAM worked and the Hard Drive worked. And many of the other components like the DVD ROM, Battery, and Wireless Card seemed to have little – if any – sticky stuff on them. So I’m assuming they work. But you can find laptops on ebay that don’t work and still sell them. This person must have not really cared. So I intend to make money off a free non-working laptop. It’s amazing. So I just wanted to share. I know my soon to be wife writes a fair deal on here, but I like to chatter every so often myself.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

People should read this.