Phil online

I bought my first house in Atlanta 12 years ago.  It came with a 2000 square foot carpet disaster.  I was broke and the house was all I could afford.  I couldn’t afford new carpeting for 2000 sq feet of house!  Or so I thought.

A friend told me to call Tom McAllister.  I am so glad I did.  Tom is a special sort of character peculiar to the south.  He runs a successful flooring business almost completely off his personality.  As far as I know, he doesn’t have any storefront anywhere.  And he’ll do a job almost anywhere around Atlanta.  But the service I got for the price is what makes Tom so great.

Tom sells all kinds of flooring.  What I needed was good cheap carpet.  And here’s what Tom did.  He went down to the carpet mills in Dalton and found me some seafoam green carpet that was on a seconds roll.  A seconds roll is one that has something wrong with it, like a seconds shirt is one that’s missing a button or something.  Tom told me that they might have changed the dye pack in the middle of that roll, so there’s a dark area that he has to cut around.  But he inspects every roll completely before he buys it to make sure he can use it.  And because of his installation techniques, you’ll never know it had a problem.

Oh my god, it was beautiful!  It was high-quality, too.  Tom took a lot of time explaining to me how the higher density and the twist of the fibers would make the carpet last longer.  And it did!  It held out until we sold the house last year, and it was still beautiful.

Over the years, I lost Tom’s phone number.  I had carpet installed from two other companies.  They were discounters, and the price was good.  The installation was ok.  But the quality was nowhere near what I got from Tom.

So, we sold the house.  Bought a new house.  New house, new carpet. We put new carpet in upstairs.  We used another local discounter.  It’s nice, but it’s just ordinary.

The carpet on the main floor was expensive looking stuff.  Patterned wool berber.  Here’s the problem with berber: it runs.  Catch a thread with the vacuum and you’ll pull a strip out of your floor 10 feet long.  We had three such strips in our carpet already.  It had to go.  Luckily, I found Tom’s number on an obscure realtor’s page through Google.
But I didn’t think Tom would come so far to where I live now, so I shopped around locally for a deal on carpet.  I was pretty disappointed with what I found, but I can afford more these days so I was prepared to pay around $40/yard for decent carpet that would last. And looking around gave me ideas about what I wanted.
I called Tom again.  He said the location would be no problem and wanted me to come what he had and discuss ideas.  I met him at a Home Depot near work to show him what I’d found.  There was a prominent display of their most popular carpet on the end-cap.  Tom squinted at me and said, “Phil, I wouldn’t install that crap in your house.”  Then he proceeded to “shave” the carpet with a pen knife.  After a few strokes, there were great piles of carpet fuzz everywhere.  Tom said, “You don’t want that crap in your house.  It’ll clog up your vacuum cleaner for a year!”  He showed me the carpet that he had in “seconds” — it was a brand that was also at Home Depot, but it was $58/yard installed, a bit out of my range.

He told me he was perplexed that it was a seconds roll that he had because he couldn’t find anything wrong with it.  But we figured out what it was looking over the selection at HD.  It was too dark.  I mean, it didn’t match any of the sample colors there.  It was a nice medium coffee color, but it wasn’t any of the colors that HD had on display.  Can’t sell it if it’s not standard, so it goes to seconds.

Long story short, Tom installed this carpet in my house for an ungodly small amount of money.  He made me promise not to tell anyone what a deal I got, but — well, let’s just say it was less than half of Home Depot’s price.  And I got an upgraded pad.  And I got a professional installer crew who came out and installed it two days later.

I was so pleased, I even tipped Tom a couple hundred bucks.  And then I blogged about it so I won’t lose his number again and so you can find him too.  If you need carpet in Atlanta, whether it’s the top quality stuff or just some cheap crap so you can sell your house, call Tom on his cell phone at 770-934-7707.  Tell him Phil Hord gave you his number.  He’ll treat you extra nice.

He treats everyone extra nice.

Here are some tips on dealing with Tom:

1. When he quotes a price, it includes installation and an 8# pad.  You want the 8 pound pad. Walking on the carpet in my house is like walking on a cloud!
2. If you want crap, he’ll put it in for you for cheap.  If you want the good stuff, he’ll do that too.  Just tell him up front.
3. Go find the carpet you like at your local carpet store.  Get some ideas of colors and features.  Then call Tom and see what he has.  He may even be able to match the exact style (get the style and color numbers off the display).  Chances are, though, that he’ll have something better.
4. Tom likes to talk.  Be prepared to hear some stories.  Get your ideas through to him and then arrange to meet him to see some samples.
5. Be ready to buy some carpet when you meet Tom, because he is the man you will buy it from.  No one else I’ve found comes close for service or price.  I hope he doesn’t retire before I need carpet again.

I like to use coloring rules, such as they are, in Outlook at work.  I want to use coloring rules in Thunderbird, too, but I find them limiting.  Thunderbird colors email when it is given a label.  But you can only have five different labels in Thunderbird.

The default labels are Work, Personal, Important, To Do, and Later.  I don’t care so much about the names since I don’t normally display them, but the colors for these are rather garish.

But I discovered that you can change not only the label name but also the color.  Someone even posted a Chrome hack to change the color from the foreground color to the background color.  Neat — I may try that later.

But for now, I just needed a few little changes.  First, the list.  Open up Tools -> Options and click on the Display icon, then the Labels tab.
Work - I’ll put all my server notices here like Cron reports
Groups - I’ve been putting group mail in “Later”.  Now I’ll rename it. 
Important - Email from my 2am friends.
Impersonal - “Newsletters” that aren’t quite spam
To Do - Not sure what to do with this yet, since I use the IMAP flag.

Now the colors.  I want Impersonal stuff and groups to be muted, so I set those to pastel colors.  Work is a pastel orange.  Important is Fire Engine Red.

Ok, now I need some rules.  I already have rules for most of the labels; let me add one for Impersonal mail.

Whoa…  That’s a lot of impersonal mail.  I think I should start unsubscribing from these (or sending them to /dev/null).  That’s a job for another day…
Next, I go to the Tools -> Filter Messages dialog and Run the new filter on my email.   Voila, my email is all magically colored.

Now Thunderbird will automatically label (and color) the email as it arrives on my computer.  I like how it does this even for my IMAP messages.  (My friend Bob Rankin says it doesn’t do this for him, but I guess this is a feature they’ve “fixed” since then.)