Rain vs. Plasmas
We are in the process of re-doing our office, and are going to hang three 50″ plasmas from a triangular bracket hanging in the center of the office.
After scouring the net for good deals on the Panasonic 50″ plasmas we wanted, we came up with 2 final options.
1. Buy from some online store and get them delivered.
2. Buy from an offer at costco, and pick them up ourselves.
Getting them from costco would mean paying the sales tax, but the deal was better and with the 3% we get off from the corporate card + creditcard they came out to be the same. The kicker was that Costco’s came with a 1-year longer warranty period.
The initial idea was to use my car, but since we weren’t sure that 3 plasmas would fit in it (these things are HUGE) we decided to grab a truck from Home Depot. They only had open flatbed trucks, but the sky was clear and it wouldn’t rain in the 75 minutes it would take to get to costco’s and back. Right?
WRONG!!!
As soon as we got the Plasmas and our other gear loaded up on the back of the truck and got back on I95 the sky clouded up and a storm of biblical proportions headed our way. By the time the rain hit us, the rush-hour traffic had come to a near standstill, and we spent the next 45 minutes crawling along wondering how much of the $5k worth of goodies would survive the rain.
Thankfully, by the time we got back to the office the rain had stopped and other than soaking wet boxes, the plasmas themselves had not been damaged at all. The outside of the boxes were soaked, but no water had seeped through to the inside of the box, and the plasmas themselves were wrapped in 2 layers of plastic. Not bad for having sat on the back of an open truck for 45 minutes in heavy rain.
The moral of this story is: There is a reason why an industry is built around delivering stuff. So will we get the next thing delivered? Probably not, buying stuff at costco is just too fun 
