I swear, in the days of crowd sourcing on Facebook, there is absolutely no way to ever feel totally confident in your decisions.
Recently, I decided that I was going to break with my phone upgrading pattern, and make the switch from Android to iPhone. I'd thought about it for a while, balancing the totally frivolous reasons (it would make it easier to share dance videos) with the good parenting reasons (it would allow me to be a much more effective administrator on Madison's iPod account). I looked at what apps I'd end up losing and the inconveniences caused by switching when I'd been a loyal Samsung customer since my very first smart phone. I looked at all the ease of moving to the phone who seemed to have a monopoly on plenty of apps. I balanced serious with frivolous, looked at prices, talked to Adam about what would make more sense.
I ordered the phone, found the transfer and set up shockingly easy (even coming from a competing platform) and almost instantly was swamped with people who both thought that a) I had made the best decision that I would ever make to 2) I would live to regret it long before I would be able to get another upgrade.
I feel like this is true with everything. If we want to get our new furniture we should a) go to this store and only this store! b) never get anything from this store because they are the worst. And it's the same store.
Appliances. Furniture. Technology. Planners. Curriculum. Cars. Banking. Services. Restaurants.
If you look for opinions, you will get plenty of this is the only and never ever and what gets totally infuriating is that you will get a contrasting opinion for every single provider.
I kind of get it. If you had a really good or a really bad experience, you want to make sure that people know. And if you have a normal, middle of the road, perfectly adequate experience, you need to convince yourself that you made the right decision and things were absolutely amazing. You don't want to show that you made a decision that you potentially spent a lot of money on and have had a little bit of worried buyer's remorse. Sure, you've only used one roofer, but man, he was the best roofer in the world. I get it. I've done it. We hired a stone mason to do our paths and patio a few years ago. It was horrifyingly expensive (although we did get three quotes and did our research, and they were on track, masonry is just expensive). It took several weeks, and there were days that the guys didn't show up because he'd pulled them to another job. The yard was ripped up by the equipment. There were days we were actually pretty annoyed by them. However, the end product was beautiful, and when people ask if we know anyone who can do stone work, we recommend them full force, talking about how amazing they were. Best place. Hands down.
Do your research. Ask for opinions. But overall, the choice is yours and you need to feel confident that neither the best nor the worst will be true.
