Joy to the World

I dunno, maybe I'm a racist, or maybe I'm just elitist, but Yaya's video is just pathetic. The card image is pretty good, I'll give him that.

I am having a wonderful phone conversation this morning with a charming young woman representing Frontier Communications about a past due notice on my internet / TV account. Most of the time I spent on hold listening to horribly distorted music. The sound quality when I was actually talking to the person was marginally better. You might want to blame it on the speakerphone, but no, that's disallowed. It's a brand new, AT & T cordless phone, and for every other phone call I've had with some faceless corporate drone, it has worked fine. After 25 minutes and having repeated the facts of the case three times I now have a fax number which I am to use to communicate evidence in support of my case. Color me happy, or is that harpy?
. . .
I logged onto my bank, found the payment record. It has a cryptic confirmation number. Press the print screen button, crop the image to the essentials using Picasa and then used FaxZero to send it. Faxzero says they accept doc, pdf and some other file types, but nothing about Jpeg's, which is what my cropped screen shot is. I wonder what will happen. Will Frontier get an image, or 25 pages of hex dump? Stay tuned for the further adventures of Milquetoast Man.

Our modern world runs on giant, soulless corporations that mostly work very well. They keep us supplied with food, water, power, transportation, entertainment and an endless variety of gadgets. A great many people have worked very hard to make these organizations productive and efficient. Problem is that in streamlining these operations they become more susceptible to grit in the gears. Their normal reaction is to just kick it out. That's when your high-tech new ride breaks down, you find yourself stranded by the side of the road with a dead cell phone that wouldn't work anyway because your account has been terminated for non-payment, because your credit card has been canceled because your number and 27 million others got stolen by the Romanian mafia who sold it to some grifters in Kansas city who tried to buy a boatload of Christmas presents over the internet.

Trying to unstick these kind of problems probably consumes more time than people spend on logical thought, which isn't saying much being as logical thought is an alien concept to most people. But hey, it makes for great entertainment, er, good entertainment maybe? How about Jerry Springer-esque level of noise generation?

Last week I got a weird number on my phone WHILE I WAS TRYING TO CONDUCT BUSINESS. Cursed interlopers, and how did call waiting get turned on? Gaaahhhh (or words to that effect)! Tried to figure out what it was. Finally tried the redial button, which formatted the number to look like a phone number with a leading 54. 54 is the country code for Argentina. Oh, it was probably Devil daughter calling. Or her phone thief. Argentina is full of phone thieves you know.

But why was the phone ringing in my ear when I am trying to have a conversation? Try going online with Verizon dot com, but evidently I don't know my user ID. It doesn't tell me that I've entered an invalid ID, it just says it can't process it right now. I fuss for a bit, but realize I probably will have a better chance by calling, so I go rooting around through Mom's stuff for the password. I find a card with some chicken scratchings that might be current, or might be from the last century. It's kind of hard to tell, it's yellow and brittle and there are bits flaking off of it. Oh, that's dried cheese.

I manage to get through the robo-cop gauntlet and talk to a real person and I find out that call waiting on my phone got turned on by mistake! Death to the infidels who would dare to make such error in our holy sacred communications system. The prophet, PBUH,  would be displeased.

The nice lady I talked to turned it off, PBUHer.

Okay, things are calm now. Callus Interruptus has been turned off, and I've figured out that it probably was Kathryn calling, so I tried to call her back. First I try the redial button: YOUR CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED AS DIALED. OK, how do you get a long distance line? Zero Zero maybe? Punch buttons on the phone until I get the stored number edited and try again: YOUR CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED AS DIALED. OK, not zero-zero. What's the prefix Google? How about 011? WE ARE UNABLE TO COMPLETE YOUR CALL. TO TALK TO A CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE, PLEASE CALL CUSTOMER SERVICE AT goobley-goobley-star-gooble.

And to think I used to be in love with all this techo-gimickry. Well, I got a blog post out of this.