Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Does this kind of thing happen to anyone else?

Maybe I'm just not meant to have a Visa card. Or a charged phone. Or cream-colored shoes.

Just enough "what are the chances?" kind of things have been happening lately, and it's making me start to wonder.

It started while we were on vacation. Driving back through South Dakota, we stopped at this horrible restaurant in Wall called Fat Boys. I'm sure Jeff is the one who picked it. Somehow this has to be his fault. The food was mediocre. The service - extremely slow. And then, just to make the experience complete, I used my credit card to pay for the meal, and left it at the table with the bill.

Of course I didn't realize this detail until more than a hundred miles later. I looked up the restaurant online and called. And amazingly, the woman who answered the phone told me she had the card in hand and would mail it to me. Suddenly I had nothing but good to say about Fat Boys.

Jeff suggested I simply cancel the card and get a new one, but that process is anything but simple because we have at least a half dozen bills that automatically get charged to the account, and coincidentally, just a few weeks earlier, I'd spent more than an hour on the phone updating all of those services when our previous card had expired. I did not want to do that again.

If the restaurant was willing to mail the card, that'd be much easier.

Or so I thought.

We got home a few days later. No card. Doing the math, I wasn't surprised or concerned. (It should be noted, I checked the account daily for unauthorised use. I'm not that trusting.) We then left for another few days. I figured the card would arrive while we were gone. Still no luck.

After more than a week had passed, I called the restaurant. The same wonderful woman answered the phone and assured me the card was in the mail. She said mail service wasn't the best in Wall, and suggested I wait one or two more days. If the card still hadn't arrived, I should call back and she'd direct me to their home office.

I waited another week. No card.

I called again. No wonderful woman answered the phone. Instead it was a brand new employee (she admitted that) who had no clue about my story and asked me to call the next day. I did. And got the same new employee.

After listening to my story, she finally suggested I call another restaurant in town owned by the same person (the home office?). I did. I talked to the owner. He had no clue and suggested I call the next day during regular business hours and he'd put me in touch with their bookkeeper. Who has cancer and is out a lot. And apparently is the only person in the organization that knows how to put an envelope in the mail.

It was a few days before I had a chance to call during business hours. When I did, the woman was out, but the guy assured me she'd be right back and would call me. She didn't.

Have I mentioned that nearly four weeks had passed by this point?

I called again the next day and actually talked to the bookkeeper. She had no clue what I was talking about, but said she would check. She asked for a detailed description of the card because "this sort of thing happens all the time." (To me, that suggests they should be better at handling it, then. But apparently not.)

She promised to call back after checking. I smirked to myself and thought, "yeah, right."

But she did. She left a message saying she couldn't find the card. And then she helpful suggested I cancel it.

(This is the part where I spent five minutes banging my head on my desk.)

I called Wells Fargo. I cancelled the card. I waited another week. And at last the new card arrived. Which meant I could start the fun process of updating the phone, satellite TV, newspaper subscription, etc. with the new card number. I'd learned the last time that some of these could be done online.



Hmmm.... what happened to the new card? It was just here.

Our computer desk is an old drafting table, complete with an unneeded tube on the front that used to hold paper. Look very carefully in the opening where the paper used to be pulled from.


Thankfully it only took about 15 minutes to find a screwdriver and disassemble that part of the desk. But what are the chances?

Another story... this one will be shorter... I've been spending a lot of time on the road for my new job, which means I'm more dependent than ever on my iPhone to keep up with e-mails while I'm out of the office. I grabbed the charger from my car to use in the County car I'd be driving. And forgot it there. Of course I didn't notice it for several days and by then couldn't remember which car I'd been driving. Writing it off as a lost cause, I stopped and bought another on my way back home from the Range. (My cell phone battery was down to 7% by that point.)

I bought this fancy version. It consisted of three pieces: a cord, a plug for normal outlets and a plug for a car. I plugged the cord into the car adapter and let my phone charge as I finished my trip. I very carefully grabbed the phone and the cord as I left the vehicle. Did you note which part didn't get grabbed? That's right. The car adapter fit so snugly in the cigarette lighter that it hadn't budged. Thankfully I was able to stop in the next morning and find the car and recover the charger piece.

And another story... In the last month I've managed to injure my feet not just once, but twice to the point that they bleed and ruin my shoes. One pair of shoes suddenly grew too small in 80+ degree heat. The other incident... while unscrewing the top of my water bottle while wearing sandals, I dropped the lid and it landed right where my big toe nail meets the toe. For future reference, you should know that can cause a considerable amount of blood loss. Not good for the toe or the shoes.

What are the chances?

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