Funny of the Day

http://www.itsdumb.com/media/images/37f933ebf04bfe11a6e9c2f77afb6f31.jpg

Memorable IRC Quote of the Day

04:49 <@S-> cyby: A friend of mine once went off on REAL flavoring of
condoms: penis-flavored. He suggested three versions – 1)
“fresh out of the shower”, 2) “3-days in” and 3) “army
deployment”

Thanksgiving Weekend

Thanksgiving (US) weekend was indeed productive/fun.

I had a wonderful dinner with Art at Melisse, a delightful French restaurant.  It came out a tad expensive, but it was pretty much a sublime experience.

Next, I went off to see some family members in Walnut, a good 40 miles away.  After an hour of dealing with my relatives, I resorted to running off to Disneyland with Art.  It was definitely not as crowded as I thought it would be, which was a great plus.  Most of the rides weren’t very long, so we overall had a pretty good time.

Friday, being Black Friday, was spent not doing all too much.  I ended up going to work for a bit, and celebrated Buy Nothing Day.  Later on in the evening Art and I were invited to T&N’s for drinks, so it was off to Orange County we go again.  That was a lot of fun, and we were invited to stay over so we could go to Disneyland again on Saturday.  I politely declined, because I didn’t want to go there three times in a week (which would break records).

We also received our new annual passes for DL.  I think I went over 25 times in the past year, and I think we’ll maintain a very similar record this coming year.  We got a special design for the pass, 20% off coupons, as well as other goodies.  I think it was worth the $359 I spent again to renew this.

The rest of the weekend was spent shopping a little bit (not as crowded as I thought!), and mostly doing cleaning.

I think I’ll have a more serious post coming up (on my LJ, that is) – once I figure out how to work it.

Macbook

I finally mailed Joe a check for my macbook.

13″, white, 2.2Ghz, 2GB.

With discount and applecare, $1400.

Back to basics

So I’ve finally had enough of the malfunctioning laptop, and I switched to the first laptop that Chuck gave me.  Fortunately, they were both Thinkpad A31s, so it took all of 5 minutes to move all the hardware over.  I guess this will last me for a while, but I’m still getting a macbook next week.

I’m looking forward to writing my Thanksgiving reflections this weekend.  I can’t believe this will be the fifth year I’m doing this…

Tonight’s Menu

Crostini with bruschetta, or chicken liver pate with port
Stuffed mushrooms (one of my favorites)
Cheese stuffed shrimp wrapped in bacon with horseradish aioli
Sausage ratatouille with baked polenta
Chocolate fondue

Tyler and Nolan came up tonight, which was fantastic.  They were very sweet and bought me a very nice gift that I will be using for my macbook coming up.

Wining and Dining

As a testament to my luck this past couple of months, I have rewarded myself quite a bit lately.

For my birthday, I went to AOC for a fabulous meal.  It was divine.  Check out their menu for some nouveau Cal-French food, served tapas style.  I even got Art to eat clams.  It is slightly on the expensive side, but it was very well worth it.  Total after tax and tip for the two of us is only $200, which is not bad considering dessert and wine ran to $75, and tip was nearly $40.

For Thanksgiving, Art and I are treating ourselves to Melisse, a recently named Michelin 2 star restaurant.  At $79 a person, I think it is the cheapest it will ever get for eating there.  I’m guessing that it’ll top out to $115 or so per person after tax and tips.  It’s doable.

Art ordered a 1986 Niepoort Colheita.  He had a glass of that at AOC, and it was $18 a glass.  He did find a bottle for $61.75, so he ordered one.  It should be enjoyable for him.

Hopefully Art will make a nice dinner for me this weekend while we have friends up from OC.

Macbook

So with the death and failure of the dear laptop that I inherited from Chuck (power component failing, I guess – the charger plugin is very loose and won’t stay powered *sigh*), I have decided to acquire myself one of these items.  With Joe’s discount, I may actually save a good bit of money.  I haven’t had a mac since my burglary 1.75 years ago, and I definitely look forward to having another one soon.

Vonage Nightmare

Not that I’m saying Vonage is awful, but their CS is pretty bad.

Thursday afternoon I had the pleasure of calling Vonage and spending more than two hours with them being transferred, call dropped, among other things to get her phone working again. Why did it take two hours, we ask? Well well well….

Apparently she lost her CC so she had an old account that wasn’t settled. So the first thing I had to do was to settle that old account. At first, they weren’t even willing to run her CC because I wasn’t her, even though I had authority to run that card myself. That effort was botched as my discussion went on for 40 minutes. The CS rep wouldn’t let the card run, so I had to try someone else.

I ended my discussion with this CS rep and called back attempting to social engineer my way through. I got a woman this time, and she was more amendable to my needs. She transferred me over to someone in America (!), where a pretty flamboyant black woman answered (!!) and ran the card. The black woman put me back through to the CS rep, who told me that she needed to transfer me to another CS rep to finish the process. That went rather smoothly too, until I was transferred to another CS rep for the purposes of getting my old phone number back.

I was told that I can’t because I wasn’t my client. WTF is this? They just ran her card without her being there, and this constitutes changing the account information. I tried to explain to this rep that I had the authority, but she told me I didn’t. I was rather taken aback. I even had access to her account information online, but apparently that was insufficient claim to having authority to change the account.

She transferred me to another department. (Yes, another one – how many departments *do* they have?) I spoke to another rep, attempting to explain the situation. She (yes, another she. I’ve only spoken to one male during all this time, and he was the one that screwed me over earlier in the day) was not impressed either. At this point, I felt rather flabbergasted, and complained.

I never had to complain so badly to a CS rep. By now I was on the phone for 1.5 hours, and I was very frustrated. And I let the poor woman have it. It wasn’t her fault, and I told her consistently that it wasn’t her fault, but I would like to speak to a supervisor about the situation. At that point, I clearly remembered saying that I was not longer as interested in resolving the situation; I wanted to complain about how their CS and their policies work. I found it mostly very absurd for them to run a credit card with only nominal verbal authorization from someone that claimed to be an authorized user, while I can’t even change a phone number with the same nominal authorization.

She duly placed me on hold to look for her supervisor, but returned 10 minutes later claiming that the supervisor was tied up to another call. Exasperated, I told her that I was willing to wait for my chance. I sensed that she was pretty exasperated as well at this point, and told me that her supervisor would tell me the same thing. I then reiterated my sentiment that I was not very interested in fixing this issue at the moment, but I wanted to complain! I realized that I was becoming a troll, but at more than 100 minutes into the phone call, I might as well continue. It’s not very often that I get paid (handsomely) to bitch at someone on the phone.   I wanted to explain to her that I get paid probably 100x more than she does, and that she’s really wasting time and money if she doesn’t help me out and fix it.  (But that was way too tactless, so I refrained.)

Sensing a stalemate, I became very direct with her, and asked her if there was any way for me to do this online. She then gave me a rather clever response, telling me that I can add myself to the account name online, and then she is able to do everything for me!

Now, I didn’t want to tamper with my client’s account information, but sensing no other alternative, and having been there for almost 9 hours that day, I decided to go ahead. Five minutes later, it was all set up and she claimed that everything would be set up and ready to go in 24 hours.

I finally got off the phone with them, sighed in total relief and disbelief, and finished up my day there. My pay was indeed quite handsome, and I went home pretty happy, in spite of an exhausting day.

Until I came back yesterday to find out that the service wasn’t working still! I spent a few hours figuring it out myself, unwilling to go through Vonage CS again, but to no avail. It wasn’t a power issue, nor an Ethernet issue. Well, it must be them, I guess. My client, of course, was getting very frustrated already, and was pretty pissed off in general. I imagine that she couldn’t have been more pissed off than I was though – because I was the one that spent all that time on the phone. I then realized one thing – they didn’t register my device through all that fuss!

All this brings us to today, when I finally gave in and called them to complain about the issue. The rep was highly apologetic, but offered to resolve that right away. I then spent a few minutes explaining to her my troubles and tribulations over the past few days with them. She was about to go through the whole tech support flowchart, but I assured her that I went through all that already, and am not interested in repeating the process.  Surprisingly, she just asked me for the relevant information to put the activation through.

After ten minutes or battling the system, she told me she wasn’t able to do it, and I had to do it myself!  (Well imagine that – something that I can do on the computer that she can’t!  Apparently I have more permissions than she does on this matter!)  So I walked myself through the registration and activation process, and within 5 minutes the silly matter was finally over.  The phone has a dial tone, and everything works.  There is a call quality problem, but that is for another time to fix.

Maybe there will be a sequel to this!  We’ll see.

Testing LaTeX

So hmm, it doesn’t look too great, but we’ll live!