10/18/2003
I swear, the entire freaking world is incompetent!!!
I go to the Gateway "esource" website and enter my info for storage but once I hit submit for the info, my order is apparently placed (as I was notified by e-mail a day or two later). Not a good idea for an e-commerce site to have no "place order" button but just a "submit" button like for all other info. So then I call the gateway local rep, who tells me the order is closed and nothing is ordered. But then discover still shows a charge on my card so I get suspicious. So I call the Gateway office at night but they're closed at 8PM (Sales is still open though, surprise). So I call the next morning and the rep tells me that the order is not closed. In fact, it shipped out yesterday. So I have to refuse shipment. Then they tell me that there's no apartment number on the address even though I specifically put the apt. number on the SECOND LINE OF THEIR FORM (ARG!). So now they have to submit a return to UPS for the shipment, and the return's probably not going to go back until Monday, after which I don't know when my credit will clear up. Oh yeah, the upshot of all this is, I get about $1500 of my credit taken away for a good week for absolutely no reason. How does the world do business like this? I wanna punch a manager just thinking about the string of incompetences I've been running in to lately. Good lord!
// posted by Me @ 10/18/2003 10:51:00 AM
10/17/2003
Oh lord. Can't believe I wasted an entire day. And an hour at night talking to freakin' AT&T. Here comes the story...
So I finally caved and got a cell phone a while ago. I used it for the roadtrip here (Santa Barbara). I switched number in the middle of the month (9/16). Now, as I understood it, the billing cycle started towards the end of the month, so the first month, I'd get a buttload of minutes (300) free to use for only half a month, and since I switched numbers halfway and got a compeltely new account, that it would happen a second time. At least I remember asking the sales rep and she said "oh yeah, you should have all your minutes for the remaining time this month." What she DIDN'T say was that "all your minutes" = all your pro-rated minutes. In other words, I thought I had 300 minutes when I had 150. So I've been using the cell and keeping it under 300 minutes for the half months. Great until I finally could access my account and saw that that's not what AT&T thinks. Of course, I was stupid to assume that they would give me extra minutes (I asked, mind you, but stupid to not make sure and believe). So now they are raping me up number 2 because I'm so many minutes overboard or whatnot. I had to talk to a rep for 1 hour (almost) before he finally agreed to compromise. He didn't give me my money back (damn you ATT damn you!) but he did agree to count the 9/18 - 10/17 period as a billing cycle (sort of) and refund me $60 extra on top of adjusting for too few minutes (for some reason, ATT gave me 100 fewer minutes under my new SB account...dumbasses) This way, my bill up to now is about $70 instead of $150 (!!!). Oy. That's still a mighty expensive lesson for me to learn to never trust phone companies. I'm a dumbass as well.
Moral of the story: check your phone bill online often and don't ever feel bad keeping the customer care people on the line. Though I had to give props to the rep with me today. If I were on the other side, I might have just been inclined to give up after 20 minutes of talking to the dumbass who's now writing this blog.
// posted by Me @ 10/17/2003 10:19:00 PM
Ah...Blogger is better than Xanga as far as pure blogging goes (was there ever a doubt). Oh well. Good blogging tool. Looks like I'll have to blog here and then copy to Xanga. If only I could blog to both places at once, but alas.
// posted by Me @ 10/17/2003 06:56:00 PM
Just got back from Mystic River. Couple friends and I wanted to see a movie but not that heavy of a movie. I'm not going to do a review here but personally, I'm not sure what the entire point of the movie was, if there was one. Sean Penn acted very well, as always, and Tim Robbins is his freaky self, though in this movie to his extreme detriment. Kevin Bacon (thank the Lord we don't see his Bacon's bacon, unlike in Wild Things) acted decently well and Laurence Fishburne is his usual alpha-male wise/bad ass self. All in all, I think I liked the movie. More for the way it was done, perhaps, than its content. Not going to qualify any of those statements cause I'm lazy :) I wouldn't really go see it again or buy it on DVD but for I've seen much worse for more than $5.50. (Like Meet Wally Sparks, of which we shall never speak again).
Wait a second...IMDB thinks that if I liked Meet Wally Sparks then I should check out The Godfather??? That's like saying that they would recommend my trying out a BMW Z4 since I've enjoyed driving around in a 72 Pinto! (Aa car whose main redeeming grace, I think, is that since its gas tanks is situated right behind its rear bumper, you can blow one up by rear-ending it! Be sure to rear end a Pinto next time you see one on the streets. It's gotta be worth at least a hojillion points.)
In other news, why does the Xanga editing box blow? Messes up my A tags left and right and messes up its own tags with equal efficiency!
// posted by Me @ 10/17/2003 06:35:00 PM
