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Neko

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

2 updates and some food news 


Long-term readers might be puzzled as to why it's been so long since I said anything about my mother (who has stage 3 breast cancer); the main reason is that we had no contact for almost 2 months, which is typical for us and hasn't changed since she was diagnosed. I'd last spoken to her the day before she went to the doctor to get her radiation treatments set up and went back to work (after being off for 6 weeks due to the surgery in which they removed the tumor), and she repeatedly said that she'd call me the next day to give me the news; never one to consider keeping her word to family members to be necessary, and not needing rides for the radiation as she had for the chemo, she blew me off instead... and if I hadn't had to talk to her about a family matter, we STILL wouldn't have spoken. (Why didn't I call her during the preceding months? Because I don't reward people for spitting in my face by running after them-I'm funny that way.)

Anyways: She's been having radiation 5 days a week during the intervening time. Her skin got all burned, and, although this is standard, they didn't have the cream for it available to give to her, and she had to pay for it out of pocket ($85 for a tiny tube) and then fight the HMO protractedly until they admitted that maybe they SHOULD be paying for this absolutely essential item; she's still fighting to get them to pay her back for the 1st tube, weeks later... she's like me x10, though, and she'll force it out of them eventually. Her last treatment was today, so now she's just going to be glopping on the cream and waiting for her skin to recover (it's CRACKED now too), and periodically seeing a doctor to monitor the progress of that issue and the "surgery area"; yes, over 3 months later she's STILL not fully recovered... she still has bruising, swelling, and soreness, and is still wearing the post-surgical support garment (a bra wouldn't hold the breast immobile). When they say that elderly people don't recover from surgery as fast as younger folks, they're not kidding; almost as hard as the slow recovery for my mother, as a woman, is that the breast that was operated on is quite a bit smaller than the other one now, and she can't pad that side until she can wear regular bras again... she's very self-conscious, and is wearing loose layers to try to conceal it. She's not going to have any reconstructive surgery, so the sunken, scarred part of her chest will always look that way; she's going to have to get rid of any shirt that doesn't cover that area completely. When she gets too bummed about being permanently disfigured, I say something like "So I guess you'll have to give up your plans to start a career in pole-dancing?" and she finds that endlessly amusing; we're an odd family.

Thank you, again, to those of you who've been sending my mother your prayers and good thoughts; it's greatly appreciated.


The other update is for my previous post; I wasn't expecting to have to say anything else about the topic, but the phone company's behavior has been so outrageous that I feel compelled to comment:

When we left off, I'd been scheduled to receive a phone call from a supervisor, who I intended to regale with the numerous problems I'd encountered with their bug-filled voice-activated system and inept so-called customer service people, especially the one who'd lied to my husband about having arranged for a tech to come and fix our dead phone line (which DID get fixed on Friday via the appointment *I* set up, luckily); it probably won't surprise you much to hear that the promised call never happened. When another business day had passed and still no call, I gritted my teeth and called THEM; it took me nearly half an hour to reach a human being, most of that time on hold but part of it struggling with the voice system, which threw a new curve at me... it claimed that if I said "agent" it'd transfer me to one, but naturally refused to recognize that word any of the 200 times I used it.

The 1st person I spoke to was a well-meaning lady who took down my entire story; she passed me up the ladder to a supervisor (the claim of the last guy I'd spoken to that supervisors aren't available upon request was apparently a lie, as were several other things he told me, it turns out, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr), and she also took my entire story before passing me up the ladder to the next highest level, where ANOTHER nice lady took my entire story and, since even SHE had no power to research much less take action on any of the issues (have you ever heard of such worthless tiers of management?), she put me on hold while she tracked down someone on the next level up, and he... no, this has gotta be a paragraph unto itself:

The "gentleman" at the highest level of management my persistence was able to reach declined to speak to me directly; he made the poor woman who'd found him for me pass messages from him on one line to me on another... what is he, ROYALTY? He'd been given the entire story, and his response to hearing about all I'd been through, all the lies and screw-ups of his employees, all the failures of his system, and the many hours I'd spent on the phone to his company on 2 different days, giving my story in detail to a whole slew of agents, was... I experienced this but I still can't believe it... that I had to write a LETTER with a description of the problems and mail it to the corporate headquarters before any action would be taken. A LETTER. Half the frigging employees of that company have written lengthy depictions of the events I endured in my file, but *I* have to write it down and MAIL it to them? Oh REALLY?!! Not being an idiot, I knew that they'd never admit to having gotten any such letter if it was sent to them, much less instigate an investigation in reference to it; the manager's instructions translated approximately to, "f*ck off."

I didn't expect anything dramatic to result from my lodging complaints, but even the managers at the least customer-friendly corporations have always previously shown some shred of interest in ameliorating the most egregious problems with their staff and computers; this refusal to even speak to me directly much less take action, coupled with the inexcusable BS about a LETTER, constitutes an all-time low for the telecommunications industry.


And now for the good news from the fast-food front; Jack in the Box has introduced an AMAZING new burger called "the House Burger," which the flier we got in the mail didn't even do justice to... it's not like the usual disappointing thing where the beautiful burger in the ad turns out to have half the toppings in real life. This burger is HUGE, not just thick but WIDE; the box it comes in is twice the size of the usual burger box. They give you an unheard-of choice of which ingredients go on it; you start out by deciding if you want just a cheeseburger or a bacon cheeseburger, then you choose the type of cheese (American, cheddar or REAL Swiss) AND what kind of onions you want (red or grilled)... and then they bring in a wheelbarrow full of stuff and make your burger.

The bun's one of those fancy ones; I don't know what to call it... it's vaguely yellowish. The secret sauce AND the meat had little flecks in them, so clearly they're both seasoned with real herbs, which is unusual, especially for the latter. You get 2 slices each of cheese and tomato, and plenty of lettuce. Surprisingly, they put on lots of good-looking bacon, not the couple of scrawny strips you usually get, and, instead of the tiny quarter-sized pickle slices normally found on burgers, they had the big lengthwise slices... which were NOT mushy like fast food pickles generally are. I got the red onion, and there was so much that I pulled off 2/3 of it and gave it to my husband. He was going to some noxious punk show, and commented that it was a bad time to have onion breath; I pointed out that that paled beside what would happen once he started digesting the onions... he was gonna have the entire mosh pit to himself, lol.

Once I'd gotten the remaining onion evenly redistributed, most of the sauce scraped off (it was good, but I don't like too wet of a burger), and all the toppings neatly lined up over the patty and not protruding past it (anal, yes, I know), I gazed down at my enormous burger, trying to figure out how to hold it all together and compress it enough to fit into my mouth; at that point, my husband returned to the room in a cloud of onion, and:

Me: It's so BIG.
Him: I've waited many years to hear you say that to me.
Me: LOL!! That's going in tonight's blog entry.
Him: Uh, ok, lol.

Levity aside, it's a top-notch burger; give it a try sometime when you're REALLY hungry.


Friday, November 03, 2006

Phone company idiots (isn't that redundant?) 


My husband's bunglings (see my previous post) might have seemed bad, but not even he can compete with the degree of fouled-up-ness that a major corporation can create; I try not to do consecutive rants about this sort of thing so that new readers don't think my life is a non-stop mess, but this one was too good not to share:

I live in one of America's biggest cities, and am thus provided with phone service by a huge corporation; today, one of our phone lines died, and my husband called them to arrange for a technician to come and fix the problem. The 1st inkling of trouble was when the woman he talked to insisted that she could give NO clue as to when the tech would be here, not even the DAY... but that of course someone had to be home when he arrived in order for him to handle the problem if it turned out to be an inside wiring issue. That seemed insane, but these big corporations are getting more and more arrogant and contemptuous of customers so I didn't doubt it was true; with the weekend coming up, and plans already made, though, I had to at least know what days and hours the techs work during so I could narrow it down a little, which meant that I had to call them and get that info.

You know the sort of music they play in a drama or suspense movie to indicate that doom is approaching? Take a moment to imagine a few bars of that in your head.

The geniuses at the phone company have switched to a voice-recognition system to handle incoming calls; I have yet to get through a session with one of these frigging things without problems (unlike using buttons, which is faster and produces perfectly understood signals), so I have a low opinion of these sorts of systems from the get-go... but this one was the worst yet. I tried several times to enter my phone #, but it never let me get in more than 6 of the 10 digits. It wouldn't give me a menu of options for how to proceed at each juncture without 1st trying a bunch of times to make me describe what I wanted verbally, guessing incorrectly what I meant, asking me if it was right, and making me say "no"; there's no way to push a button to get out of the voice system or request a menu, and needless to say their goal is to prevent you from being able to talk to their agents if possible, so I was TRAPPED. When it finally claimed to be transferring me to a human being, a loud metallic tone came on the line and continued until I gave up and hung up several minutes later... and then had to call back. The 2nd time, it picked up the call, started the recorded message, and gave me a DIFFERENT loud metallic tone that went on until I hung up. The 3rd time, I slogged determinedly through, giving answers and pressing buttons almost at random because of course there were never any options offered that matched my inquiry... and then, miraculously, I reached a PERSON.

He told me that they could, and in fact were supposed to, give a 4-hour window on a specific day as the time frame in which the tech guy would show up; I was happy to hear it, but very much less than thrilled that the original employee had either been a moron or lied. An attempt to find out when my appointment window was failed, so I was transferred to the tech department... and another branch of the voice system, which I spent an additional 10 minutes struggling through until it decided that I was trying to SET an appointment, and, with no way to backtrack, I had to hang up and call back AGAIN.

This time, I was out of patience; to every question it asked, I responded "I need to talk to a human being"... and this did in fact connect me to a person far quicker than anything else had. I explained what had happened so far, and made it clear that I wanted to be transferred to an AGENT in tech support, NOT to their voice system; to give the service guy who was helping me at that point credit, he stayed on the line with me until it was confirmed that I'd reached a person rather than the system or another tone. In response to my question about the time and day I could expect the tech guy to come, I was told that... brace yourself... there was NO appointment set up for my household. He re-checked it, and discovered that there wasn't even a record of any contact between my home and his department that day; he also told me that they would NEVER tell a customer that there was no time frame or even day that they could guarantee that their arrival would be on. He had no explanation for the conversation my husband had had earlier, but he determined somehow that there was a short in the dead line, and tried resetting it, which he said sometimes helped; that didn't fix it, but I figured he knew his stuff well enough that he'd be able to set an appointment for a repair guy in the proper way, so we did that-let's just hope it's an OUTside wiring problem and thus free.

Naturally, I was dismayed at the thought that we could've been waiting for DAYS, with someone always having to be home, for a non-existent appointment to happen, only to discover when we finally called back to complain that there never WAS an appointment and they never just show up at unplanned days and times in any case; I asked to speak to someone who could track down what had happened, so I was transferred back to customer service (a true oxymoron if there ever was one) again. The tech guy had suggested that maybe some confused agent had done who knows what that they THOUGHT was setting an appointment but wasn't, but didn't have access to that area of the system to check it out; this was the 1st thing I asked the latest service guy to do, but he couldn't find any record of it, and in fact announced triumphantly that there was no record of any calls from my house, or of my account being accessed, before my own 1st call about an hour before... as if to imply that perhaps I was making it all up and he'd just "proved" it.

It was clear that it was time to converse with a supervisor, and my request to be connected to one led to the grimmest aspect of this whole debacle, in my mind; unlike every other company in the country, they do NOT have supervisors available to get on the line with customers... if you want to speak to one, you have to sign up for a callback within a certain time range on whatever the next available day is. I DID sign up, believe me, and whoever's unfortunate enough to get assigned to me is going to get a VERY detailed description of the train wreck their staff and computers created from what should've been a simple call to schedule a repair; don't worry, I'm not going to vent my ire on an innocent person, but they're responsible for finding and correcting problems, and as much as I'm paying them they're damned-sure gonna fix the bugs I experienced in their system, record my complaints about how difficult it is to use it, and find out what the truth is behind the phone call my husband had where he was misinformed, possibly lied to, and all record of it vanished.

Although as usual I'm the one required to spend hours dealing with corporate nitwits, my husband will be sharing the joy this time; since our interior phone-related wiring is massively intertwined with our network, which only he can deal with, he's going to have to hang out for 4 hours waiting for the repair guy so that if the latter needs to get to that section of the wiring he can safely detach and then reattach the component parts... although if the repair guy DOES need to come in the house, it'll disprove my husband's assertion that the problem CAN'T be inside because if it was the short on the line would be affecting the DSL, which it isn't.

Never a dull moment; just cross your fingers for me that this gets handled quickly, so that we don't have to limp along without that phone line until Monday... and that if we do that the short doesn't start affecting the DSL, because if we have to spend a weekend competing for the use of one dialup line one of us is gonna end up buried in coffee cans in the back yard.


I'll leave you with something amusing, albeit in a scary way:

I saw an auction for a Sesame Street brand pair of overalls for an infant boy

http://cgi.ebay.com/RACOON-SESAME-STREET-OVERALLS-3-6-months-boys-SWEATER_W0QQitemZ200042264058QQihZ010QQcategoryZ57756QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting

They have a raccoon face on them, and under that it says "racoon," just like that with the 2nd "c" missing; yes, a piece of clothing licensed by the TV show dedicated to educating small children about things like spelling has a misspelled word embroidered on it, lol!!





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