Before I forget

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Hosea showed up to class this morning in a new mask, if in fact I’m actually allowed to use the word “mask” to describe a cut-up sock. Because he had a cut-up sock on his face. When I gave him a new mask from my stash and told him to put it on, he asked me why he needed it.

“Because you have a sock on your face, Hosea,” I said.

“No I don’t,” he said. (Remember, reflexively denying anything is a big part of whatever is wrong with this kid.)

“Yes, you do,” I said. “You are not wearing a sock on your face at school. Put the mask on.”

There then followed a ten-second stare down while I stood there holding the mask, at which point he said “Fine,” took it, and put it on. I don’t know what happened to the sock.

I was going to tell a whole story here about a bit of delivery nonsense involving UPS delivery of my son’s new phone– yeah, that’s a thing that’s happened now– but I no longer have the energy for the entire story so I’ll just tell the important parts: I had to redirect the phone to a UPS location because Verizon insisted on a signature and they weren’t going to be delivering while anyone was home. They did not give me a choice of locations, and directed me to their main distribution center, which is out past the airport, which you should understand to mean far away from everything. I got an email that said it was there and waiting for me.

When I got there yesterday, this sign was on the door:

You may note several possibly relevant pieces of information missing from the sign.

Despite that, the door opened as I was standing there trying to decide what to do and someone let me in, telling me she hoped she didn’t get in trouble for letting me in. She then told me that my package was still on a truck, despite the email that I’d gotten, and that it would be ready today. Okay, fine. Are you sure it’s not going to get redirected? No, it won’t be, but if it is, you’ll get an email.

Oh.

I did not get an email. When I got there today, this had happened:

The story ends with me getting the phone, which was indeed at that location, behind the caution tape and the locked door, but … well, imagine trying to explain this to customer service robots over the phone. I was moments away from my nuclear method of reaching a human when stuck in customer service robot hell (start swearing and yelling racial epithets into the phone; believe me, these systems recognize profanity) when the door opened and half a dozen UPS employees poured out, all carrying various broken pieces of wood, and threw everything into a nearby dumpster, an act that provoked a surprising amount of rejoicing on their parts. Then the lady I’d spoken with yesterday recognized me, ushered me past the caution tape and past the locked door with the “don’t come in here” sign, gave me my package, and sent me on my way.

I swear everything in this post is true, and I dare you to make any of it make any fucking sense.

On coffee and customer service

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

You know this already, if you’ve been around for a while: I moved to Chicago in 1998 after graduating from college, and lived there until getting engaged and moving back home to South Bend in 2007. I loved living in Chicago, and one of the things I miss most about it even after all these years is the food. Chicago’s one of the biggest cities in the country, and (especially once you got used to getting around) you could find anything there, and most of them delivered. Thai food at 3 AM? No problem.

South Bend is not like that. Most of South Bend’s restaurants, for better or worse, are regional or national chains. We’ve got some gems sprinkled here and there (Nedderman’s Steak Place, some good teppanyaki, and a really good hole-in-the-wall Venezuelan bistro) but in general if you’re looking for quality cuisine outside of what you would expect to find in a mid-size Midwestern city you’re going to be disappointed.

I found out yesterday that we’ve recently acquired an Ethiopian coffee business. How did I find out? They brought a bunch of free coffee to work, and the secretary emailed everybody that there was free Ethiopian coffee so come get some free Ethiopian coffee, and I wasn’t at work to go get it, so the email just sort of sat there and teased me. Interesting fact: they don’t appear to have a retail footprint, but they’ve got the website, and if you’re local they bring you your coffee. If you aren’t, they’ll still ship for you.

I ordered some coffee yesterday evening at around 6:15 PM. At 6:38 I got an apologetic text message that due to the blizzard taking place outside my coffee would not be delivered that evening. So their usual standards are pizza-delivery speeds, which I feel like isn’t completely necessary for coffee. I replied to make it clear that they could take as long as they needed to; I don’t need someone sliding off the road into a ditch so I can have novel caffeine the next morning.

At any rate, I did get my coffee today, and had a weird moment with the delivery guy when we both realized the other one looked kind of familiar, but it was dark and bloody cold outside and also COVID and neither of us were masked up (side note: “masked” can autocorrect to “naked” if you aren’t careful with your typing, which would have altered the meaning of that sentence somewhat) so we did not stand outside and chatter at each other long enough to figure out where we might have known each other from. Have I consumed coffee yet? No, which might make this post premature, but I figured the whole apologetic about not bringing me coffee during a blizzard thing probably warranted its own post. Plus, dear God, I know better than to have coffee at 8:15 at night, and that’s, like, Folger’s and shit. I assume this is probably going to be a little stronger.

I’ll report back tomorrow, of course.

In which I had something for this

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I’m on at least three post ideas for today so far, and by “post ideas” I mean I came up with something, thought “Okay, that’s today’s post,” and then promptly forgot what the hell it was before I had a chance to put it into writing. So that’s how my day is going so far.

I did manage to get my work tasks squared away early today, by not bothering with the instructional video (tomorrow’s material is the same as today’s, so rather than recording something myself I just linked to someone else’s) and getting the assignment written while working in the Meet and doing other things. Sometimes it’s kinda fun to yell “give me a number!” at a half-dozen kids and then write a math problem about it.

I’m also reaching that point in the week– and it’s alarming to realize that it’s only Tuesday– where my eyes could definitely benefit from doing less staring at screens for a little while.

Actually, there’s this, which I think was one of the things: I had to go to my local Ace Hardware to buy a flagpole earlier, because I’m finally getting around to putting the pride flag in front of my house that I have wanted to put up since last June. And, y’all, we need to protect our retail workers, okay? Because the item I bought ended up not being in their system for some reason, and it took all of five whole minutes before the manager finally shrugged and charged me for a slightly different flagpole (which, whatever; I hadn’t even looked for a price, I just grabbed the one I wanted and headed to the counter) and I think during that five minutes I was apologized to for my incredibly minor inconvenience at least a dozen times by at least three or four different people. And you could just tell that everybody was waiting for me to completely lose my shit about it, and it’s like … yeah, I have so many more important things to worry about right now than this that I don’t even have the energy to reach “this is not your fault but I’m annoyed anyway” level annoyed. Oh, darn, I had to wait five whole minutes.

And you just know that these folks have gotten the shit kicked out of them recently about something similar, right? Because motherfuckers have allowed themselves to get completely out of control lately, and while filming these fools and putting it on the Internet has gotten rather popular I think it might be time to start upgrading to actual intervention. Nobody should be this nervous about this minor of a thing, and it wasn’t just the cashier, it was everyone I encountered in the store.

The flag’s gonna look nice, by the way. We’ve taken it down already to get the folds pressed out, but I hung it up long enough to take a picture, which the wind promptly made twice as complicated as it needed to be. But nonetheless:

Okay FINE then I WON’T

Luther M. Siler

The picture almost makes customer service seem cool, doesn’t it?

I was recently able to zero out all but one of my credit cards, and Lord willing and the creek don’t rise it shouldn’t be long until I’m able to whack that one as well. I was startled to see a bill show up from one of my cards a few days ago; the card actually got overpaid a bit so the last I’d looked at it they owed me money, which is always a fun thing to have happen with a credit card. Turns out they’d charged me a $59 annual fee. Now, chances are this fee has been around for all if not most of the time I’ve had this card, but during damn near 100% of that time I’ve carried a balance. It pissed me off that I suddenly owed them an annual fee on a card with no balance, so I did a brief check to make sure it wouldn’t affect my credit rating too unduly and then called to cancel the card.

(A five minute period ensues here, as we go from blustery-but-dry outside to torrential rainstorm hello tropical storm Cristobal in about ten seconds and then the power blinks out. By the time I have the computer back online and the Internet back up, the rain has stopped.)

Anyway. That was a long lead-in to a quick resolution, but: it turns out that if you’ve had a credit card for 23 years and you call them and say something along the lines of “Hey, y’all charged me this annual fee. I don’t wanna pay it. Cancel the card!” they will not only remove the fee from your card (and, to be honest, I pretty much expected this result) but they will set things so that you are never charged an annual fee again. Which, paradoxically, is kind of annoying, because I find you must pay this annual fee, unless you don’t want to to be really obnoxious as a policy.

But, hey, I guess I don’t have to cut the card up now? All told, I’d rather have the credit than not, so I went ahead and kept it.

Also, I can see blue sky outside now. Weather is weird.

5:45 PM, Tuesday June 9: 1,973,803 confirmed cases and 111,751 Americans dead.

OK Boomer

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

Our grill has shit the bed, so we ordered a new one from Lowe’s, finding it online and setting it up to be picked up curbside at the store. I dunno if you’ve done this or not, but the way it works (at least at our Lowe’s) is that you pull into one of about eight labeled parking spots, dial a phone number, put in an extension, and then tell the person who answers the phone your order number and the spot you’re in. It took me a few seconds longer than it might have because I didn’t immediately realize that you can dial a # extension pretty much any time I want (I was waiting for a “to dial a specific extension, press blabla” prompt) but somebody answered the phone and said they’d be outside with my grill in a few minutes.

Cool.

Five minutes or so later I hear the unmistakable sound of a grill being rolled across a parking lot, and I put on my mask and hopped out of the car, figuring social distancing or not there’s no way dude is going to get this thing in my trunk by himself. And I notice that the guy pushing my grill out to me is being followed, at quite a bit less than a six foot distance, by a mask-free woman (note that wearing a mask in any retail store is currently mandated by our governor) who is highly upset that he is bringing me a grill and not bringing her something. Apparently she belongs to the minivan a space over, and she tried to call the number but no one answered and apparently this massive sin is worth abusing this poor dude who had nothing to do with it.

Dude, to his credit, is doing an admirable job of not getting caught up in her shit, and when a moment later she looks over at me and snots that She will Never Use This Service Again, but it’s Good that You got HIS Stuff for Him, he actually rolled his eyes at me, correctly figuring out that I was as annoyed by her as he was.

So, uh, Karen, look here: you either don’t know how to use a cell phone or you don’t possess the awareness necessary to realize that, every once in a while, it’s possible that people in retail jobs are busy and maybe you call back in two or three minutes if your call isn’t instantly answered. You also don’t have the sense to realize that you do not need to involve me in your shit. I don’t want to be involved in your shit, I have no reason to be involved in your shit, and if you insist on me being involved in your shit, you will probably not like the way that I involve myself, which will be to mock you into the grave and back. Because I don’t give a fuck if you had to call these folks twice.

A moment later, while the gentleman and I were ignoring the shit out of her and putting my grill in my trunk, someone else came out with all of her mulch, so … what, you got through after all? Was that whole thing just bullshit? Who the fuck knows.

Please don’t try to involve me in your customer service drama, people. I am always on their side, even if they’re wrong. If I need to paint that on my fucking mask, I’m happy to.