Tomorrow night at 10:00 EST, 7:00 PST, venture out into the cold and enjoy a total lunar eclipse. Seriously. Do it. If you’ve never seen a Lunar Eclipse before, they’re darn spiffy. It looks like the moon is bleeding, perhaps about to be split in twain as in the intro to Thundarr the Barbarian.
Insight Cable continues to make me feel like I’m living in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Now they want a $170 bribe. They freely admit this is not for a bill. The $170 isn’t for a service or product. Nope. There’s an accouting error on their part that messed up something in their computer system. No, they can’t fix it. Sucks to be me. I can either cough up the $170 bribe or have my credit report wrecked by their bill collectors and remain without broadband.
I can’t begin to express how much I hate this company. They won’t let me pay my actual bill unless I pay the bribe, too, so late fees are being added. It’s crazy. Insight employees have told me to my face that it’s all totally bogus, but, in their words, “the only thing you can do is pay it.” When I have some free time again, there are letters to the BBB and Attorney General’s office in my future. Bribery is bullshit.
I can’t beleive how many hours of my life this company has sucked up in the last few months. It’s appalling.
I’m trying to focus on the positive, though. I had a very encouraging phone interview this week. When the recruiter says, “You’d be awesome for this job,” I think odds are good. I’m not holding my breath on anything. I’ve been on a gazillion interviews in the last few months. Hopefully, they’ll call back to set up an in-person interview next week.
I’m also enjoying the heck out of my forensics class. I can’t believe a local high school offers an entire semester of forensics as a senior level science class. That’s so cool. Four weeks is nifty. A whole year of it would be amazing. It’s a great way to get kids (and the senior citizens who mostly populate my class) deeply interested in multiple branches of science.
What?
Get back, you parasite! I expect dinner and drinks before you come within five feet of me - and don’t use that, “premature sporation” excuse! No comming. No rebirth. NO! I am not volunteering to have your alien spawn eat its way through my living abdomen before overtaking the earth.
Oh, wait. I forgot. It’s okay to nearly kill people as long as you quote the Bible at them first. That’s patriotic!
To take some of the sting out of job searching, I’m volunteering with the local branch of the MS Society. It’s a great way for me to use my uncanny ability to sweet talk people into charitable donations. This time, I’m working for an actual good cause instead of, say, coming up with a year’s worth of Boardgames Meetup prizes.
Helping round up coffee, face painters, and a bouncy castle really makes me miss working on SF ConComs.
That’s right - a woman walking by herself in the dark. In most cities, that would be asking for an assault. One of the things I love about Louisville is the crazily low crime rate. This is the safest city I’ve ever lived in. Well, unless you’re within 500 feet of me on the 4th of July. In my defense, I still have all my fingers and toes - and so do the rest of you. Okay, except for John, but that’s not my fault.
There’s something about powerful weather that makes me want to be in it. I once sat in a windowsill watching a tornado rip down the street while my family shouted at me from the safety of the basement. No summer passes without me hanging out on the lawn in shorts and a tank top during a warm, heavy rain. Tonight, it’s a clammy 60 degrees out. It’ll be down to 30 by tomorrow.
My jeans soaked through within seconds of stepping outside, but it took a good six minutes before my shoes leaked.
The nearest stoplight is flashing red on all corners. I saw a car spin out of control and finally stop facing the wrong way in traffic. An ambulance zoomed around it, adding to the cacaphony of sirens.
There’s something etheral about dark, empty parking lots illuminated only by flickering store signs. Any second the lights could fail entirely. The part of my brain raised on movies and TV expects vampires to crawl out of the sewers in search of human victims. After all, in Louisville Zombie season doesn’t start until August.
See it before the trendy popularity makes you hate it on principle. It really is a good movie.
Without giving away any plot points, one of the details I love most about this flick is it’s portrayal of a great stepmother. Stepmothers get harsh treatment in both books and movies. Out here in reality, I personally don’t know a bad one. Linda’s been great to me. Billie’s been great to Chaz. Among my friends who have stepkids, they all genuinely love them. It was awesome seeing a realistic relationship instead of the usual ugly plot device fodder.
And to our stepmoms - you both rock.
Erin and I pulled in to Chattanooga around 6 p.m. The hotel check-in was completely smooth. While there were some comic moments waiting in the pre-reg line, I actually enjoyed the heck out of the company. The hotel was smart enough to have a waitress working the line. Some guys we’d just met bought us both drinks. When they got thier badges, we ended up talking to a woman in a corset and tutu, then Erin found a bellydancer/fellow GuildWars player while I compared notes on past cons with other people in line. Everyone was incredibly friendly. I’ve never been to Chattacon, but the atmosphere felt like coming home.
In my frenzy of packing, I forgot my own pirate costume (as well as Batgirl and my Ottomon getup). Nevertheless, Erin and I took the opportunity to show off in a slightly different way. While everyone else was tarting it up in corsets for Saturday night, we put on our evening gowns. From that point on, the room parties were a delight. In fact, they were so good I never made it to the dance. I don’t think I made it to bed until 5 a.m. Sunday morning.
No, I don’t really have any photos from the con. There were plenty of other people lugging cameras around. This con will not lack for documentation. I took half a dozen shots on my cellphone then decided to heck with it for the weekend. I’m glad I did. Someplace like this, it’s more fun to be in the picture than behind the camera.
When we last left our intrepid heroine, she’d been charged with the impossible task of getting an original hardcopy of an entirely electronic document.
Since no such document exists, that obviously wasn’t going to happen.
Not their problem. Insight informed me they were holding my broadband and cable hostage until I found out where they misplaced the funds. A copy of my bank statement showing I’d paid simply wasn’t good enough. If they couldn’t find the information using their internal computer system, what alchemy was I supposed to perform for the sake of discovery? Oh, wait. I could send my thousand cybernetically enhanced uberrats into the sewers. They’d climb up every Insight customer’s toilet and search their houses for bills until they found someone with a mysterious bonus payment in my exact amount.
Screw that. I called my bank. Three customer service numbers and a trip to India later, they stopped payment on the check. There! NOW NOBODY HAS THE MONEY! The rats can stop their search for the mystery account. Can we start over from scratch?
Of course not.
It turns out Insight had the check all along. It was even somehow associated with my account, although not in a way that involved, say, paying my bill. Maybe they were using it for a complicated piece of oragami. Maybe there was an inter-office airplane fight. Regardless, one hour after the stop-payment went through, an automated call informed me my account was now being suspended for stopping payment. What? They’d already shut off my service! They denied recieving any payments since Dec. 11th! Now they were essentially admitting they had the check all along but were just holding onto it and playing mindgames with me.
I called Insight back and said look, that check’s gone bye-bye. No money has been deposited into someone else’s account. End of problem. Can we please just start over? Tell me what I owe you and I’ll go pay in cash in person. We’ll settle this today.
No deal.
When I got to the Insight kiosk in my local grocery store, they said I had a $169 credit. Buh? That completely contradicts what I’d been told an hour earlier. I tried to pay $110 for a month of service anyway, as I am SURE this is yet another bizarre error, but they didn’t want my money.
At this point, I have absolutely zero confidence that Insight’s cable or broadband won’t spontaniously shut off the next time they decide to randomize everyone’s bills. I have no idea how much money they think I owe them. Last month they wanted $485 for what should be a $110 service. Gosh, and they wonder why I called?
Chaz and I haven’t had a land line in years, but we’re seriously contemplating switching to DSL and buying our TV ala carte from iTunes. It feels like a lot more hassle - combined cable and internet with one bill and one provider is supposed to be EASY. After all the hours I’ve spent on the phone with them this month, I suspect I’d save both time and money.