monkey nonsense

my luck with customer “care” lately:

jason’s bday present – ordered his birthday present and entered the correct shipping address…. SOMEHOW between fedex and the thinking putty company, they changed his apartment number to #205, a non-existent address…. after one failed delivery, i see the error and call fedex. on redelivery attempt, i discover fedex has completely ignored my attempt to correct the address… after being on hold for nearly a hour, 2nd attempt to correct the address takes 2 days to process (something about how they had to pull it from the truck)… about a WEEK after it should’ve arrived, jason gets his thinking putty. sorry jason
julie’s bday present – ordered on july 18th (erp, kind of late, my fault)… attempted to get it delivered early… as i interpreted, person says they can do it no problem. apparently i misunderstood her b/c when i called again just now… it appears the person who i spoke to did some maggiically magically things b/c they apparently can’t access the information she gave me through their system?!? and then i misunderstood her b/c when she says she can send it out earlier… she actually means that at the latest, the present will arrive… september 19th!?! sorry julie
shoes – ordered shoes june 17th on sale… ’cause of the sale, my size was out of stock (darn my normal average sized feet ) so it was backordered until july 1st. july 1st rolls around… get an email saying it’s backordered til… july 1st? huh? called twice in july, they don’t know when the shoe will be in… told them i ordered with a credit card expiring july 31st (citicards fraud protection dealio) thinking that ~2 months would be more than enough time for them to process my order… no. shoe doesn’t ship out until aug 9… (after i had to call back with a new credit card number)… i think that’s a sign i shouldn’t exercise.
ibm thinkpad “repair” – sent in laptop for a simple fan repair…. laptop comes back with NO HARD DRIVE… yea, you’ve probably heard me complaining about this one already BUT i don’t think i’ve brought up the excellent customer care service i got… like how they put me on hold for nearly a hour, how i had to call in on two phones… and how i got “transferred” back to the same division?
declining delivery from newegg – called fedex to attempt to stop the delivery… two days later, it somehow still ends up being delivered to me despite notes posted EVERYwhere (ok… the front door of my apartment and my building) to decline the package. apparently, delivery guy does not know how to read and mistook my decline as yes i’ll sign for this package as my tracking shows one “H. Sivn” (or something like my last name badly butchered) signed a waiver. package sits outside my door for nearly another week just waiting for fedex to pick it up.

i’ve noticed that fedex service pretty much sucks! my one experience with DHL through all this (IBM’s delivery method) has been quite good though.

grrr…. yeah, customer “care” my butt…. those liars!!

why is it…

elementary school kids are given a 30 minute break during the day for recess… but by the time you’re in middle school, they magically decide that you’re old enough not to get that 30 minute break… and it disappears forever? how come adults don’t get break up the monotony of the day with a game of tag?? (ok ok, maybe not tag, but at least a break!)

i propose that a 30 minute “recess” be added to the work day and included in the 8 hour work day. i think it’d increase productivity since people will be more focused when they come back from the recess.

well, i’m off to take my 15 minute smoke break! (smokers get 15 minutes to go outside and take a smoke… so i’m gonna take 15 minutes to not smoke)

so i only posted the bad things about my cousin bobby’s wedding. now the good stuff:

• bobby and jaclyn… they’re so cute together
• beautiful wedding location… it was overlooking water, i think maybe cape cod? and the weather was wonderful! so cool and refreshing compared to muggy DC
• seeing old cousins for the first time since 1994… i had forgotten the last family reunion/wedding i went to was in 6th grade. everyone kept gesturing towards the ground when they were talking about me… and how oh, i’m taller than my mom and whatnot and i was thinking, dude… i’ve been this tall since high school! and then i realized most of them hadn’t seen me since 6th grade. in some cases, some of them hadn’t even seen me with glasses before! (that means pre-3rd grade!) i saw the 2 cousins i was a flower girl for… one of them had kids that were older than i was when i was the flower girl! =O i saw my aunt #1 who looks like a mirror image of my grandma (who was too ill to make it )… almost freaky! also saw my cousin’s kids, so big now!! one of them is going to dartmouth to play football! saw my cousin thomas’ kids… haha, splashed around in the pool with one of them. speaking of which…
• the hotel’s pool had this really fun water slide!
• visiting plymouth rock (literally a rock, labelled 150 years after the first pilgrims, enclosed in a cement “building”) and the mayflower II…. it was nice just walking around that small town. felt kind of like ocean city, but MUCH nicer. also ran into the chous (minus derrick, but alison was there!) randomly at the mayflower II hahahah
• TWO (count ‘em… TWO) cousins commented on how i looked exactly like a “mini auntie emily”… BOOYEAH, that’s right! i look like my MOM, not my dad!!
• saw my sister’s med school on the way up to boston

lots of fun! wish i were closer to my cousins though… :-/

since monday, i’ve been reconnecting with an old friend:

at my cousin bobby’s wedding (oops, haven’t finished posting about that), my cousin ming reminded me of how they all used to play bubble bobble when they came over to my house.

i had it on my old desktop since college, but since that computer crapped out, i had to wait… on monday, i stayed up late JUST to get the game onto my new computer… and stayed up into the wee hours of the morning (ok ok, 2am… but that’s pretty late for me!) playing.

i missed you, bob my old buddy. i was always bob (in some games bobblun), the blue dinosaur. my sister always bub (bubblun), the green one.

Cheerleaders help police catch driver who left accident scene

Monday, August 8, 2005; Posted: 11:53 a.m. EDT (15:53 GMT)

ANN ARBOR, Michigan (AP) — A man who left an accident scene was tracked down with the help of some cheerleaders who witnessed the crash and turned his license plate number into a cheer, police said.

Members of the Lincoln High School varsity cheerleading squad from neighboring Ypsilanti were in Ann Arbor for a Universal Cheerleaders Association’s camp when they saw the wreck near the University of Michigan campus.

“I knew I was going to not remember it because there was too much going on,” coach Patricia Clark said Monday on NBC’s “Today.” “So, when I ran down the street and got the plate number, I yelled to the girls: ‘Remember this!”‘

The cheerleaders put their skills to work, chanting the license number.

“The coach just said it and we were saying it over and over, and then it just turned into a big chant since we kept repeating it,” said Kimmie Ostrowski, a senior captain for the team who also appeared on “Today.”

According to police reports, a truck hit a car stopped at a traffic light Wednesday, and the impact forced that car into another vehicle, which then hit another one.

The truck driver, found at his home, told officers he didn’t think the damage was severe enough to stop, police Lt. Mike Logghe told The Ann Arbor News.

The man wasn’t arrested and his name wasn’t released, but police said he could face a misdemeanor charge of leaving the scene of an accident.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

From: http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/08/crime.fighting.cheerleaders.ap/index.html

well.. that phone call i was to expect within 24-48 hours… never came.

so i called IBM myself.

got someone pretty quick… who then said they would be transferring me to the missing parts department… i got put on hold for 30+ minutes…. does IBM apparently have a lot of missing parts!?! anyways… got impatient but didnt want to lose my place in line, so i used my cell phone to call the line again. argh, other person was nice enough (after i was disconnected once due to bad cell phone reception) to stay on hold for me and to call me back when he finally got through. i stayed on the line with the original call.

finally got through… was told my hard drive was lost and i’d need to order a replacement. what. the. heck. how do you LOSE a hard drive?!?! somewhere out at IBM facilities in TN… there is a hard drive that has appeared OUT OF THIN AIR… does no one see this hard drive that was clearly not there before they handled case 31T687N, but is now there?!?!?

ARGH…

yeah… so one lady seemed to try to reassure me that it happens all the time. grrreat… and that makes me feel better how?!?! to know that your incompetence is not just isolated to my laptop?! then, when she transfer me to someone who’d help set me up with a recovery disk, when he asked for what reason i’d need this and i proceeded to rant about how they could possibly have lost my hard drive and how i was on hold with their missing parts department for more than half a hour… he told me how this rarely happens. which doesn’t make me feel better to know that oh yes, while IBM is pretty reliable… yes, we did manage to lose YOUR hard drive.

THANK YOU IBM!!

so this past weekend, i went to my cousin bobby’s wedding! bobby and jaclyn are so cute together , it was great seeing family again and yummy food is always good. all and all, a good trip! =) of course, i titled this post “the bad stuff” portion so i’ll proceed to rant… i’ll save the good stuff to post tomorrow during work!

thursday night, i was to have left VA at 7ish to meet up with my parents in MD and then head to Long Island, NY to stay the night before going up to the Boston area on friday. well, i had to do laundry so i left work early. when i got home, there was a package from DHL waiting. awesome! my IBM laptop (which had a broken fan) was already fixed! i wasn’t expecting it back until next week. however, when i opened the box… my laptop was missing a side panel. ghettto. how the freak did they forget to put back the cover?! well i turned on the laptop to check out if they had reformatted my harddrive or anything (i asked they try not to reformat unless absolutely necessary b/c i hadn’t had a chance to backup my data before my fan died and prevented me from starting up my laptop. i was assured over the phone that a simple fan replacement wouldn’t need reformatting)…

well… i got a boot error! errr, sat on hold for nearly half a hour before finally reaching someone at IBM, then had to try to describe what was missing from my laptop. IBM guru over the phone (even after i described how the side panel where the audio ports are located was missing) diagnosed my hard drive as dead. went through nearly the whole process of ordering a new hard drive… when she started showing me videos of how to replace my harddrive… i realized i DID NOT HAVE A HARD DRIVE. that’s right… IBM FORGOT TO PUT BACK MY HARD DRIVE after replacing my fan. what the heck!?

well… that made it already 8pm-ish by the time i got off the phone with IBM (and my situation wasn’t even resolved yet. their “system was down” so i was told to call back in the morning so they could see what happened to my harddrive and if necessary, send me a replacement or a missing parts request to have someone look for it… speaking of which, i was told they’d contact me in 24-48 hours which they haven’t!! where’s my hard drive?!?!). by the time i got up to MD, it was 9ish and my parents decided we’d just drive the whole trip up friday. and that’s also when they told me my sister wasn’t going anymore. so uh yes… my extended family is gimongous (my dad’s generation has approximately 17 siblings… and most of them had kids) and also kinda old. i am the youngest of my generation, with my sister being my next closest relative in age. i am older than some of my cousin’s kids only by about 5 years… yea… i was kinda banking on my sister going so i’d at least be able to hang out with someone!!

anyways.. this was all pre-trip bad news. the actual trip included very few bad news… except:

• since we were leaving MD at like 7am, i had to wake up at 6am to do some last bit of work that had to be posted on the internet on friday. BOOO
• i got huge huge bug bites from standing outside for approximately 10 minutes
• my aunt attempted to set me up with some 30-40 year old guy (a friend of my cousin who was getting married)… why is it that people seem to want to hook me up with either guys not yet out of high school (17 year old at my cousin jenny’s wedding) or guys who could’ve graduated from high school before i was born!! (ok ok… maybe not before i was born, but at least before i was 10!)
• i smell like smoke b/c my dad did not think to ask for a non-smoking room.

that’s about all the bad news from my trip, the rest of it was awesome!

on a random note: thanks wayne! i stole your MX4 template (and modifications)… i like! i think i will try to “customize” it some more by myself so my webpage isn’t a complete rip off of yours

this is awesome.

i used to love the incredible hulk. in fact, there are pictures of my sister and i both trying to strike the hulk pose.

browsing the washingtonpost.com website today, i found:

http://www.people2people.com/?page=remember_me&connect=washpost

Remember the girl you flirted with on the Metro? Or that guy you met at happy hour and lost his number?Here’s your chance to reconnect. Post your message now.

whoooaa… would you ever use this service?!?!?

1. Speeding laws

Maryland: Exceeding the speed limit in excess of 10 mph or more is only 2 points. Over 30 mph is not automatically reckless driving… and results in “only” 5 points (MVA then requiring you to attend a Driver’s Improvement course)
Virginia: 10 mph or more over the speed limit is already 4 points. Over 20 mph is automatically reckless driving. Driving at any speed over 80 mph is automatically reckless driving. And with reckless driving, you can get your license suspended.

2. Protecting Renters

Maryland: If your apartment complex becomes condo, they honor the remainder of your lease. I haven’t yet verified this, but basically my apartment management told me this is the case, but unfortunately, I live in…
Virginia: They aren’t required to honor the remainder of your lease. You just have 120 days from the date the complex becomes a condo.

3. Free Credit Reports

Maryland: One of the few states that make free credit reports available to consumers.
Virginia: Nope.

I miss Maryland!