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The advantage of having a blog…

…is that you can whine about anything you want. My whine today is about Sprint Local. Anyone who is stuck in an area served by Sprint Local would probably say I could fill this blog with whines about Sprint Local. They’re right. (When I have more time, I’ll write about my recent experience with my Sprint DSL service.)

Todays whine…
For the past two weeks, as often as 3 times a day, including Sundays, the phone would ring. Occassionally we’d get one call that rang once (short enough not to pass caller id data), then a few minutes later the phone would ring again. Caller ID said it was from 866-542-2401.

When I’d answer the phone no one was on the other end. Until today. I wasn’t very nice to the Sprint rep once I found out who was spamming me with calls, in part because in addition to the hangups from this number, we had several “spam calls” from people trying to sell us college degrees, insurance, and work at home jobs and I thought the call was more spam. (They insist we requested more information. Yeah, right we did. Or as my kids like to say “liar, liar, pants on fire”.)

And why were they calling me? To remind me to pay my bill, which I paid online days before.

BTW – if you want a college degree, try 602-954-9071. I’m sure they can set you right up.

 

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XM Radio rocks

It only took a few days, but I’m hooked on XM Radio. The final straw that got me to try it was the morning drive to my youngest daughter’s school. The morning air show bordered on obscene. She hated commericals and talk and we were thinknig about getting one when the morning guys pushed us over the edge.

I got a SkyFi2 with a home and car kit. We rarely use the home kit since a subscription to XM gets you XM online too, but we occassionally bring it in to listen to college football or ML baseball games. Soon after I got it we made a trip to PA. It was sweet – we changed stations only when we wanted to, not when we lost the signal or the announcers annoyed us.

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It must be the holidays…

My college kids arrived home this afternoon for their Thanksgiving break. I had to pick the older daughter up in a nearby town, she got a ride home with a teammate (I’m a mean momma – no cars at school for my kids) and the younger one got a ride home with classmate who lives nearby.

Once they ran the gasoline out of both of my cars, they decided to make a jello salad for Thanksgiving and watch old home movies. Squeals of laghter are coming from the living room… I’ll bet they are watching the video of the snow shovel fight, when they dumped their then-two year old little sister from the baby sled into deep snow drifts when we lived in Maine… while I taped them. (I really need to put that on a DVD and give each of them a copy for Christmas.)

I wouln’t trade my big family for all the money in the world – the memories and laughter are priceless.

It sure is nice to have them home for a few days. 🙂

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More banking fun

My situation with the cancelled debit card is better than last Christmas when they put a hold on the card – it worked some places but not others and for days I just assumed it was network problems because of high volumes.

Finally, I needed to make a deposit and went to the ATM because the drive up line had a car waiting. (I’m impatient.) The screen said I needed to call a number and refused the transaction. The bank was open, so I went in to ask what was up. They looked up my account. There was a fraud hold on the card because of “unusual activity”. I had to verify a recent $700 transaction valid. It was to my web host and had been billed monthly for at least the last 6 months. Why couldn’t they see that it wasn’t unusual? Why didn’t they call the phone number on the account to ask about it? What did I learn from this? Buy cheap. In thinking back, all charges under $50 went through while the hold was on. Only charges in excess of $50 failed. Great fraud protection that is – steal a card and use it for many small transactions.

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I’m easily annoyed and today is one of those days…

The problem began 10 days ago when I placed an order for an in-stock item from Sears.com and put it on my debit card. Silly me expected it to ship within a day or two and arrive by the end of the next week, especially since nothing on the site at the time of the order said it would not ship “immediately”. That’s how internet orders are supposed to work, right?

Apparently not when it’s Sears. The email confirmation that arrived minutes after I finalized the order said otherwise. It would be 3 weeks before it shipped. I called the number in the email that is supposed to be usable 24/7 and got a recording to call back during business hours. Now I know why Sears went bankrupt. I sent an email to customer service and a person replied very quickly, saying she would cancel the order and I could expect a refund in 10 days.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email 5 days later telling me they couldn’t cancel the order! I checked online banking and discovered the charge to Sears was processed and paid. Why are they billing before shipping? That’s not how any other place I order from does business. They all bill the day of (or day after) shipping – which helps me know when to expect an item.

The fact that they decided 5 days later that they couldn’t cancel the order and then charged my card long before it’s going to ship pissed me off, so I contacted the bank and disputed the charge. My wonderful bank sent an email telling me they *might* have to cancel the card. They never said they *did* cancel the card. Three days later, I get an email from a company that my automatic payments are rejected. I called the bank. Yeap, the card was voided earlier in the week. At least they credited me back the amount Sears deducted. (I sent Sears a reply to their email before desputing the charge. I got a reply back hours later telling me they would try to cancel the order. I wonder if they knew I disputed the charge?)

I cut up the card and threw it out – then wondered if it would work in the ATM. I’ll never know. But I’m glad I found out this morning and not tonight when we go out for our usual Friday night dinner out. We usually use this card to pay for it.

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Future Penn State Fans

Don’t let the clothes they are wearing fool you, once they can dress themselves, they’ll be wearing Penn State blue and white at the PSU – Michigan game.

Tailgating

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Can you be high tech and not have cable TV?

I sure hope so. Not only do we not have cable, we don’t have a dish either. It shocks a lot of friends when they find out, but it makes perfect sense to me: TV is boring and makes lazy kids.

We had cable when we lived in Maine while the kids were small. One nice spring day they were planted in front of the TV,where they spent most of the winter, instead of outside.enjoying the beautiful weather. I immediately called the cable company (never piss off mom :)) and we’ve been cable-free ever since. We watch stations that come in with “rabbit ears” as well as VHS and DVD movies.

I don’t miss it one bit. Especially football Sundays when it was my husband, not the kids, who remained glued in front of the TV.

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Ain’t technology great?

Background: My father-in-law is seriously ill. He lives 520 miles away. They don’t have Internet. I have a Verizon cell phone and null modem cable so I could use it as a modem, but the battery dies after 2 hours and I can’t talk on it when I’m using it as a modem, but it’s free after 9 PM and on weekends. We go up Fri afternoon and I can’t work in the car until we’re almost there, unless I want to waste my plan minutes. So I got a Verizon modem for my tablet pc and now I can get some work done during the 8 to 9 hour car rides. It’s really nice and well worth the $60 a month I’m paying for the service because I can earn it back working Fri afternoons.

My daughter came over from Ohio with her toddler and husband to visit her grandfather and we all left Sunday afternoon. My daughter called my cell phone when we were a couple of hundred miles into VA on I81. They were about 90 miles inside Ohio (I80) and needed the phone number of a Chinese restaurant near their home so they could order take out. While I googled it, her husband called his brother to look it up in the phone book. I found it first – while flying down the highway at 75 MPH. Mucho cool.

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I finally did it.

After weeks of thinking about it, I finally decided to create a personal weblog. You won’t find any thing about Outlook or Exchange here. Well, hopefully nothing. I write about them enough, I don’t need to do it for fun.

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