I spent 24 minutes on the phone with Comcast trying to find out the status of my trouble ticket, but nobody there really wanted to bother with that. Instead, they wanted me to rehash what had been done so far, after which - in a manner that would make Dell customer service envious - they shuttled me to another department that repeated the exercise. After about four iterations, they declared that since I am, in actuality, an Earthlink customer, I needed to talk to Earthlink. (This, despite the fact that the hardware and infrastructure belong to Comcast.)
Fair enough. I call Earthlink, which earnestly doesn't want me to talk to a human, its computer-generated voice insisting that, if my problem has to do with connectivity, there's nothing they can do for me, and I must talk to Comcast. Asking for a "representative" or trying to dial numbers to get vectored off to some related department where a human might answer the phone made about as much impact as mosquito spit in a monsoon.
So I call Comcast again, now with a longer story, and eventually - worn down from holding a phone to my ear - I eagerly hang up after getting someone to admit my ticket is still open.
* * * LJ friend
spidielives threw a major wrench into the workings of what has been laughingly called my mind with her home game entry for this week's LJ Idol. Her entry got me to thinking along even broader lines than before, and now I'm completely at sea.
Well, not entirely. One idea I have focuses on a memoir type of entry, but I'm not sure, in the end, of how much interest it might be to the casual reader, or whether I'd have the time, between now and deadline, to forge it into something of interest.
Another idea that keeps bobbing up and down like a bone in a stew - one directly inspired by
spidielives - will take me entirely too long to implement and it takes the kind of chance one generally finds only in PowerBall, because if it doesn't click with the readers (as is often the case with entries that involve poetry, for example), I'll be out of the competition faster than a Nolan Ryan fastball.
* * * Receiving an email from a client that "reminds" me of a lower rate of pay for certain kinds of work that I did recently has sort of put me in a bad mood, because I don't recall ever being told of the lower rate in the first place. Thus, the request to amend my rate seems a bit unilateral and after-the-fact.
I composed a reply, then ditched it and started over. What I ended up sending was a request to know who it was who was supposed to inform me of the lower rate in the first place.
In the end, my retirement will not depend on the difference between what I invoiced and what I've been asked to invoice (though I do not walk by such sums lying in the street); it's simply that I do not like being treated this way.
In other work news, I translated just over 5,000 target words yesterday, and am working on 4,500 target words so far today.
* * * I'm guessing that I may have to admit I bit off more than I could manage with Nanowrimo, but we'll see.
Cheers...
UPDATE (11:40 pm): The day's word count is 5,150 or so, and I'm 69 slides through a 103-slide presentation. I'm going to go uncross my eyes for about 7 hours, I think.
Fair enough. I call Earthlink, which earnestly doesn't want me to talk to a human, its computer-generated voice insisting that, if my problem has to do with connectivity, there's nothing they can do for me, and I must talk to Comcast. Asking for a "representative" or trying to dial numbers to get vectored off to some related department where a human might answer the phone made about as much impact as mosquito spit in a monsoon.
So I call Comcast again, now with a longer story, and eventually - worn down from holding a phone to my ear - I eagerly hang up after getting someone to admit my ticket is still open.
Well, not entirely. One idea I have focuses on a memoir type of entry, but I'm not sure, in the end, of how much interest it might be to the casual reader, or whether I'd have the time, between now and deadline, to forge it into something of interest.
Another idea that keeps bobbing up and down like a bone in a stew - one directly inspired by
I composed a reply, then ditched it and started over. What I ended up sending was a request to know who it was who was supposed to inform me of the lower rate in the first place.
In the end, my retirement will not depend on the difference between what I invoiced and what I've been asked to invoice (though I do not walk by such sums lying in the street); it's simply that I do not like being treated this way.
In other work news, I translated just over 5,000 target words yesterday, and am working on 4,500 target words so far today.
Cheers...
UPDATE (11:40 pm): The day's word count is 5,150 or so, and I'm 69 slides through a 103-slide presentation. I'm going to go uncross my eyes for about 7 hours, I think.