spammity

i admit to feeling a certain sort of smugness (not quite Schadenfreude, but how about Schandenfreude?) at seeing people all fancied up, but stupidly, like, wearing spike heels with blue jeans to go shopping on a 75-degree humid day when it's about to rain -- with a bit of paper napkin stuck to the bottom of their shoe.


in other news, i say again, i have just moved, so if you think you have my address, the odds are overwhelming that you're mistaken.  please e-mail me if you feel that you should be able to send me things, and we'll make sure you've got the right information.

then fix it, dear henry, dear henry, dear henry; then FIX IT, dear henry - what else would you do?

In the continuing saga of my phone bill:  I went down to the Local Wireless Carrier shop today.  As planned, I asked the person who offered to help me if there was someone who was more in charge than anybody else, because I really needed at this point to speak to a manager.  Tall Guy Named Tom said he was one down from the manager, and was it possible that he could help me.

Well, let's see, I said.

So I explained my ongoing difficulties to Tom.  I showed him the receipt, and the printout of the e-mail Helpful Young Woman gave me on Saturday once she'd sent it to Customer Service, and the notes I took during my conversation this morning with Katie at Collections.  I told him the block on my phone had been removed, so that was fine, but my online access to my account was still suspended, which continues to be an issue.  Okay, he said, let's see what we can do -- and what he does is, call and talk to someone at some Customer Service-like place, and then send almost the identical e-mail again, but with slightly stronger language:  Please remove any bar on the customer's account.

Yeah, I said, but my concern is that they'll point out that there is no block on my phone, just on the account, and when I talk to them, they even acknowledge that -- see, they've stopped saying 'until the balance is paid', because I just say to them 'yes, but I've paid the balance', and we get nowhere, so now they're saying they don't dispute that I've made the payment, only they haven't received the payment, so something's not right here in this shop.  But what can that be?

Tom didn't know.  He didn't even properly understand my issue, really, until he had me try to log in to my account on his computer, and saw what I was talking about.  At which point he called up some other number and spoke to someone about what he now acknowledged to be a genuine problem.  'Right,' he says into the phone, 'yeah, the account number is -- oh, Chris, you moppet muppet.'*

The words didn't make any sense to me, but the tone did.  He finished on the phone and showed me where on the receipt from when I paid my bill, the account number was missing a digit from what appears in the system.  It's supposed to end with 11, see, and on the receipt it ends with 1.  This is apparently the source of ALL THE TROUBLES OF THE WORLD, and Tom borrows my receipts and goes back to see the manager.

The manager I'd asked to speak to in the first place, by the way, but I choose not to point this out.

When Tom returns, he tells me he's made photocopies of my receipts and he'll have to get in touch with the Finance department to sort all this out, but it should be fixed within the next twenty-four hours.  'Excellent', I say, 'but humour me for one second:  what if it's not?  Then what do I do?'

Apparently the next step involves letters and things, but Tom is confident that he's isolated the problem and this will fix everything, and it should all be sorted soon.  And, he says, without my even asking, they (he and the manager, I assume) will be having A Word with 'the moppets muppets* who work here'.

So.  It's not fixed yet, but by this time tomorrow, one hopes, my worries will be over.


*sebastienne reports that it is very likely what Tom said was, in fact, 'muppet'. Go figure.