We spent the day paying bills and preparing quarterly taxes.  ATT sent us an email saying our phone bill was ready, so we went onto their website to read it.  Even tho’ we use a strong but for us easy-to-remember yet volatile password for each website, ATT refused to recognize it and locked us out of the account.  In that case, it said, we are to contact Customer Service, but they might as well have said “find Jimmy Hoffa.”  ATT’s customer service is a misnomer, of course.

So we spent an hour online and on the phone trying to contact a human who could unlock our account.  We wandered thru phone-tree hell.  Technical support told us to contact billing, who told us to contact customer service, who told us they had nobody to contact who could help us.  We gave up our phone number, our address, our social security number, and other information multiple times to people who only connected us to someone else.  We were hung up on.  Our final call took so long we had to cut it short because we had to leave the house for another appointment.  When we returned, half an hour of the same thing. 

Finally, we contacted someone in customer service –they  couldn’t help us get back to our online account, but they did arrange to have a paper bill sent to our house every month from now on rather than mess with the ATT website.  Back to the ’40’s!

The afternoon was spent on the phone with Verizon.  We have three phones in our household — one for us, one for our wife, and one for Spawn 1, who will turn 13 in a week.  Several months ago I arranged to block all downloads, because Spawn 1 just couldn’t help herself with ringtones, games, wallpapers, etc. and was racking up a considerable bill every month on such things.

This month’s Verizon bill had a large charge for downloads from Spawn’s phone.  So I called Verizon:  why?  Well, Verizon cancelled the block — they couldn’t tell me why.  But they’d reinstate it.  And I had to pay for the downloads.

And by the way — our plan calls for 250 text messages per phone per month — Spawn certainly uses hers, wife doesn’t use hers at all — but for some mysterious reason, that feature had been cancelled on my phone alone,  and all my text messages (incoming and outgoing) were being charged 20 cents each.  Why did they do it?  They couldn’t tell me — it just happened.  They reinstated the text message allocation.  But I’d have to pay for the texts up until then, of course.

(And don’t tell us to try internet phoning.  We took Charter’s phone service when it was first offered.  The first technician they sent said he didn’t have a tool to open the box.  The second technician pried it open with his bare hands.  Every night, we could neither call out nor receive calls, because “circuits are busy at this time.”  This is kind of a drag when one of the members of the household is a physician on call.  I cancelled it after the modem crashed for the second time during the day and I was out on my front lawn, with my Verizon cell phone, trying to raise Charter customer service.  “This just isn’t right,” I said.  And then there was the fresh hell of reinstating ATT service.  But I digress).

After the Verizon problem was solved — or not — and they’lll be mailing us paper bills from now on, too — I made up a deposit for our bank.  We have a supplemental health insurance company that’s an epic in itself — suffice to say, I have complained so much that I now submit our claims directly to a supervisor’s fax machine.  This doesn’t stop them from losing about 50% of our claims, but it’s better than the 75% they used to lose.  So when we get checks from them, it’s a big deal, and I run them to the bank ASAP. 

When I got to the bank, it was 4:02 — and the bank closes at 4.  Promptly.  On a weekday.  Friday, they leave early.

When I got back home, I decided to make a call to Kaiser Permenente — I had a medical procedure scheduled for next week, and couldn’t clear up the time or support to do it, so I wanted to reschedule.  Called the universal Kaiser scheduling number, and punched in my patient number.  Then they sent me to a human. I had to give them:(repeat after me):
    patient number (second time)
    home address,
    home and cell phone numbers
… before she said that she couldn’t schedule where I wanted to go, and I’d have to call another number.  Which I did.  Entered my patient number (third time).  Was sent to a human.   Had to give them:
     patient number (#4)
    home address (#2)
    home and cell phone numbers (#2)
… before she said that she couldn’t help me, and I’d have to call the clinic directly.

I called the clinic.  I got an answering machine.  It was 4:54.  The answering machine said that the clinic closed at 4:50.   It then asked me to provide:
    patient number (#5)
    home address (#3)
    home and cell phone numbers (#3)
… and they would call me back to reschedule

As of the moment, they haven’t called me back, and the clinic is closed for lunch and will be for another half hour.  Looking forward to calling them back and giving them my patient number again ….