thank you Anna

I don't know you, I just spoke to you on the phone. You work at Bell Canada, and you helped me out. Thanks! My saga with Bell is now ended. I don't owe any money, and in fact, Bell owes me $6. What a hassle. I somehow mistakenly paid some bills using online banking to an inactive account. Twice. Those payments never showed up on my bill, and the amount kept rolling over to the next bill. I thought, "well, sometime when I use the Internet, it takes a while for them to process the payment, and it shows up as not paid when in fact it is. I'll just wait for them to sort it out." Nope.

I try calling to sort it out. We track down the payments, they went to the wrong account, I am assured that they will take care of it, and since they owe me money, they'll be sending me a check. I feel good, having taken care of this loose end. About a month later, I get a call from the credit department saying that they're going to call the collection agency if I don't pay my bill. What? You owe me money and you're calling to threaten me? I'm annoyed. So talk to someone that they transfer me to, and she says that I have to send proof of those two payments to this fax number. So I download the two statements of the net, PDF them, and fax the whole thing to the number. Dutifully, I call back a week later to check what's going on. That was yesterday. Well, it turns out I"M not supposed to fax the information, THE BANK is supposed to fax it, and they have to do what's called a Data Centre Trace. So I call my bank. Can they do this? Unfortunately, they can't since it's been over 90 days since the transactions were made. (I think the bank needs bigger hard drives so they can do data centre traces further back, like say, 6 years, like I have to keep all my financial records for the government... but now I'm ranting).

So I call back to Bell (this is the 4th conversation, now, in case you're counting). I get bounced around from the billing department to the credit department, finally to some woman's voicemail, at which point I hang up because I have no idea who this woman is and I don't want to leave her a voicemail.

I wait a few minutes till I calm down a bit.

Then I called again, and spoke with Anna, who took care of things. Firstly, she thought that I had already provided enough information, and even though the bank couldn't do it, what I had provided ought to be enough. Secondly, she didn't transfer me to another department, she 'escalated' my issue to her manager, and was kind enough to keep me on hold for a long time while she did so. Frankly, I was happier to be on hold than to get transferred, so I waited. She finally got back to me and said that it would take some time to sort this out, could she get a number where she could call me back? This was yesterday afternoon. So I gave her my number, and then I didn't hear back from her until just now. Good news, it's taken care of, the money is transferred, and I'll be getting a cheque from Bell. Sounds eerily familiar...

This whole payment hassle is primarily the reason why I'm no longer with Bell.

technorati tags:Bell, Canada, phone, billing, issues

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argh

I hate being frustrated.

I mean, why would FedEx list a location as being a drop off centre when they're not? I went there, and they said they wouldn't be set up for a week. Ahhh! Of course, it was 4:15 and too late to go anywhere else, not that I could remember where any of the other locations were... this place was like an internet cafe / falafel house / corner store. I guess you get hungry for some food while you're pwning your friends...

discovered a new show today... 30 Rock. It's pretty good, I think. I liked Studio 60 (cancelled yet? not yet.) but it was kind of too serious, and I never got to see enough of the sketches. At least with 30 Rock you don't see the sketch but the rest of the show is actually funny. And Alec Baldwin deserves that Golden Globe for the show... he's so straight it's hilarious.

technorati tags:30, Rock, frustrated, TV, Alec, Baldwin

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christmas lights

We put up some outdoor Christmas lights this afternoon. After we got home from church, T was asleep in the car, so I stayed with her, while J went in with mom. I am happy to say I dozed as well, which was very nice, having stayed up till past 1AM to put the finishing touches on my message today. Hope it went well. I thought it went alright.

Anyway, J has been pestering me all week to put up our lights, and I had put her off until the weekend, simply because I was too busy and it was too dark to do it, usually, when she was asking to. So today was the big day.

And I have to complain about the eavestrough clips that I bought to string up lights... junk! They don't stay on the edge of the gutter, they just fell off. And they didn't screw onto the end of a broomstick like advertised either. Or maybe my broomstick wasn't skinny enough. In any case, after several failed attempts to hang the lights up from the eavestroughs, I gave up and we went with Plan B. J remarked, "This is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be." We strung them through the iron hand rail up the steps to our place, and lay them across the top of the porch wall. Simple. Fun. Nice. J was a great helper. I said that we were going to feed the lights through the rail, and she tried to understand the usage of 'feed' in that context...

There are a lot of things in the English language that are so different, or difficult, that it's a wonder we can speak at all. But if you grow up with it, you learn by exposure. You just grok it somehow. The amazing thing about J is that she's able to understand things like expressions. How something means something other than what it says. Like "going out to take the air" (found in a Madeline book) means going out for a walk, essentially. Or "raining cats and dogs". Or "feed this line through here".

And T is following hard on her sister's tail. Not that she understands expressions, but she'll repeat everything J says after her. She has the 1-2 buckle my shoe rhyme down. She has trouble saying "construction paper"... it comes out like "strunk-shun paper" or "strunken paper". Most requested car song is "tzena tzena". If she hears something she likes she'll say "I love that song!" But if she doesn't, now she says "Me love not this song".

N and I were commenting the other day that it's only fitting that we have two children that love to talk. We reminisced that we were always getting into trouble at school for talking in class, so it's only fair that our kids are the same. We were hoping that at least one of them would be a little quieter, but alas, it is not to be. :) Not that I'd change a thing.