October 27, 2006
Well, I took a brief trip into emo yesterday. Sorry about that; I'll try to provide a little bit of rage before I'm done here to make up for it.
Usually, work gets busy when my life is calm and life sometimes messes with me when the workload is light. This is nice, all things considered, since I can use one to escape the other when the need arises. Well, work is definitely busy now: I've got one client I'm basically spending all day on while I punt many other things away, annoying the other people to no end. I don't like to make people wait, but the client I'm working on is the one paying the bills at the moment, so what they wants they gets.
I've been punching out "early" lately to keep from getting completely burned out. The problem is that home isn't much better.
The car, a.k.a. The Albatross, is acting up again, not two months after I dropped a grand on a new head gasket and spark plugs. The symptoms are basically the same as they were before, so my hunch is they fouled something up. Given that every time I've been there someone's come in to complain about shoddy service I'm not holding out hope that they'll do things right the second time. I'll have to wake up early and see if I can't channel Grandpa Sullivan a little bit.
So I may need a new car sooner than I thought. I'll still be leasing, but I may wind up with a new Civic instead of an Accord. No big issue; I'll only have to deal with it for three years. The problem will be financing.
I still have about $3000 worth of debts from the time I was out of work (that would be March 2002 through April 2003 if you're scoring at home (or even if you're alone)). With the IRS off my back (I screwed up my 2004 taxes and owed them a couple thousand bucks) I can pay those down quicker now, but it'll still take a couple months.
The car may die in a couple weeks if my luck continues.
Add to that the dipshits at Verizon. You may be aware that my internet connection (and land line now) are through the cable company, so you may be wondering what possible problem Verizon has with me. Well, it appears that they forgot to credit my account after they accepted my money for my last bill back in April of last year.
They sent a collection agency after me in July, more than a year after I concluded my business with them. I wrote back informing the agency that Verizon was mistaken, and to please verify that they had sent me to collections in error. I never heard back, so I considered the matter over and done with.
See, I've never been sent to collections before. I didn't know that I needed to double-check on the idiots.
So that's my anger at Verizon: They took my money, didn't credit me with it, and have been shitting all over my credit report for the last year and a half. I found this out when I was denied credit. And it's a good thing, because otherwise I'd have found out when I tried to get my lease agreement.
This is easy enough to fix: I called Verizon and found out where to fax the cancelled check. Then I called up National City (the bank the check was drawn on) to get a copy of the check. The lady I spoke with told me I'd have to get a statement first to get the exact date the check cleared, and that I'd have to deal with the bank branch directly since they have no way to charge me the $5.00 fee. At that point the branch was closed (4:00 -- yay, bankers' hours) so I called them this morning.
And instead of getting another helpful lady I got a heinous bitch. When I tried to explain the situation -- namely that I can't remember the account number 18 months after the fact -- she refused to help me at all, even considering that I had every other piece of information I could need.
Another call to the national customer service line armed me with more information and I was able to make my second call to the branch go more smoothly. I've already sent them a check to cover the fee and they'll send me the statement so I can send them another check so they can send me the cancelled check so I can fax it to Verizon so they can fix their error.
I'll be invoicing them for the $7.00 it's costing me to fix their fuck-up; what do you think the odds of them paying it are?
But until that happens I'll have a "serious delinquency" on my report which will affect my ability to do anything credit-related. All because some high-school dropout punched the wrong button more than a year ago.
Now if you'll excuse me, I hear a Guinness calling my name.
