Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

Gina decided to come with me to BrainWash, seeing as I had woken her up beyond her ability to go back to sleep with the clickety-clack of the keyboard while typing my last blog post.

This meant that we would both have the fun of an adventure of going to a strange Cafe+Laundromat. The walk over from the Hotel was not too bad, as far as the distance goes, but the area we had to walk through is definitely in a revitalization stage.

Gina informed me that the Yahoo! Travel description for our hotel said not to go in the direction we were going as far as walking to get to BrainWash. When I asked the Concierge how to get to the corner of Folsom and Langston, he didn't say anything along the lines of 'Be careful you might get mugged.'

That meant that overall I wasn't too worried about the walk over to the laundromat.

However, along the way I must say that there were a couple of times where I was glad to be making the walk in broad daylight vs dusk or evening.

Gina and I split the 'Blue Collar' special, it was a tasty scramble of eggs, bacon, onions, peppers and I think some tomatoes were in there. The hash brown/home fries were excellent, Gina loved the toast and I ordered an English muffin on the side, which was honestly one of the best (if not the best) English muffin I have ever had.

Gina helped me out using the wash, as I am not accustomed to using pay washers, I am sure if left to my own devices I would have eventually found the hard to read instructions on where to put the soap.

My stuff is in the dryer right now and should be done in about 20 minutes.

The free wifi here along with the excellent food made me think about Jeremy's side project, Grubfi.com.

After breakfast, we broke out the laptops, we definitely are a modern couple. Gina informed me that her beanatx email address (@sbcglobal.net) had been suspended. I was pretty sure I had paid the Uverse bill, since I had been on the phone with customer-service just the other day. However, it turns out that I had not.

However, the customer service agent informed me that her email address should not have been suspended by me forgetting to pay the bill on time. So I have now been on hold with customer service for about 20 minutes.

I am pretty sure that my being on the phone is annoying the gentleman next to us, he looks like he came to drink coffee and enjoy himself and not have two out of towners get on on their cell phones.

The coffee here is pretty good.

All for now about the BrainWash, next post will be about the wharf and crab last night.

Laterz

I called back on the land-line and proceeded to sit on hold for a while more.

When an operator finally answered I asked if they could help me with U-Verse, she proceeded to tell me that she could not and that I would need to be transferred.

I informed her that the last time they tried that I was disconnected.

She told me that there was a notice about the U-Verse's call center having phone problems. That must be where the "Due to an emergency condition we are unable to answer your call, please hang-up and try again later." came from.

Jeremy and I joked around about the "Emergency" and tried to figure out why they would use the word "Emergency" vs say "Technical Difficulties" or something like that.

The best that we could come up with was that someone was in the call center running amok. Another notion was that maybe they had run out of coffee.

Regardless, it was a BS afternoon. I got some work done at least, and I was able to do a couple of loads of laundry.

The thing that aggravates me the most is that now I am going to have to re-arrange my schedule again to meet up with the install guys, whenever that comes about.

I left them a note on the porch to call my cell.

I have plenty more I could gripe about this whole thing.

But I will close out with the fact that the automated hold announcements did inform me that their call center is typically not that busy between Wednesday and Friday, recommending that I call back then.

Ummmm, yeah ok. So you know your call center has increased load on Mondays & Tuesdays. Wouldn't that make you think to bring in MORE agents on those days to field the increased number of phone calls?

Now, they might be doing that, but given that I was hold for a good chunk of the afternoon between 2 and 5:30pm, I think they could stand to train a few of the operators that answered the phone that couldn't help me.

Oh yeah, ok last thing!

The last round of waiting on hold that I did, I called in was greeted by an operator that couldn't help me. I asked her to transfer me. I am on hold for maybe like 20 minutes or so, then the music cuts out and I hear someone asking if they could help me.

SCORE!!! SWEET!!! EXCELLENT!!!

Ben: "Can you help me with U-Verse Service?"

Operator: "No sir, sorry I will have to transfer you to the U-Verse department."

Ben: "But I've been waiting for the U-Verse department."

Operator: "....."

So did the operator steal me out of the U-Verse queue and thus give away my spot to someone else?

Or was it that I was never properly transferred before and rather just put on hold?

I will never know, because I hung-up at 5:30 to get ready to go to the SXSW mixer, which was kind of fun. I will post a little bit about that later.

Laterz.

Ummmm, yeah, that was the automated prompt said to me as I waited on hold for someone over at AT&T to answer the phone and give me some answers about why the install folks that were supposed to be here between 12 and 2pm central haven't shown up yet (notably, it is 4:38pm central).

I have sat on hold a few times now with their staff.

Now, I think I might have some sort of major issue with my install request. As their automated system is unable to find any status related to my phone number.

My cell phone ran out of juice while waiting on hold, which unfortunately I at first interpreted as a good thing, because all I had heard was the hold music stop (mind you it is better than average hold music).

So I began to say 'Hello, Hello?'

Then I looked down and saw that my phone was displaying a low power alert message.

Shoot!

Well, I am supposed to be going to a SXSW mixer at 7pm downtown, similar to the one I went to last year.

However, if these guys don't show up soon, that won't be happening.

Bummer!

Ok, I need to get back to editing a Statement of Work.

Laterz