So yesterday Dell sent me dispatch information, and there was great rejoicing! Then today I received...a battery. By itself. A quick check of our bank account revealed that they did NOT charge me anything (yet?), but why the battery? Are they sending me a laptop without a battery? Are they GOING to charge me for the battery I thought I needed to buy weeks ago, before they gave up on the original laptop? WHAT THE DELL?!?
* Item: Things at my job are kinda grim. The line of work I am in waxes and wanes to a certain extent, and can swing even further in either direction than usual due to a plethora of factors, from The Economy to Current Events to Management Problems and Administrative Dustups. We're in the slim season right now, and there have also been Extenuating Circumstances, and there just aren't enough hours to be had to make a living even with Tightening Our Belts. I won't lie, I am Very Concerned, which is part of why I don't have tons to say lately. There are only so many ways to say "it's like The Grapes of Wrath, but in a minivan." Thanks to my garden and the critters of Squatter Workshop, we have enough to eat, so there's that (and I'm very thankful). I'm playing chicken with school supplies and the first day of school, but I think it'll be okay (I'll be stuck elbowing last-minute shoppers in the teeth for the last zippered pencil case, but it's all good! I'm scrappy!). Still sucks though, and makes me feel antsy when things are this tight.
* Item: Due to the above, I went for a job interview Friday, and today I found out I got the job! It'll be a new Weekend Warrior job, in addition to my fulltime-but-currently-part-time gig, and hopefully THIS one won't go bankrupt...LOL, J/K!!! No but really, it would totally screw with my head...I start this weekend and I think it'll be fun. I'm working for someone who was my boss at the ORIGINAL Weekend Warrior Job, who I like very much. So that's good.
* Dell on wheels? As I type this (with my lightning-fast index finger), a new laptop should be on its' way. SHOULD being the operative word, as I never got any dispatch information from Dell. This makes me nervous, and I e-mailed them yesterday, and will call tomorrow. Sigh.
* And finally...today I took a co-worker a rabbit as a gift. She perked up when she heard that I raise them, and offered to buy one from me, but I like her very much (she was one of MANY people I work with who were exceptionally kind during Hotter's neurological mishegas) and told her I'd just give her one. So I took it in today, but wanted to be discreet, because while gifting co-workers with smallstock isn't expressly forbidden in the Employee Handbook, I kind of doubt the answer would have been yes had I asked The Powers That Be. So I went up to my co-worker friend and said "I brought you a present!" quietly, and she muttered "rabbit?" and I nodded, and she pumped her fist excitedly. Another co-worker, who knew nothing of our agreement but had overheard, gave me a dirty look and stalked off muttering in her first language (which is not English, so I don't know what she was actually saying, just that it didn't sound good). Second Coworker continued glaring at me and muttering until I finally just asked her point-blank if I'd done something to upset her. "As a matter of fact, yes!" she snapped. "You could have asked me if I wanted a rabbit if you have a connection! I'm old but I'm not dead!" I was a little confused by the second part of her statement, but eager to make peace, and said I hadn't known she wanted a rabbit too, but I had plenty more if she did, since they breed like, well, rabbits. "BREED?!?" She looked at me like one of us was insane. I said the next litter was just six weeks old and she cut me off with "BUNNY RABBITS! Oh hell no, I don't want one of THEM. I thought you meant, you know..." and she made motions in front of her crotch and pantomimed an orgasm. "Like Sex and The City!" And then First Coworker and I died. The end.
Well, my computerless state continues! This morning a very nice technician came to Casa MFA and replaced the hard drive in less than five minutes. He then turned the computer on, advised me to leave it on for an hour and a half while the imaged hard drive loaded, and left.
Unfortunately, the laptop still doesn't boot.
So I spent an hour on the phone with an excruciatingly polite fellow over in India (that's one thing I'll say for Dell, AGAIN--I usually call them in a high dudgeon ready to spit nails, but their overseas technicians are just so disarmingly pleasant that I lose my raging hate-on), and he had me run a series of diagnostic tests. After those apparently failed to produce the desired result (the laptop locked up during most of them), the technician conferred with his supervisor and they decided to offer me a system exchange. Which means they send me a working laptop as good as or better than this one, and I send them this one back, and then my Computerless August will (allegedly) be over.
When I work a lot, I tend to eat like crap. Part of it is that I tend to graze on the fly (we rarely take meal breaks in my line of work), part of it is that I'm surrounded by delicious snacky foods, part of it is that I'm friends with the kitchen staff and they often ask me to taste things and give my opinion...anyway I probably won't NOT be chubby anytime soon, and also I sometimes get to craving veggies to the point of distraction.
Today for lunch I had an artichoke (I'm the only one in the house who likes them), a bunch of roasted backyard kale, tomatoes with feta and lime basil, and the heel of a loaf of zucchini-carrot bread. My kids are veggie-fans, too (Big Child and I practically ended up arm-wrassling over the pan of roasted kale, it was so good and Little Child stole half my tomatoes).
I love our wacky little family.
* The box from Dell arrived today, and while the paperwork claimed this was my system, repaired, I and the different model number and lack of scratches/dings beg to differ. WHAT.
* So yeah, I freaked out and was all "THIS IS NOT MY BEAUTIFUL LAPTOP!" Hotter was all "so?" and I was all "I just...don't claim it's the same system is all! This thing doesn't even have the same kind of DVD drive! Did they just not expect me to NOTICE?" He said probably they EXPECTED me to be grateful. Clearly neither Hotter nor Dell know who they are dealing with!
* All kidding aside, I *am* grateful. It just rubs me the wrong way that Dell wouldn't SAY "here, your laptop was a lost cause, have this shiny new one!"
* The perceptive among you may have noticed I'm still posting from The Precious. That's because Dell shipped me a new computer with the old (borked) hard drive in it. And shipped me a new hard drive separately. A technician is coming tomorrow to do the switcheroo and then--THEN--I will have a computer again!
So I got an e-mail from Dell today stating that my laptop had been repaired and was on the way back. Yay! I still haven't seen the $160 I was quoted for the new battery come out of my account, though, so I hit the link to chat with an agent about that. I have an auditory processing defect that makes understanding foreign-to-me accents very difficult for me, so I LOVE that Dell has the live-chat option, as most of their CSRs are based in India.
Today's representative was no exception. I get the impression she didn't understand most of what I typed. I asked whether the battery was shipping with the laptop or separately, and she informed me the laptop would arrive tomorrow. I rephrased my question and she listed the parts that Dell had replaced. The battery was on the list, but the hard drive was NOT. This was counter to what the last representative had told me (they'd said the hard drive was damaged and all of my data lost, and I had a long and frustrating exchange with a different agent about whether or not I could get them to send me the bad part so a techie friend could try to recover my data). I informed today's representative of that and she said not to worry, that the computer had been tested and was now in working order. I point-blank asked if my hard drive was replaced. She said no. Okay! Great! Then I asked about the cost of the battery and she said there was no charge because it was covered by the warranty. If that is the case it's terrific news, but two different reps had previously told me that was NOT the case.
I am very confused. I don't know whether I should add that $160 back to my checkbook or not, I'm not sure if my data is lost or not, I don't understand what is going on with the battery/warranty situation (and if the battery IS covered I'm going to be annoyed because this is my third battery; when the first one died I paid for the second one out of pocket because, again, I was told batteries aren't covered by the warranty)...and after switching from live chat to telephone conversation I am unconvinced the representative really understood what I was even asking!
I think I'm just going to have to see what's in the box when the MFA Laptop gets home and go from there. Which is frustrating. I could rant about the outsourcing of call-center work, which in and of itself is a real negative when so many Americans need jobs, but my real issue here is that the reps I keep speaking with, while obviously knowledgable and almost excruciatingly polite, don't have an adequate grasp of the English language to help me. And that's bad all around; not only is it as useless to customers as no service at all, but I'm sure it's frustrating for the reps as well.
Bottom line? I'll be so glad when my laptop is home!
Apparently even my subconscious mind is a smartass!
So okay, FINE, I'm sorry, subconscious mind, that I called you names. Last night's renditions of "putting the dog to sleep" and "psycho killer with a chainsaw" were VERY creative and also wholly unnecessary.
Now we're about to work a double, and then we only have five hours in which to sleep before working some more, so can we please call a truce? Thanks.
Anxiety dreams are nothing new to me; during my Therapy Years a Harvard-trained shrink once had me draw a map of the Dream University where most of them played out. There was the fountain in which I frolicked nude with the family rabbi, the quadrangle where the piece of paper vital to my graduation kept blowing out of my hands, the soccer field where I was chased by wolves, the Student Commons Building where I showed every person my right nipple, one by one...my subconscious mind used to be a real one-trick pony.
About six years ago, my anxiety dreams began to alternate between Dream University mishaps and dental catastrophes. The ringing crack of a veneer breaking loose, the jarring blow that breaks a tooth, the feeling of sand on the tongue one gets from an incisor shattering.
Just recently, for the past...oh, three or so years?...a new type of anxiety dream reared its head. One in which I urgently need to communicate something to someone (a loved one's symptoms to paramedics, my antibiotic allergies to a surgeon standing over me, scalpel in-hand, the location of the bomb to co-workers after I hang up the phone from talking to the terrorists), but there's a problem with my throat, or maybe it's my breathing, or both. I have to exert maximum effort to make any sound at all, and can only get out one or two words per breath, and it's awful.
Today at my temp job minding an empty office I sat and thought about this. I was a career student for eight years, so it would make sense for my mind to torment me with higher education debacles. Dental catastrophe? Fairly self-explanatory. But I've never had extended troubles making myself heard. Occasional asthma flares, the odd winter laryngitis, sure, but the agonizing inability to speak, like THAT? No.
I'd gone so far as to think about my grandfather's death from esophageal cancer and muse that perhaps these were not anxiety dreams but some sort of premonition before it struck me: I stayed silent when Stalky really stepped up her efforts and told no one of the terror that at times nearly incapacitated me right around the time the dreams started. I'd blog around it, say something vague about depression, a bad day, and ignore it, fearing all along that the unchallenged lies might begin to be accepted as truth. It ate at me. And clearly my decision to end the silence brought some of this to the forefront.
Anxiety dreams are ALWAYS assholes, but sometimes you can learn from them, too.
One was a family of five, out to Sunday brunch. Two parents and three people in their early twenties who were obviously the couple's children. The parents and two of the children were of average stature. The remaining kid (I feel weird calling him that, as he had stubble on his face) was...well, he was little. Not so little as to likely be affected by any sort of achondroplasia (I studied those and other genetic conditions affecting stature when Little Child was a sick little baby, so I feel pretty confident in saying that), and his body and features appeared to be perfectly proportionate, he just...wasn't very big. I was both trying not to stare and desperately trying to figure out how tall the guy was; I hope he didn't notice. I just...well. It made me think about Little Child, and wonder if he'll be THAT little when he's that age. I don't ever want anyone, no matter how well-meaning, to stare at my baby ever again (we got plenty of that when he had a tube taped to his face and later snaking out of his clothes and running into a backpack), and yet that's exactly what I ended up doing to the young man I saw today. For the first time ever I questioned my opposition of the notion of growth hormones for Little Child except in the case of an actual deficiency; I still think we should give him a minute to get used to not having a G-tube. I still don't like the idea of meddling with his endocrine system. He's not even seven and I think we have time to leave the kid the hell alone for a bit and see what his body does on its own. But...well, if he really isn't even going to hit five feet, and he's still healthy in a couple of years...MAYBE.
We'll see I guess.
The other thing was a trio of wee little dogs belonging to another large-ish family I encountered in a business context. They were mini-pinschers (the dogs, not the family, although one of the kids was chatty and informed me the dogs were also related), a breed of dog I've long admired, and they were ferociously opposed to my encroachment into what they obviously considered to be their territory. "Would you like to pet one," the chatty tween boy asked, having noticed how taken I was with the dogs, "the mom might nip you but the babies won't." And he proffered one of his dogs, which he held out easily with one hand under its chest, while his father was signing some paperwork.
I never really considered myself a "big-dog person," having grown up with small dogs, but reader, I had no idea how to even go about petting a dog so tiny! I finally ended up stroking the little beast's head with one finger, chortling in utter glee.
And now I'd really like to get a mini-pinscher when Isis goes.
Hotter says no, but hopefully I've got at least a decade to work on him.
Y'ALL! Today I randomly reconnected with someone I used to ______ with at ______. And they suggested that I ______, which could be really great for my family, but I just don't know. I mean, ______ is pretty great, but ______ might be even better.
