Some Days Are Worse Than Others
Did you ever have a bad day? Today it seems I can’t get anything right. I went to my bank and decided to close an account since they were hacked and open another and transfer what ever was in it to the new account. I went to a bank officer and they did the job for me and when I got home, I added my wife to the account online. So far so good. Fast forward to three bank days later, no money went into the new account. I called the bank to find out what happened and they told me I didn’t open the account correctly. I told them the bank did it and there was a pause and the agent said well sometimes the bank branches are not familiar with what they have to do.
Can you imagine a bank that can’t do a simple thing like close one account and transfer the funds to the second one? When I called the bank, I was put on hold because the call was very important to them and told please do not hang up the wait time is several minutes, which turned out to be about 6 or 7 even thought I was told about 4. As I was talking to the agent, I was told I needed a code and at that point I was cut off. This meant I had to call again and this meant waiting again. I called and waited. When a representative came on, I now had to repeat everything I told the other agent. After going through everything again I was told I needed a code and it was sent to me on my other phone but there was now another problem. The agent on the first phone was talking and I could hear her and was yelling for her but she hung up on me.
Well, you can imagine how exasperated I had become by now as I called again and again was put on hold. After about another 7 or 8 minutes I reached someone and told them my story and guess what they said to me? You have the wrong department I will have to switch you over to the right one. This meant another wait. This was just not my day. Finally, I reached someone who understood the problem and never needed any codes at all. He said the problem was simple to solve and was caused when I didn’t set up the account properly. Again, I told this agent it was the bank that did this and he apologized. He also wanted to talk to my wife since she was also on the account but one phone went dead. It seems the power strip the phone was on burned out, but I had another one so we finally got through everything.
It always amazes me when banks want to talk to your wife since you could put anyone on the phone and they would never know. This just seems ridiculous to me. My morning wasn’t finished yet.
I decided it was time to renew the security on my computer. I did this because there was a sale of 50% off. I went to the site, used my credit card and was sent the usual receipt and later the instructions which unfortunately didn’t seem to work and were not very clear. They told me to log on to my account and update my devices. Try as I must, it just didn’t work and my purchase was not recognized. I spent at least an hour trying to fix this. I had to take out was is know as a trouble ticket with the support department and about a half hour later received a download which I hadn’t been sent before. It seem they forgot to send it and you needed it before you could update the account. From the instructions it seemed they had updated the account. This time everything went perfectly.
I have had a lot of annoying things happen to me in my life. They were not life and death but annoying because they either embarrassed you or wanted to make you pull out your hair. One day when my kids were young, we were walking through a large department store and I reached back and took the hand of one of them and we got on the escalator and we rode it up to the next floor. I turned around only to find I had someone else’s kid. They were running around looking for him on the floor below. I found them and told them what happened and we looked at each other and both broke out in a loud laugh.
I remember another time when I had a car with a manual choke. In case you don’t know what that is, it was a nob you pulled out from the dash which gave more power to the engine and made it run a little faster. The car I had was a 1960 Volkswagen Beatle. I got stuck in the snow one day and got out to push the car while it was in neutral, but the snow was too deep. Then I had a brainstorm, pull out the choke so the car would slowly turn the wheels and push. I pulled out the choke and got out and pushed, but it didn’t work as planned. There I was chasing my own car which was running ahead of me. It looked like something out of a comedy movie. Thank goodness I finally caught up with it and was able to jump in.
That car was cursed. It didn’t have a gas gage in those days, but it did have a reserve tank and the instructions which came with the car stated if you ran low or out of gas, flip the lever on the reserve tank for another gallon or so of gas. Knowing this I never worried about the gas because there were plenty of gas stations around in Queens, New York. One day I was on the biggest road in Queens it is called Queens Boulevard and had four lanes each way. The car stopped running and was out of gas but I knew I had the reserve so I flipped the switch, but nothing happened. There was traffic whizzing all around me and I had to get out and try and push the car to a gas station on the other side of the road meaning crossing all eight lanes. God was with me that day and I made it without getting run over or the car hit.