Brought to you by Government.
Yes, you pay for it. And for that pay taken right off the top of your check...
You get phone trees with voice recognition that can.not. recognize an adult voice over the children's noise in the background. Apparently helicopters bombing in the background also confuse it and you get a nice computer lady repeating over and over "I'm sorry, I don't understand, please repeat" and then dumps you back into the voice tree that reminds you to visit their website at www.itdon'twork.gov
Back on the website, you go to renew your licenses. Now of course it's your fault that you didn't renew on time. Admittedly. So now I'm 3 days late. and counting. And IF I could just send a check and the paper thing they send in the mail- I WOULD HAVE. Except I have 2 licenses and they only sent me one renewal piece of paper. OR rather.. the Government run post office only delivered one. Perhaps both were deposited into the mail on their end. Either way. I have to renew 2, have the paperwork to renew only one and thus I can get in my car and drive for 8 hours to go and wait for 3 to talk to someone or I can attempt to contact someone with smoke signals from here.
4 screens into "continue" when the computer tells me I don't have an address associated with my license I'm trying to renew. OK.. back to the license and I see an address. right there. yes it's there. OK. I'll update it to the new one. click continue and it tells me I don't have an address.. repeat. click a bunch of other stuff. curse at the computer. Remembering the definition of insanity being repeating the same thing and expecting different results.
Back to the phone. THIS time I get a busy signal. I hit redial every 30 seconds until it rings and I get "I am sorry, due to high volume of calls, we cannot accept your call at this time." click. Curse under my breath again. Try calling again until I get the phone tree. Finally get to the "renew licence" press number 3, press number 3 and get the "due to high call volume" message
Bang head on the computer until one of the keys stick. Mutter about not eating at the computer.
Try calling to order a dumpster (again) because we have more trash than we're allowed in our one permitted trash can at the new house with the construction stuff. Get a person on the first try. Yippee. Things are going good. Order dumpster. Give them credit card. Can't find our household credit card, must be in my jeans pocket upstairs, pull the business one out of our wallet. And it's declined. Oh, right, I forgot. It's Monday.
Monday is the day that our credit card company decides we've have too many charges in a set period of time and they turn it off until I call in to politely ask them to turn it back on. We've been through this with several credit card companies. They're all the same.
You see.. we ship alot of packages. And most of them we ship fedex. ALOT of packages. Over 1000 since June.
Fedex bills each package individually. And they process charges 2x a week. One of them being Monday, For the past 4 days of shipments.
Credit cards have a limit on number of transactions you have have in a day and in a month. Most mondays we exceed that limit. I have yet to pin them down on the exact number but one of the rookies told me it was 25. Several supervisor calls later, they have assured me they raised the limit, but apparently we still exceed what ever our mystical magical number is nearly every week.
I have given up on changing it. I've written letters to Fedex asking them if perhaps they couldn't do ONE charge for that day's charges? or do an invoice for a week of charges, I've written and changed credit card companies thinking it was just the credit card company's policies, but apparently it's universal and I'm thinking all the 'fraud operations' decisions are handled by the same 3 people for all companies. I've stuck with this one because it has reward points for stuff I actually use. And for the most part they're nice about turning it back on. I mean, it's embarrassing enough for the card to decline and usually they apologize and say they'll put on on hold to talk to their supervisor who will also apologize and tell me it won't happen again.
And it doesn't. For about 6 days.
And I'm happy their phone tree doesn't have voice recognition "technology" because the time it takes me to say the "16 digit account number" is far too long to avoid some huge racket or disaster to happen in the background.
And all that before 8:30 am.
I'd like to say the rest of my day went splendidly.
Spent a good chuck of time cleaning the work site (aka new house) and then taping off the remaining trim to paint. And ran out of tape. I could have sworn I had 2 more rolls of tape, but it was no where to be found.
So.. kids in car and off to buy tape.
Dressed in my "painting clothes" which today consisted of a ratty tshirt and Larry's old BDUs (camouflage) pants from his skinnier airforce days. The BDU's in themselves are quite a fashion statement, much less paint covered and torn and ripped.
Not wanting to waste the 40 minutes it would take me to go home disembark and re-embark the kids into carseats I figured 'heck, I'll run in like this. They've seen worse.
No, possibly not. At least not at Walmart. I've gone in paint covered in Home Depot and looked like I fit in just fine. But Home Depot doesn't sell milk and we were also out of milk.
And go figure. As I'm walking out I see one person, a person who knows me as the owner of little lions, sees me and we exchange greetings. Well. THAT's making a great public image.
At least we're real. What you see is what you get. No mascara, no hairspray. Just plain old salt of the earth- the kind you put on the road in winter. Yep. That would be me. And life just wouldn't be the same with out me. Or at least without salt. Me.. ah.. well.. life would be less dull. And the poor guardians of my kids would be going and getting themselves some Prozac.
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