Mondays. Gotta Love 'Em

Every now and then I plan on taking a break from writing historical fiction. Not that I've hit a writer's block or anything, it's just that there will be times when I wish to post about something else. This is one of those days.

Monday was, shall we say, interesting.

First I played, where is my laundry?

The Missus Herself  did laundry on Sunday, did it rather late in the day actually. So I was expecting to find my clothes neatly folded, in the laundry basket, in the spare room. When she has time, she actually puts things away. Apparently she had trouble sleeping Sunday night as there was no basket of neatly folded clothes in the spare room.

Rather than look in the places where clean clothes are normally stored, I went hunting. First I went to the living room.

There was the laundry basket, bereft of clothing, it sat forlornly on the floor.

Uh oh, I thought, better check the dryer. So on to the basement I went.

While the dryer did have some clothing in it, they were not the clothes I was looking for.

Yes, exactly.

Going back upstairs I decided to look where the clothes were supposed to be, lo and behold, there they were. So fifteen minutes into the day, I felt like a complete idiot.

Got to work, fired up my unclassified laptop and saw this ...

Your account has been disabled ...

Uh, what?

Hhmm, I changed my password like two weeks ago (every 91 days is the standard here, and yes, for many reasons I think that sucks) so that can't be it.

Eventually my colleague looked up the number for the "help desk" so that I could determine what the "h," "e," double hockey sticks was going on. (Fire trucks might have been mentioned as well.)

After a few long moments on the phone, the nice lady told me, "I put in a ticket for you to get your account enabled."

"Uh, you can't enable it yourself?"

"No, sorry."

Hanging up, I moved to my classified computer. It worked fine, which puzzled the you-know-what out of me.

After an hour of not hearing from "tech support" I called them back.

My company has one of those annoying (and completely horrid) phone systems which have a two-fold purpose. The first purpose is so that they don't have to pay a human being, the second is to discourage anyone from actually using the system. Both are highly effective at those two things. What it's not very good at is actually helping those who call in.

Eventually I got to a human by pressing the "all other inquiries press #" - which went something like this.

"Help desk, how can I help you."

"I'm calling in reference to ticket # 99999."

"Let me look that up for you ..."

"Okay."

"That ticket is still open."

As I couldn't log onto my laptop yet, I already knew that it hadn't been done yet. I resisted the urge to say "No shit, Sherlock." Instead I went with ...

"Okay. How will I know when it's been resolved, will someone call me?"

"Uh, no." Talking to this guy was painful in the extreme.

"So I should try to keep logging in for the rest of the day until I can get in?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Okay."

"Is there anything else I can help you with?" Mr. Helpful asked, obviously wanting to terminate the call ASAP.

"Well, you haven't really helped me at all, have you?"

"Uh, not really, no."

"No, not really."

"Okay."

Then there was dead silence for maybe thirty seconds until I heard, "You can hang up now."

"Oh, sorry, I was stunned by your lack of helpfulness."

"Okay, bye." And Mr. Helpful terminated the call.

Eventually I was able to log in, but received no notification of that fact.

I was annoyed to receive one of those smiley-face survey emails, asking "How did we do?"

I did answer the survey and let them know that they were no help whatsoever.

Did I feel better?

Yes, a little.

So three hours into my day, I was actually able to access my laptop.

Good times.

Not.

/rant