True to my word, I radically changed my diet. Out were all dairy, red meat, pork and a great deal of the salt I'd been eating. In were fiber-rich fruits, veggies, grains, plus Egg Beaters, turkey sausage, chicken and fish for protein. My theory was that the the weight, cholesterol and blood pressure would drop in dramatic levels with those fatty and caloric restrictions. And the weight did drop. Kind of. A little bit. Not exactly dramatically, but gradually, to the tune of about a pound a week. It still galled me that I'm not even 40 and am already having to take old man pills, but if it would keep me out of the cardiac ward I figured it was worth it.
Unfortunately, the blood pressure didn't seem to give a wet crap what I did or didn't eat. After three weeks on the new regime, I asked the wife to test my BP and it was still through the roof. We called it in to Dr. Ralph, who then put me on Lisinopril, an ace inhibitor and the eventual source of my hacking cough.
I stuck to this diet for three months, with only one or two breaks for a cheeseburger or pizza the whole time. I was proud, though not precisely enjoying myself, but it was still a doable thing. My next checkup was in November. To my and Dr. Ralph's delight, my blood pressure and cholesterol had not only returned to normal levels, but had dropped to enviable levels. He was astounded that I'd been able to make such great strides. Not astounded enough that he wanted to immediately drop all meds, but astounded. I agreed to stay on my meds for another three months and immediately went and ate a massive bacon, egg, cheese and potato biscuit for lunch to celebrate my good fortune.
Jump ahead to December, during my coughing fits and the wife pronouncement of
"Ohhhh! You have an ace cough." Such fits, she explained, were one of the possible side effects of Lysinopril in a small percentage of its users. The onset of my ace cough had just been unfortunately timed with a cold so its cause was masked. She advised me to drop that med and see if the cough went away. After all, my blood pressure had been great at my last visit so I should be fine. What I didn't realize was that it takes a couple of weeks for the ace cough symptoms to go away, so dropping Lysinopril was not an immediate fix. I continued to hack and wheeze well into the new year and had only ceased the fits for a handful of weeks before my next appointment with Dr. Ralph.
It was around this time, in January, that our video game situation took a major turn as well. Since Thanksgiving, I'd been looking into gaming systems and was still pretty well convinced the PS3 was the way I wanted to go. But I also hate paying retail for anything. I kept waiting for some kind of massive PS3 sale online, but none seemed forthcoming. (This was before I learned how much crackdown Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have on retailers who discount their systems.) And to paraphrase a line from my all time favorite film, Raising Arizona, soon I even found myself driving by Gamestops that weren't on the way home. At the wife's suggestion, one day, I even went into one and had a look around--just browsing, mind. If it had been up to me, we would probably have just browsed and left, but the wife knows me better than I admit to knowing myself, and after having a look at some of the games there and talking to the manager, she said, "Oh, just get one, already!"
As I said, the Play Station 3 is the first game console I've owned since the Atari 2600. As great as my expectations for the machine were, the PS3 surpassed them by a good distance. It's one thing to know that the PS3 is capable of syncing up to your wireless network and streaming Netflix, but my experience with home theater appliances being able to do that has been limited to our LG Bluray player, which can't hold a wireless connection for any useful amount of time and causes one to spend most of one's viewing time constantly doing pushbutton wireless connection for it. (In fact, we went without Netflix streaming for around 6 months because the LG refused to behave and I'd been unable to convince it otherwise after an entire afternoon spent trying to do so.) I expected that sort of hassle from the PS3 but I did not get it. It took one login to the network and that sucker has run smooth ever since. And the Netflix streaming software it runs is leagues better than LG's, not to mention it's a Bluray player to start with. In fact, if our LG Bluray player ever sees power again, it'll be because it's hooked to a different TV altogether--possibly in someone else's house.
And, of course, there's the gaming aspect of it. Of course, I loaded up with the Half-Life Orange Box, so I can play through the last few Half Life episodes. But it also came with Portal, which I like almost more than Half Life. The wife picked up Oblivion, too, but has spent more time playing Infamous--a more modern day RPG style game. However, the game that has charmed us more than any other thus far has been Little Big Planet. I adore any game where I can customize things to suit my wishes and LBP has that going for it by the bucketful. We've not done a lot of game buying and most of it has been from the used game section of Gamestop, but we really like the system. And the cool thing about being so behind in the gaming world is that there are SO many now classic games for us to catch up on.
Meanwhile, I had my third visit with Dr. Ralph a couple weeks back. My blood pressure was still good, but my occasional dalliances with bacon and cheese since my last visit have lingered in my system, for my cholesterol had risen above recommended levels again. It's still not at the boo scary level it had been, but it was enough that Dr. Ralph upped my intake of Crestor to 10 mg a day. Which, I guess, means for the time being I'm still a slave to big pharm. And big turkey.
Showing posts with label Tales from the Lost Months. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tales from the Lost Months. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
TFTLM: Got Them Soul Coughing Video Game Addict Blues (Part 4)
Before the wife finished with the old company, I decided to take what advantage I had left of our job insurance and get my eyes checked. So on a Tuesday in August, I went for my eye exam at the same place I once swore I'd never set foot in again. The only reason I was going back on my vow and allowing my foot to land upon their floor again was because that office had done my wife a good turn a couple months back by seeing her after hours and with no appointment after a different optometrist flaked on the appointment my wife had made with her. Such good turns should be rewarded, I figured, so I gave them a second chance. And for my second chance, they did me a good turn.
The exam went well, I was seen quickly, initial testing done, eyes were dilated and while that was kicking in I was sent up to browse frames. I'd already decided that I would just stick with my current drill-mount rimless frames, as they've held up amazingly well despite repeated dog attacks. I expected the lady in the frames section (a different lady than Liz, though she's still around), to give me a hard sell on a new pair, but after asking me to put my regular frames back on my head, she agreed that they were the right style for my face and looked good, so there was no need for any change. Sweet. Only after I was ushered back into the chair did problems occur--not on the part of the office staff, but on the part of my eyes.
I began to suspect something might be amiss when the doctor spent a good five minutes examining the interior of my eyes. When he finished, he looked a bit concerned and asked if I'd had any problems with high blood pressure.
"Not that I know of," I said.
"Have you had your cholesterol checked recently?" he asked.
"No."
"Hmm," he said. He went on to explain that while there might not be a huge cause for worry just yet, there had been some definite change in the vessels within my eyes in the past year of the kind that wouldn't normally occur in a healthy individual. Arterial venous nicking, it's called. He recommended I see a doctor.
Now, I'll be first to admit that I've not exactly been in fantastic shape in the past year. I exercise every day, whether it's going to the gym or walking the dogs through our hillyass neighborhood, but my exercise regimen could not be described as rigorous. I can still make it up our gravity hill driveway with no breathing problems at all, but I don't spend a great deal of time on intense cardio otherwise.
So in I went to see Dr. Ralph, my wife's partner at her old clinic. Blood was tested and the results tallied. Not only did I have extremely high cholesterol, but it had tag-teamed with high blood pressure to put me in a very sorry state. I was instantly insulted that my own body had turned against me. I was also dead set against taking medication for it, because it was my firm believe that I could tackle the problem by adjusting my diet. The way I saw it, I'd practically been existing on bacon and cheese and bacon-wrapped cheese for months. Surely if I dropped red meat, pork and dairy from my diet, everything would even back out and then I could reintroduce my favorites slowly. I mentioned this plan to Dr. Ralph and he agreed that it was solid enough, but suggested we try me out on a daily intake of 5 mg of Crestor as a backup and try and lose some weight. According to him, for my height I was ideally supposed to weigh 165. I explained that I hadn't weighed that since probably the 8th grade and that even at my thinnest in college I had only gotten down to 175 before falling off the cheese wagon. I haven't seen the underside of 200 since then, though I came within sight of it a couple of times. But if I put my mind to it, I could stick to a dietary program with little problem. He told me to do that and if the blood pressure didn't come down some, he'd put me on lisinopril to help out. If everything came down with Crestor and diet, we could talk about ditching meds altogether. His point to me was that these conditions were likely inherited, as evidenced by my Papaw, who was thinner than Kate Beckinsale and had 3 heart attacks before one finally got the upper hand on him. For folks who had genetics going against them, AND were fatasses like myself, drugs such as Crestor were tools to even the odds. This made sense, so grudgingly I agreed.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
So in I went to see Dr. Ralph, my wife's partner at her old clinic. Blood was tested and the results tallied. Not only did I have extremely high cholesterol, but it had tag-teamed with high blood pressure to put me in a very sorry state. I was instantly insulted that my own body had turned against me. I was also dead set against taking medication for it, because it was my firm believe that I could tackle the problem by adjusting my diet. The way I saw it, I'd practically been existing on bacon and cheese and bacon-wrapped cheese for months. Surely if I dropped red meat, pork and dairy from my diet, everything would even back out and then I could reintroduce my favorites slowly. I mentioned this plan to Dr. Ralph and he agreed that it was solid enough, but suggested we try me out on a daily intake of 5 mg of Crestor as a backup and try and lose some weight. According to him, for my height I was ideally supposed to weigh 165. I explained that I hadn't weighed that since probably the 8th grade and that even at my thinnest in college I had only gotten down to 175 before falling off the cheese wagon. I haven't seen the underside of 200 since then, though I came within sight of it a couple of times. But if I put my mind to it, I could stick to a dietary program with little problem. He told me to do that and if the blood pressure didn't come down some, he'd put me on lisinopril to help out. If everything came down with Crestor and diet, we could talk about ditching meds altogether. His point to me was that these conditions were likely inherited, as evidenced by my Papaw, who was thinner than Kate Beckinsale and had 3 heart attacks before one finally got the upper hand on him. For folks who had genetics going against them, AND were fatasses like myself, drugs such as Crestor were tools to even the odds. This made sense, so grudgingly I agreed.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Monday, February 28, 2011
TFTLM: Got Them Soul Coughing Video Game Addict Blues (Part 3)
It took several more weeks, but with diligent work and treatment the wife eventually did get over her pneumonia. The first couple of weeks back at work, she had to stop and take breathing treatments throughout the day, but her strength was returning. Meanwhile, she was enjoying Elder Scrolls for the PC.
And as for my cold, I got over it, too. At least, mostly. The odd thing about that, though, is that while my major snot-based cold symptoms diminished, the hacking cough never quite went away. It wasn't a constant irritant, but at least once a day I would be hit by the same violent tickle in the back of my throat and would then be sent into a fit of dry hacking coughs that had little to no effect on alleviating the tickle. The only successful ways I found to combat the tickle were gargling with salt water (which only worked half the time), using a Neti pot (or "Drowny pot" as I call it) to irrigate my sinus passages, or sucking on a lozenge. Usually these coughing attacks would happen in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, the coughing was so violent that I began to feel like a Little Big Planet sack person whose stitches were coming loose--just to bring things back to video games.
Toward the end of December, I began asking Dr. Wife what was up with this. The trouble with having a doctor for a wife, though, is that by the time she comes home she's fed up with having to deal with sick people and doesn't want to hear it. Her typical response to any medical questions from me becomes something akin to "I don't know. What are you asking me for?" After the cough continued for another week and a half, though, she suddenly realized the answer.
"Ohhhh! You have an ace cough."
"Do whuuut?" I said.
Let me back up.
One of the major things that's happened to our family in recent months has been a change in position for my wife. After a smidge over two years working for the hospital-based family clinic that brought us to Borderland in the first place, my wife resigned her job there in order to take a position with a local urgent care clinic. It was a decision made with a good deal of consideration, because it meant leaving the patients she had come to know for the past two years. But the hospital clinic job had been stressful and life-consuming to a ridiculous degree from near the beginning and it was taking a real toll on her. When she first interviewed for the position, she had made it clear to her future employers that she was not willing to devote all waking hours to the job, spending all her time on call at the hospital and never getting to spend time at home. She told them that if that was the reality of the job, they needed to part ways then and there. She'd been assured by them, though, that this wasn't the case, her call time would be minimal and she'd have plenty of time off. However, these assurances proved to be wild underestimations. She had two nights of call per week, which meant having to round on patients she admitted during those nights until they were discharged. So two nights on call technically, but days of after hours rounding beyond that in most cases. Then she was asked to take on call duties with a local psych hospital for one night a week, which led to similar after hours time when the docs there were only too happy to turf their patients to her. The draw of a new job with fewer responsibilities, only 14 shifts per month, and better pay to boot was incredibly attractive.
And, having been on the job for nearly six months, she can attest that the new place is pretty much as amazing in reality as it was on paper. She still has a few late nights when they get busy and she has to go over charts afterward, but she's very happy and a lot less stressed out. In fact, when former coworkers and patients ask if she misses the old job, her answer is always "No-hohohoho!"
And as for my cold, I got over it, too. At least, mostly. The odd thing about that, though, is that while my major snot-based cold symptoms diminished, the hacking cough never quite went away. It wasn't a constant irritant, but at least once a day I would be hit by the same violent tickle in the back of my throat and would then be sent into a fit of dry hacking coughs that had little to no effect on alleviating the tickle. The only successful ways I found to combat the tickle were gargling with salt water (which only worked half the time), using a Neti pot (or "Drowny pot" as I call it) to irrigate my sinus passages, or sucking on a lozenge. Usually these coughing attacks would happen in the middle of the night. Meanwhile, the coughing was so violent that I began to feel like a Little Big Planet sack person whose stitches were coming loose--just to bring things back to video games.
Toward the end of December, I began asking Dr. Wife what was up with this. The trouble with having a doctor for a wife, though, is that by the time she comes home she's fed up with having to deal with sick people and doesn't want to hear it. Her typical response to any medical questions from me becomes something akin to "I don't know. What are you asking me for?" After the cough continued for another week and a half, though, she suddenly realized the answer.
"Ohhhh! You have an ace cough."
"Do whuuut?" I said.
Let me back up.
One of the major things that's happened to our family in recent months has been a change in position for my wife. After a smidge over two years working for the hospital-based family clinic that brought us to Borderland in the first place, my wife resigned her job there in order to take a position with a local urgent care clinic. It was a decision made with a good deal of consideration, because it meant leaving the patients she had come to know for the past two years. But the hospital clinic job had been stressful and life-consuming to a ridiculous degree from near the beginning and it was taking a real toll on her. When she first interviewed for the position, she had made it clear to her future employers that she was not willing to devote all waking hours to the job, spending all her time on call at the hospital and never getting to spend time at home. She told them that if that was the reality of the job, they needed to part ways then and there. She'd been assured by them, though, that this wasn't the case, her call time would be minimal and she'd have plenty of time off. However, these assurances proved to be wild underestimations. She had two nights of call per week, which meant having to round on patients she admitted during those nights until they were discharged. So two nights on call technically, but days of after hours rounding beyond that in most cases. Then she was asked to take on call duties with a local psych hospital for one night a week, which led to similar after hours time when the docs there were only too happy to turf their patients to her. The draw of a new job with fewer responsibilities, only 14 shifts per month, and better pay to boot was incredibly attractive.
And, having been on the job for nearly six months, she can attest that the new place is pretty much as amazing in reality as it was on paper. She still has a few late nights when they get busy and she has to go over charts afterward, but she's very happy and a lot less stressed out. In fact, when former coworkers and patients ask if she misses the old job, her answer is always "No-hohohoho!"
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
TFTLM: Got Them Soul Coughing Video Game Addict Blues (Part 2)
Bi-Lateral, or double pneumonia is not fun and the wife had already had it for a month by the time she decided to go to the hospital for it. Her illness had actually started as a nasty chest cold, which she had been gifted with in mid-October after a small and infected child sneezed directly into her eyes, nose and open mouth while she was examining the kid. She knew instantly that whatever bug this little Typhoid Mary was carrying would soon be flourishing in her system, and none of the preventative medicines she began downing had much effect on it. Within days, the wife was seized with coughing fits which continued to worsen.
I've written on the topic of coughing and my near irrational hatred of it during the chronicle of my old "Liberry" patron Johnny Hacker. However, no matter how much blind fury I usually allot to people coughing around me, you just can't get upset at your own poor, sick wife when she's wracked with such uncontrollable fits. So when our conversations were interrupted by sudden fits, or when the coughing drowned out something on TV, I would try my damndest to keep from seeming irritated and, instead, would just rewind and start over. After all, that's why God made DVRs. But after nearly three weeks of the coughing, with no end seemingly in sight, I had to ask, "Do you think you might have pneumonia?" She'd had very similar symptoms when she developed walking pneumonia back during her residency and a miserable couple of months that had been. She assured me it was only a cold, or the flu at worst. However, after having difficulty breathing at work, she had the lab run some tests and learned that she did indeed have pneumonia. She started on antibiotics and steroids at once, all designed to strengthen her system and help fight this off. And for a while, she seemed to get a little better, but not as much as expected. She'd try to get rest on her days off, but as soon as she returned to work it seemed to start getting worse again.
The wife survived the Thanksgiving holidays, for the most part. She was still coughing and wheezing and taking barrels full of meds, but I thought she kept a good game face. Then, at around 3 a.m. on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, she woke me up to tell me she thought she needed to go to the ER. I was terrified, because her personality doesn't usually allow for even complaining about being sick, and she'd rather take a bullet than go to the ER, so for her to actually say she needed to go to the hospital meant things were truly not right with her. We talked things over, then woke up my mother-in-law to spread the terror. She recommended we talk to Dr. Ralph, the wife's doctor and her former partner at her old clinic, to make sure he concurred. This seemed wise.
Dr. Ralph seemed to think what was needed was to step up her meds to some different anti-biotics, more steroids and some breathing treatments. And for a day this seemed to help. Then, during her first day back at work from the holiday, I got a call from her mid-day telling me to come pick her up, cause she couldn't breathe and needed to go to the ER after all.
I practically panicked over this and raced over to her clinic only to have to sit and wait for 45 minutes while she saw a couple more patients and waited for her replacement doc to arrive. It was maddening. There I was in full on Emergency Get Her to the Hospital mode and I was completely shut down by the hold-time.
The old adage that doctors make the worst patients is very true. Not that the wife was at all a bad patient in terms of behavior, she's just completely out of her element when it comes to having nurses and other doctors poking and prodding and running tests on her. They all agreed, though, that she needed at least a day in the hospital, with 24/7 steroid, antibiotic and breathing treatment sessions to get her back on a healthy track. She was in for two and a half days and then had nine days of mandatory rest at home afterward. Meanwhile, I managed to pick up a nasty cold just by being in the ER with her, so I too soon had symptoms to deal with, including an obnoxious, uncontrollable, hacking cough of my own, one remarkably similar to that of Johnny Hacker. Serves me right for making fun of his, I guess.
On about day two of her down time, her Robert Jordan book beginning to bore her, the wife began wondering aloud if we might ought to investigate buying some sort of video game console.
"I knew it! You're addicted to Fable III!" I exclaimed. Oh, glory be, this would be my revenge for all those times she threatened to hurl my Half-Life CD out of a moving vehicle.
"No," she said. "I'm just bored."
Trouble was, if I was going to buy a console, it wasn't going to be an XBox. I don't really have anything against it as a system, but Playstation 3's advantage for me is that I have more friends who own one and it's online component is free. Unfortunately, Fable III isn't made for PS3. So instead of seriously shopping for a gaming system, we popped by the local GameStop and asked them what PC games they had that were similar to Fable. They passed over Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for PC. It was cheap enough, so we bought it and the wife spent a goodly chunk of her convalescence exploring the fantasy realms offered by it, the soothing tones of Patrick Stewart welcoming her into its embrace.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
I've written on the topic of coughing and my near irrational hatred of it during the chronicle of my old "Liberry" patron Johnny Hacker. However, no matter how much blind fury I usually allot to people coughing around me, you just can't get upset at your own poor, sick wife when she's wracked with such uncontrollable fits. So when our conversations were interrupted by sudden fits, or when the coughing drowned out something on TV, I would try my damndest to keep from seeming irritated and, instead, would just rewind and start over. After all, that's why God made DVRs. But after nearly three weeks of the coughing, with no end seemingly in sight, I had to ask, "Do you think you might have pneumonia?" She'd had very similar symptoms when she developed walking pneumonia back during her residency and a miserable couple of months that had been. She assured me it was only a cold, or the flu at worst. However, after having difficulty breathing at work, she had the lab run some tests and learned that she did indeed have pneumonia. She started on antibiotics and steroids at once, all designed to strengthen her system and help fight this off. And for a while, she seemed to get a little better, but not as much as expected. She'd try to get rest on her days off, but as soon as she returned to work it seemed to start getting worse again.
The wife survived the Thanksgiving holidays, for the most part. She was still coughing and wheezing and taking barrels full of meds, but I thought she kept a good game face. Then, at around 3 a.m. on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, she woke me up to tell me she thought she needed to go to the ER. I was terrified, because her personality doesn't usually allow for even complaining about being sick, and she'd rather take a bullet than go to the ER, so for her to actually say she needed to go to the hospital meant things were truly not right with her. We talked things over, then woke up my mother-in-law to spread the terror. She recommended we talk to Dr. Ralph, the wife's doctor and her former partner at her old clinic, to make sure he concurred. This seemed wise.
Dr. Ralph seemed to think what was needed was to step up her meds to some different anti-biotics, more steroids and some breathing treatments. And for a day this seemed to help. Then, during her first day back at work from the holiday, I got a call from her mid-day telling me to come pick her up, cause she couldn't breathe and needed to go to the ER after all.
I practically panicked over this and raced over to her clinic only to have to sit and wait for 45 minutes while she saw a couple more patients and waited for her replacement doc to arrive. It was maddening. There I was in full on Emergency Get Her to the Hospital mode and I was completely shut down by the hold-time.
The old adage that doctors make the worst patients is very true. Not that the wife was at all a bad patient in terms of behavior, she's just completely out of her element when it comes to having nurses and other doctors poking and prodding and running tests on her. They all agreed, though, that she needed at least a day in the hospital, with 24/7 steroid, antibiotic and breathing treatment sessions to get her back on a healthy track. She was in for two and a half days and then had nine days of mandatory rest at home afterward. Meanwhile, I managed to pick up a nasty cold just by being in the ER with her, so I too soon had symptoms to deal with, including an obnoxious, uncontrollable, hacking cough of my own, one remarkably similar to that of Johnny Hacker. Serves me right for making fun of his, I guess.
On about day two of her down time, her Robert Jordan book beginning to bore her, the wife began wondering aloud if we might ought to investigate buying some sort of video game console.
"I knew it! You're addicted to Fable III!" I exclaimed. Oh, glory be, this would be my revenge for all those times she threatened to hurl my Half-Life CD out of a moving vehicle.
"No," she said. "I'm just bored."
Trouble was, if I was going to buy a console, it wasn't going to be an XBox. I don't really have anything against it as a system, but Playstation 3's advantage for me is that I have more friends who own one and it's online component is free. Unfortunately, Fable III isn't made for PS3. So instead of seriously shopping for a gaming system, we popped by the local GameStop and asked them what PC games they had that were similar to Fable. They passed over Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for PC. It was cheap enough, so we bought it and the wife spent a goodly chunk of her convalescence exploring the fantasy realms offered by it, the soothing tones of Patrick Stewart welcoming her into its embrace.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Got Them Soul Coughing Video Game Addict Blues (Part 1)
One of the questions asked of me before I jumpstarted this blog again was whether or not my 5 month absence was due to being addicted to World of Warcraft. My answer was "No," but with the caveat that there had been an increase in video game activity around Chez Juice.
As I've mentioned in a previous story here, back at Thanksgiving we had a WHOLE MESS of people at our place. For Thanksgiving day we had family, friends, inlaws, outlaws, and all but one of our five godchildren under our roof. In total, we housed eleven folks, beyond ourselves and had an absolute blast doing it. Most of the actual family part was on the wife's side, but I represented too by importing from Mississippi my buddy Joe, his wife Leigh Ann, his son Jonah and his brand new baby Rhys to join the fun. Between my wife, her mom, her sister, her sister's daughter and our niece Kayley taking turns, Joe and Leigh Ann hardly had to touch their baby the whole time.
Since the Borderland area isn't exactly an exciting place and the weather wasn't cooperating enough for us to travel to some of the more beautiful places in the area, and since no one in the family had any desire to do black Friday shopping, I had worried there would be too much downtime for folks with not enough to do. Ahead of time, I requested that Joe and my brother-in-law Jim bring their respective gaming consoles, which we set up on two different TVs. Joe is an avid PS3 guy, but Jim swears by the XBox 360. Leaving off one of the 1st gen Game Boys from the early `90s, I've not owned an honest to goodness gaming console since the Atari 2600, like 28 years ago. As you can see, I'm not a huge video game guy.
Don't get me wrong, I do like video games, but I tend to only play them on PC and not all that often. In 1999, the wife (then the fiance) bought me a copy of Half-Life for PC and then spent years regretting it. I played that game all the way through several times over before branching out into the spin-off sequels and generally loving the universe it set up. Unfortunately, by the time Half Life 2 and subsequent episodes were released, my computer had become just obsolete enough that it could only run the games for a few minutes before crashing. I eventually upgraded my video card (between Half Life 2 and Half Life 2 Episode 1), but the technology had jumped again so I was back in the crashing boat.
I enjoy console games as well, but have never had access to them long enough to get any good. I also have some childhood issues with arcade games, due to their requirement that you spend lots of money in order to get enough practice to become good at them. My allowance money tended to go toward comics, and any spare change my dad had I knew would be better spent on food for us all. So I eschewed video games for much of my life. I also tend to resist playing them even at the console level because I don't want to look like an idiot, mashing all the wrong buttons. It's not that there are too many buttons on modern controllers, either, as there are far more keys to press in PC games. It's just a coordination problem adapting to those buttons.
While Jim was here with his XBox, the wife decided she was going to have a go at it. She's even worse with modern controllers than I am, but she was determined to have some fun. She played a zombie shooter game for a bit, then Jim suggested she switch to Fable III, which is a fantasy RPG style game. She loved it and would have spent the day playing it except she had to put down the controller long enough to go help cook. By the end of the visit, Jim was threatening to leave his XBox with us. He argued that the XBox Kinect had just been released, so he was thinking about buying a new XBox/Kinect bundle. We might even have taken him up on the offer, except that my sister-in-law had already alerted us that she'd already bought the Kinect as Jim's Christmas gift, so we knew we couldn't borrow his system out from under him.
Then, barely a day after everyone left from our holiday gathering, two ugly things happened. A) The wife went into video game withdrawal; and B) she was hospitalized with a wicked case of bi-lateral pneumonia.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
As I've mentioned in a previous story here, back at Thanksgiving we had a WHOLE MESS of people at our place. For Thanksgiving day we had family, friends, inlaws, outlaws, and all but one of our five godchildren under our roof. In total, we housed eleven folks, beyond ourselves and had an absolute blast doing it. Most of the actual family part was on the wife's side, but I represented too by importing from Mississippi my buddy Joe, his wife Leigh Ann, his son Jonah and his brand new baby Rhys to join the fun. Between my wife, her mom, her sister, her sister's daughter and our niece Kayley taking turns, Joe and Leigh Ann hardly had to touch their baby the whole time.
Since the Borderland area isn't exactly an exciting place and the weather wasn't cooperating enough for us to travel to some of the more beautiful places in the area, and since no one in the family had any desire to do black Friday shopping, I had worried there would be too much downtime for folks with not enough to do. Ahead of time, I requested that Joe and my brother-in-law Jim bring their respective gaming consoles, which we set up on two different TVs. Joe is an avid PS3 guy, but Jim swears by the XBox 360. Leaving off one of the 1st gen Game Boys from the early `90s, I've not owned an honest to goodness gaming console since the Atari 2600, like 28 years ago. As you can see, I'm not a huge video game guy.
Don't get me wrong, I do like video games, but I tend to only play them on PC and not all that often. In 1999, the wife (then the fiance) bought me a copy of Half-Life for PC and then spent years regretting it. I played that game all the way through several times over before branching out into the spin-off sequels and generally loving the universe it set up. Unfortunately, by the time Half Life 2 and subsequent episodes were released, my computer had become just obsolete enough that it could only run the games for a few minutes before crashing. I eventually upgraded my video card (between Half Life 2 and Half Life 2 Episode 1), but the technology had jumped again so I was back in the crashing boat.
I enjoy console games as well, but have never had access to them long enough to get any good. I also have some childhood issues with arcade games, due to their requirement that you spend lots of money in order to get enough practice to become good at them. My allowance money tended to go toward comics, and any spare change my dad had I knew would be better spent on food for us all. So I eschewed video games for much of my life. I also tend to resist playing them even at the console level because I don't want to look like an idiot, mashing all the wrong buttons. It's not that there are too many buttons on modern controllers, either, as there are far more keys to press in PC games. It's just a coordination problem adapting to those buttons.
While Jim was here with his XBox, the wife decided she was going to have a go at it. She's even worse with modern controllers than I am, but she was determined to have some fun. She played a zombie shooter game for a bit, then Jim suggested she switch to Fable III, which is a fantasy RPG style game. She loved it and would have spent the day playing it except she had to put down the controller long enough to go help cook. By the end of the visit, Jim was threatening to leave his XBox with us. He argued that the XBox Kinect had just been released, so he was thinking about buying a new XBox/Kinect bundle. We might even have taken him up on the offer, except that my sister-in-law had already alerted us that she'd already bought the Kinect as Jim's Christmas gift, so we knew we couldn't borrow his system out from under him.
Then, barely a day after everyone left from our holiday gathering, two ugly things happened. A) The wife went into video game withdrawal; and B) she was hospitalized with a wicked case of bi-lateral pneumonia.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
TFTLM: Dishin' It Up 2.0 (Another Cautionary Tale) Part IV
After giving myself a while to cool down from my call to Dish Network Internationale, I manned up and phoned their number again. This time the American call centers were apparently awake, for I was connected to someone right away. Not only did they listen to my tale of woe, but they seemed concerned about it. They heard my final pleas for them to just send someone, ANYONE, from the actual Dish Network regional office to tell me what was really going on. Please, please, for the love of God, don't farm it out to sub-contractors again. I don't know if it was the frustration and desperation in my voice, or that they had a gander at just how long this ordeal had been going on in the notes, but they said they would help. The rep put me on hold long enough to call the local office themselves and then came back to let me know that someone would be phoning me within half an hour with news about my case.
Maybe, I thought, they would actually connect me with Dish Dude #2, the guy who'd given us the most hope about ever getting HD and local channels out of them. Did I dare hope to dream?
A half hour passed. Then three more hours passed and I’d still heard nothing from Dish. I wasn't really surprised that they hadn't called back when promised, as the national office had made promises of calls from the regional office before. I decided to call and remind them.
When I phoned Dish back, an odd thing happened. Normally, the automated voice at the beginning of the call quotes my own phone number to me and thanks me before cheerfully saying, "Oh, I see you are one of our best customers. Here. Let me connect you." This time, the auto-voice quoted to me the wrong phone number. It got the area code and the first three digits right, but said the last four were “0000.” I didn’t understand this, nor did I immediately realize the ramifications of it, for I was distracted by the soothing tones of being told I was one of their best customers.
I managed to keep my cool once a rep came on the line. But I did stress to the guy how frustrated I was at the situation, especially how irritating it was that I’d not been called back when I’d been told I would. The Dish rep seemed very skilled at dealing with end-of-their-rope customers. He had a look through the record, saw the failed visit that morning, the calls to India and the report that the local office was on the case. He said that according to what he could see, they were going to send someone out for a fourth opinion, though he wasn’t certain when exactly. He said he would send the local office another note asking them to call me ASAP. This at least seemed positive, so I hung up semi-appeased.
While I was out running errands that afternoon, the wife called me on my cell.
“Dish Network is here,” she said.
“Is it another sub-contractor?”
“No, he’s in a Dish truck,” she said. “He said he’s been trying to find our house for an hour, but couldn’t call us, cause our number’s disconnected.”
“What?”
“He’s been calling the wrong number, though,” she said. And then she repeated back the correct first six digits followed by “0000.”
I was instantly seething, realizing what had happened. Someone with access to our Dish Network account had zeroed out our phone number at some point during the day. It hadn't happened before that day, because every other installation tech up to and including Dish Dude #3 that morning had had no problems in calling ahead before they arrived. So the zeroing out had happened sometime between DD#3’s departure and that afternoon. Furthermore, my suspicion was that the zeroer was likely not a resident of the United States.
Now, despite my frustration with them, I really hadn’t been that bad with the Indian reps I’d spoken with earlier. Not by ugly American standards. I’d only raised my voice a little, but had never lost my temper with them, as I’ve been known to do with actual American DirecTV reps in the past. But my frustration with the situation had certainly been evident by not only my tone but also by the fact that I flat out told them I was very frustrated with the situation. Who knows? Maybe one of them was actually listening in when I thought I was on hold and had heard me whispering to the wife about being on the phone with EFFing India again. Perhaps they might have taken offense at that and made certain assumptions as to my character. One might see how this could have been perceived as mildly racist, when it was only mildly bigoted--and that bigotry specifically directed against Indian Call Centers and not the Indian people themselves.
I drove home to find Dish Dude #4 hard at work installing the new system. He was impressive before I'd even introduced myself in that he was at least a head taller than me and I suspected his use of the ladder was only one of formality.
"And... everything's going okay?" I asked him hesitantly. He said it was. "And the dish has line of sight?" I added. He said it did. It was a clear shot right from the edge of the roof. He didn't go so far as to bad mouth Dish Dudes #1 and #3, or anything, but it seemed clear from his manner who the superior installation techs were and what sort of vehicles they drove.
While Dish Dude #4 was still installing our system, I fired up the Dish website and confirmed that both our home phone and cell phone numbers had been zeroed out. This meant no one from Dish had been able to contact us that afternoon and Dish Dude #4 really REALLY had no chance at contacting us while driving around our neighborhood, looking for our unmarked cul-de-sac and barely marked house. According to what he told us when he'd finished the install, he’d eventually had to phone his supervisor, the much sought-after Dish Dude #2, to get directions on how to find us.
Once the dish was installed, the lines run to the house connector, the interior lines hooked to the TV and the satellite link established, DD#4 fired her up and, blammo, we had amazing-looking high definition TV complete with local channels. It was a thing of beauty. I nearly wept.
We felt so grateful to him for giving us what we had thought was probably impossible. We asked him if there was anyone we could call to let them know he did such a great job--a Dish Dude Attaboy Hotline, if you will. He just shrugged and humbly said, no. He was just doing his job. Then he walked into the sunset, his tools at his side, his tall form casting a long shadow behind him, safe in his role as one of Dish Network's Technician All Stars. Okay, that last sentence was bullshit, cause the house was blocking the sunset. But he did leave and we did think of him as a mighty servant of goodness and justice and high definition television.
Now, after a couple months of using the new Dish Network system, I can say it may be the single-most impressive piece of television technology I've ever owned. Whereas our old system, impressive though it was, allowed us 100 hours of recording time in its DVR, the new system has around 345 hours available--and thems HD hours! And we now have local channels! Which, after nine years without them, I still haven't gotten into a habit of watching much, but we have them. Including PBS! Now I can also not watch Masterpiece Theater and lots of educational programming that I've been failing to see. And the marriage between the Dish system and the new HD TV is a lasting and beautiful thing. If I gave a crap about sports, it would be the perfect vehicle to view them. And if I had a video game system it would...
...ohhhhhh, but that's a story for another time.
Reality Break: since starting this story, the middle east has done blowed up with protest and turmoil (at least more than usual). Don't know yet how it's all going to shake out, but we certainly live in strange and interesting times.
Maybe, I thought, they would actually connect me with Dish Dude #2, the guy who'd given us the most hope about ever getting HD and local channels out of them. Did I dare hope to dream?
A half hour passed. Then three more hours passed and I’d still heard nothing from Dish. I wasn't really surprised that they hadn't called back when promised, as the national office had made promises of calls from the regional office before. I decided to call and remind them.
When I phoned Dish back, an odd thing happened. Normally, the automated voice at the beginning of the call quotes my own phone number to me and thanks me before cheerfully saying, "Oh, I see you are one of our best customers. Here. Let me connect you." This time, the auto-voice quoted to me the wrong phone number. It got the area code and the first three digits right, but said the last four were “0000.” I didn’t understand this, nor did I immediately realize the ramifications of it, for I was distracted by the soothing tones of being told I was one of their best customers.
I managed to keep my cool once a rep came on the line. But I did stress to the guy how frustrated I was at the situation, especially how irritating it was that I’d not been called back when I’d been told I would. The Dish rep seemed very skilled at dealing with end-of-their-rope customers. He had a look through the record, saw the failed visit that morning, the calls to India and the report that the local office was on the case. He said that according to what he could see, they were going to send someone out for a fourth opinion, though he wasn’t certain when exactly. He said he would send the local office another note asking them to call me ASAP. This at least seemed positive, so I hung up semi-appeased.
While I was out running errands that afternoon, the wife called me on my cell.
“Dish Network is here,” she said.
“Is it another sub-contractor?”
“No, he’s in a Dish truck,” she said. “He said he’s been trying to find our house for an hour, but couldn’t call us, cause our number’s disconnected.”
“What?”
“He’s been calling the wrong number, though,” she said. And then she repeated back the correct first six digits followed by “0000.”
I was instantly seething, realizing what had happened. Someone with access to our Dish Network account had zeroed out our phone number at some point during the day. It hadn't happened before that day, because every other installation tech up to and including Dish Dude #3 that morning had had no problems in calling ahead before they arrived. So the zeroing out had happened sometime between DD#3’s departure and that afternoon. Furthermore, my suspicion was that the zeroer was likely not a resident of the United States.
Now, despite my frustration with them, I really hadn’t been that bad with the Indian reps I’d spoken with earlier. Not by ugly American standards. I’d only raised my voice a little, but had never lost my temper with them, as I’ve been known to do with actual American DirecTV reps in the past. But my frustration with the situation had certainly been evident by not only my tone but also by the fact that I flat out told them I was very frustrated with the situation. Who knows? Maybe one of them was actually listening in when I thought I was on hold and had heard me whispering to the wife about being on the phone with EFFing India again. Perhaps they might have taken offense at that and made certain assumptions as to my character. One might see how this could have been perceived as mildly racist, when it was only mildly bigoted--and that bigotry specifically directed against Indian Call Centers and not the Indian people themselves.
I drove home to find Dish Dude #4 hard at work installing the new system. He was impressive before I'd even introduced myself in that he was at least a head taller than me and I suspected his use of the ladder was only one of formality.
"And... everything's going okay?" I asked him hesitantly. He said it was. "And the dish has line of sight?" I added. He said it did. It was a clear shot right from the edge of the roof. He didn't go so far as to bad mouth Dish Dudes #1 and #3, or anything, but it seemed clear from his manner who the superior installation techs were and what sort of vehicles they drove.
While Dish Dude #4 was still installing our system, I fired up the Dish website and confirmed that both our home phone and cell phone numbers had been zeroed out. This meant no one from Dish had been able to contact us that afternoon and Dish Dude #4 really REALLY had no chance at contacting us while driving around our neighborhood, looking for our unmarked cul-de-sac and barely marked house. According to what he told us when he'd finished the install, he’d eventually had to phone his supervisor, the much sought-after Dish Dude #2, to get directions on how to find us.
Once the dish was installed, the lines run to the house connector, the interior lines hooked to the TV and the satellite link established, DD#4 fired her up and, blammo, we had amazing-looking high definition TV complete with local channels. It was a thing of beauty. I nearly wept.
We felt so grateful to him for giving us what we had thought was probably impossible. We asked him if there was anyone we could call to let them know he did such a great job--a Dish Dude Attaboy Hotline, if you will. He just shrugged and humbly said, no. He was just doing his job. Then he walked into the sunset, his tools at his side, his tall form casting a long shadow behind him, safe in his role as one of Dish Network's Technician All Stars. Okay, that last sentence was bullshit, cause the house was blocking the sunset. But he did leave and we did think of him as a mighty servant of goodness and justice and high definition television.
Now, after a couple months of using the new Dish Network system, I can say it may be the single-most impressive piece of television technology I've ever owned. Whereas our old system, impressive though it was, allowed us 100 hours of recording time in its DVR, the new system has around 345 hours available--and thems HD hours! And we now have local channels! Which, after nine years without them, I still haven't gotten into a habit of watching much, but we have them. Including PBS! Now I can also not watch Masterpiece Theater and lots of educational programming that I've been failing to see. And the marriage between the Dish system and the new HD TV is a lasting and beautiful thing. If I gave a crap about sports, it would be the perfect vehicle to view them. And if I had a video game system it would...
...ohhhhhh, but that's a story for another time.
Reality Break: since starting this story, the middle east has done blowed up with protest and turmoil (at least more than usual). Don't know yet how it's all going to shake out, but we certainly live in strange and interesting times.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
TFTLM: Dishin' It Up 2.0 (Another Cautionary Tale) Part III
Our satellite service verbally assured and installation ordered, we were delighted when on Thursday we received a call from Dish Dude #3 asking for directions to our house. (Foreshadowing continues.) We gave him said directions and he arrived driving a civilian vehicle. (Red flag red flag!)
We led him to the spot on the roof where Dish Dude #2 had said we could have the dish installed, no problem. DD #3 had barely raised his doohickey to his eyes when he declared that the roof mount was impossible. Furthermore, upon a brief scouting mission, he declared that there were no other locations on the property that could work, save for the middle of the back yard. We inquired as to why DD#2, who was a field manager from Dish Network central, had declared the roof mount "an easy job," yet it was somehow now impossible? DD#3 continued to stress that he had no control over what anyone else said, but he was looking at it himself and the roof would not work. There was no point in him even attempting an installation, because he’d just have to take it all back down again when it failed.
"You know, I used to work for DirecTV," the man began. "Have you thought about sw--"
"No!!" we said in unison. "DirecTV screwed us over hard and we swore we'd never do business with them again."
Dish Dude #3 said he understood.
We asked if he minded if we called Dish Network central to see if they could put us in touch with Dish Dude #2 so we could determine who was correct. For all we knew, DD#2 had been wrong, and he was definitely in the minority opinion. However, the majority opinion came from two sub-contractors, who allegedly ran at the first sign of trouble. We really wanted DD#2 to be right.
Naturally, the Dish Network phone tree process was especially slow. Usually, it recites to you your own phone number, then gives you an option to talk to someone right away and then you do. Somehow, though, despite my doing things like I had during my other 50 calls to them over the past couple of weeks, the quick connection didn’t work. My guess is that it was too early in the morning for most of their stateside call center offices to be in full gear yet, because once I did get into a hold queue for a representative my call seemed to have been routed to one of their call centers in India. I know this, not only from the distinctly Indian hold music that played as I waited for five minutes, but also from the heavy Indian accent of the agent I eventually was able to speak with.
I’m conflicted on the subject of Indian call centers. I mean, I saw Slumdog Millionaire along with the rest of you and part of me likes the notion that the transfer of a goodly percentage of the call center industry to India provides work for a lot of people, some of whom desperately need it. However, I also think there are plenty of folks in this country who are in desperate need of work. Also, while Indian call centers are usually adequate for most basic transactions (setting up accounts, etc.), when it comes to more complicated matters, their ability to help, in my repeated experience, breaks down. All evidence I've personally seen shows that stateside representatives have a leg up over those in foreign nations when it comes to handling complicated issues such as the ones that tend to happen to me. Granted, I've not had any particularly awful experiences with Indian call centers, but I’ve also never had any outstanding ones.
For instance, a few years ago, in the calls I made to both Direct TV and Dish Network during the events of my first satellite TV debacle, I was routed to India for the initial phases of many of those calls. After several such encounters, I realized that the ground-level representatives had neither the know-how nor authority to help me with my complicated problem, except when it came to their ability to transfer me to someone who might have the necessary powers. (This is actually true of both stateside and Indian call centers, but I tended to get mostly Indian ones during that debacle.) I quickly reached a point where I would start my part of the conversation by explaining that I already knew my problem was beyond their kin and just requesting that they go ahead and transfer my call to their Problem Customer Hotline. Did any of these reps ever listen? Nope. Not a one. I'm sure they were acting on policy, but they always insisted on plunging ahead and have me explain the whole lengthy mess of a story to them (which just got longer with each passing representative). Only then would they realize their own powerless nature to resolve my concern and would finally transfer me to the Problem Customer Hotline as I originally asked. A whole lot of my time and their time (i.e. their company's time and money) was repeatedly wasted, which, if any lurkers from Dish or Direct are still reading, would be a fine thing to pass on to the powers that be looking to make improvements.
The Indian operator I eventually spoke with this time was no exception to the above scenario. She went through the standard procedures of helping me, but I knew already that my goal of learning the identity of Dish Dude #2, let alone speaking to him, let alone doing anything about whether or not I could have a dish in the first place, was outside the realm of her power. (So, really, I should have just hung up and tried again.) I had to explain the situation with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd opinions we'd had and how they conflicted. Had to explain it twice, I did, but I was still pretty sure she didn't get it. She then put me on hold for more Indian music, then came back and proved my suspicion right by demonstrating a complete misunderstanding of the situation. I asked if there was any way she could just transfer my call to the local Dish Office in my state, as I suspected they would be better-equipped to help me. Nope. She plunged right on, putting me on hold again while she consulted with superiors.
Meanwhile, Dish Dude #3, had called his own boss at sub-contractor central, who told him it was completely his call to make on the install and he didn’t have to do it. He left our property LONG before the rep came back on to tell me she would be happy to schedule me a second opinion about my dish set up.
“No!” I said, a little louder than maybe I should have. “That’s what I’ve been saying all this time. We’ve already HAD a second opinion. We’ve had three opinions. We’re simply trying to confirm which of the three opinions is correct!”
More hold time and Indian music followed and then the rep came back to say she was going to have to transfer me to another department. Finally!
One transfer later and a different though still distinctly Indian accent came on the line. She immediately asked me to hold while she researched the account.
“Still talking to India,” I whispered to the wife, confident that the rep couldn’t hear me.
“Hang up,” the wife whispered back. She had a point. I should have just hung up then and called back hoping to get a call center in the states, but I thought that would be rude. So I waited, then had to try and explain the situation all over again when the rep came back. The new rep didn’t really understand either and offered to schedule more second opinions. I managed not to lose my shit with her, tried to explain it all again, then spent more time on hold. When she came back, her ultimate solution was to offer to give me phone numbers for some satellite installation companies in my area, in case I wanted one of them to have a go at the job.
“Wait a second,” I said. “I thought I was talking to Dish Network.”
“You are, sir.”
I told her I didn't want other numbers for other satellite installation services. I called Dish Network because I wanted to talk to the people who were directly responsible for installing my system to inquire whether or not they could do the job. Furthermore, if she truly worked for Dish Network, I didn't see why she couldn't simply transfer me to my local central branch so that I could pursue my quest to find out if their area manager was right in the first place. She didn’t know either. Rather than risk becoming more agitated than I already was. I thanked her for her time and hung up the phone--which is what I should have done nearly half an hour earlier.
(TO BE CONCLUDED...)
We led him to the spot on the roof where Dish Dude #2 had said we could have the dish installed, no problem. DD #3 had barely raised his doohickey to his eyes when he declared that the roof mount was impossible. Furthermore, upon a brief scouting mission, he declared that there were no other locations on the property that could work, save for the middle of the back yard. We inquired as to why DD#2, who was a field manager from Dish Network central, had declared the roof mount "an easy job," yet it was somehow now impossible? DD#3 continued to stress that he had no control over what anyone else said, but he was looking at it himself and the roof would not work. There was no point in him even attempting an installation, because he’d just have to take it all back down again when it failed.
"You know, I used to work for DirecTV," the man began. "Have you thought about sw--"
"No!!" we said in unison. "DirecTV screwed us over hard and we swore we'd never do business with them again."
Dish Dude #3 said he understood.
We asked if he minded if we called Dish Network central to see if they could put us in touch with Dish Dude #2 so we could determine who was correct. For all we knew, DD#2 had been wrong, and he was definitely in the minority opinion. However, the majority opinion came from two sub-contractors, who allegedly ran at the first sign of trouble. We really wanted DD#2 to be right.
Naturally, the Dish Network phone tree process was especially slow. Usually, it recites to you your own phone number, then gives you an option to talk to someone right away and then you do. Somehow, though, despite my doing things like I had during my other 50 calls to them over the past couple of weeks, the quick connection didn’t work. My guess is that it was too early in the morning for most of their stateside call center offices to be in full gear yet, because once I did get into a hold queue for a representative my call seemed to have been routed to one of their call centers in India. I know this, not only from the distinctly Indian hold music that played as I waited for five minutes, but also from the heavy Indian accent of the agent I eventually was able to speak with.
I’m conflicted on the subject of Indian call centers. I mean, I saw Slumdog Millionaire along with the rest of you and part of me likes the notion that the transfer of a goodly percentage of the call center industry to India provides work for a lot of people, some of whom desperately need it. However, I also think there are plenty of folks in this country who are in desperate need of work. Also, while Indian call centers are usually adequate for most basic transactions (setting up accounts, etc.), when it comes to more complicated matters, their ability to help, in my repeated experience, breaks down. All evidence I've personally seen shows that stateside representatives have a leg up over those in foreign nations when it comes to handling complicated issues such as the ones that tend to happen to me. Granted, I've not had any particularly awful experiences with Indian call centers, but I’ve also never had any outstanding ones.
For instance, a few years ago, in the calls I made to both Direct TV and Dish Network during the events of my first satellite TV debacle, I was routed to India for the initial phases of many of those calls. After several such encounters, I realized that the ground-level representatives had neither the know-how nor authority to help me with my complicated problem, except when it came to their ability to transfer me to someone who might have the necessary powers. (This is actually true of both stateside and Indian call centers, but I tended to get mostly Indian ones during that debacle.) I quickly reached a point where I would start my part of the conversation by explaining that I already knew my problem was beyond their kin and just requesting that they go ahead and transfer my call to their Problem Customer Hotline. Did any of these reps ever listen? Nope. Not a one. I'm sure they were acting on policy, but they always insisted on plunging ahead and have me explain the whole lengthy mess of a story to them (which just got longer with each passing representative). Only then would they realize their own powerless nature to resolve my concern and would finally transfer me to the Problem Customer Hotline as I originally asked. A whole lot of my time and their time (i.e. their company's time and money) was repeatedly wasted, which, if any lurkers from Dish or Direct are still reading, would be a fine thing to pass on to the powers that be looking to make improvements.
The Indian operator I eventually spoke with this time was no exception to the above scenario. She went through the standard procedures of helping me, but I knew already that my goal of learning the identity of Dish Dude #2, let alone speaking to him, let alone doing anything about whether or not I could have a dish in the first place, was outside the realm of her power. (So, really, I should have just hung up and tried again.) I had to explain the situation with the 1st, 2nd and 3rd opinions we'd had and how they conflicted. Had to explain it twice, I did, but I was still pretty sure she didn't get it. She then put me on hold for more Indian music, then came back and proved my suspicion right by demonstrating a complete misunderstanding of the situation. I asked if there was any way she could just transfer my call to the local Dish Office in my state, as I suspected they would be better-equipped to help me. Nope. She plunged right on, putting me on hold again while she consulted with superiors.
Meanwhile, Dish Dude #3, had called his own boss at sub-contractor central, who told him it was completely his call to make on the install and he didn’t have to do it. He left our property LONG before the rep came back on to tell me she would be happy to schedule me a second opinion about my dish set up.
“No!” I said, a little louder than maybe I should have. “That’s what I’ve been saying all this time. We’ve already HAD a second opinion. We’ve had three opinions. We’re simply trying to confirm which of the three opinions is correct!”
More hold time and Indian music followed and then the rep came back to say she was going to have to transfer me to another department. Finally!
One transfer later and a different though still distinctly Indian accent came on the line. She immediately asked me to hold while she researched the account.
“Still talking to India,” I whispered to the wife, confident that the rep couldn’t hear me.
“Hang up,” the wife whispered back. She had a point. I should have just hung up then and called back hoping to get a call center in the states, but I thought that would be rude. So I waited, then had to try and explain the situation all over again when the rep came back. The new rep didn’t really understand either and offered to schedule more second opinions. I managed not to lose my shit with her, tried to explain it all again, then spent more time on hold. When she came back, her ultimate solution was to offer to give me phone numbers for some satellite installation companies in my area, in case I wanted one of them to have a go at the job.
“Wait a second,” I said. “I thought I was talking to Dish Network.”
“You are, sir.”
I told her I didn't want other numbers for other satellite installation services. I called Dish Network because I wanted to talk to the people who were directly responsible for installing my system to inquire whether or not they could do the job. Furthermore, if she truly worked for Dish Network, I didn't see why she couldn't simply transfer me to my local central branch so that I could pursue my quest to find out if their area manager was right in the first place. She didn’t know either. Rather than risk becoming more agitated than I already was. I thanked her for her time and hung up the phone--which is what I should have done nearly half an hour earlier.
(TO BE CONCLUDED...)
Monday, February 7, 2011
TFTLM: Dishin' It Up 2.0 (Another Cautionary Tale) Part II
The next day, the Dish Dude arrived to install the new system. He called ahead for directions to the house and then rolled on in, not in the usual Dish Network truck but what looked like a civilian vehicle. I felt kind of sorry for him, as there was something of a cold drizzle falling. Quickly, he delivered some bad news, though. First he announced that the location our old satellite dish was in was no longer good, as it was aimed at non HD/non local-channel satellites.
He scouted out our property, pointing a doohickey at the sky on occasion, before finally announcing we had no line of sight for the three satellites he needed at any point in our back yard. He then revised this to say that he “might” be able to get at least a partial signal from a point in the very middle of our back yard. I explained to him that this would not work, because if I allowed him to install in that spot I’d be the recipient of a dish and a divorce, cause the wife would NOT want a satellite dish in the middle of the yard. I told him we’d have to decline service and look into other options.
“You can get a second opinion, if you want,” he offered. This meant a different technician would come up and have a look, perhaps finding something this man could not. Seemed a long shot to me, but what could it hurt? I gave him the go-ahead to sign us up for the 2nd OP and he departed.
I investigated some of the other local HD programming options available in our area, including our cable company that already provides our phone and internet. They also do HD and DVR service, but while their website listed a whole bunch of channels, the tiers they had them arranged in didn’t make it at all clear which ones I’d actually be receiving. I called them up to ask and they seemed kind of cagey on the topic.
“Well, you’ll get the 75 channels we offer, plus around 15 HD channels,” the rep said.
“Does that include BBC America?” I asked, staring right at that listing on their website.
“Uh, no,” they said. “But we are doing a big upgrade mid-December, so you’ll probably get it then.”
“But your website says BBC America is now,” I said.
“Yeahhhhh, but in mid-December.”
This seemed lame. I also felt guilty about having to ditch Dish Network after all this time, particularly when they were finally offering me networks. Local cable had those too, but they also had fewer than half the channels Dish offered. I decided the second opinion from Dish was my favorite option, but kept cable as a backup.
When I called Dish to ask when the second opinion would happen, they said it would have to be scheduled by the local Dish dispatcher, but would probably occur at the earliest on the following Saturday. So no HD for Thanksgiving. Ah, well.
By the time our Thanksgiving guests arrived, I’d rigged the new TV to receive our current receiver’s signal by running coax cable from the receiver directly to the TV, rather than first through our home theater setup. I then patched audio cable from the TV to the home theater. It worked, but it looked like crap and was far from HD. It would probably have looked better using HDMI cables, but our old Dish receiver didn’t offer that as an option for output. We even tried watching Planet Earth on it, but something in my Jerry rigging made it look less than pristine, too, and it all just pissed me off.
PERSPECTIVE BREAK: Current Death Toll from Australian Flooding = 23.
Saturday and Sunday came, our guests departed, and we'd still had no call from the local Dish dispatcher. On Monday I phoned Dish central back, explained the situation and asked if they had heard anything further about when we would receive our second opinion. The Dish rep on the phone had looked at the notes in our account, seemed confused, and then said, “Oh, I see it here. Yes, I see the order for installation of an HD dish and HD receiver for Tuesday, November 23, between 8 and noon.”
“Uh, November 23 was last week,” I pointed out. The phone rep got quiet, then asked to put me on hold. He came back on the line to explain he was now contacting the local hub to find out what the situation truly was. My impression from his urgent tone was that people on his end of the line were now hell bent on getting this thing solved for me ASAP. And, when he returned, this seemed to be the case, because he said they could have a guy come out that very afternoon. Again, awesome!
The second Dish dude arrived in quick time, calling ahead for directions and pulling up in his sparkly Dish Network official vehicle. (You’ll note this is the second time I’ve mentioned a Dish Dude calling ahead for directions. It’s an important fact to note for foreshadowing purposes.) Dish Dude #2 also had a doohickey and immediately used it to find the same line of sight in the middle of the back yard, exactly where the first guy had. However, he also found some places in the front yard and, intriguingly, on the back part of the roof. The roof option was an option I liked a lot, as it was one that had already been suggested by the wife. Dish Dude #2 said it was not a problem and that the dish could fit right at the edge of our roof and have clear line of sight, winter or summer. When I asked him why the first Dish Dude hadn't been able to see this, he explained that DD#1 worked for a subcontractor satellite installation service and very often if a job seems at all challenging they’ll run the other way and leave it for the official types to clean up. He assured me that the roof mount was not only possible, but would be an easy job. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do the job himself because he was one of their field managers in charge of second opinions, so I’d have to order the installation part from Dish central.
I went in, immediately made the order and they said they’d send someone out on Thursday morning.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
He scouted out our property, pointing a doohickey at the sky on occasion, before finally announcing we had no line of sight for the three satellites he needed at any point in our back yard. He then revised this to say that he “might” be able to get at least a partial signal from a point in the very middle of our back yard. I explained to him that this would not work, because if I allowed him to install in that spot I’d be the recipient of a dish and a divorce, cause the wife would NOT want a satellite dish in the middle of the yard. I told him we’d have to decline service and look into other options.
“You can get a second opinion, if you want,” he offered. This meant a different technician would come up and have a look, perhaps finding something this man could not. Seemed a long shot to me, but what could it hurt? I gave him the go-ahead to sign us up for the 2nd OP and he departed.
I investigated some of the other local HD programming options available in our area, including our cable company that already provides our phone and internet. They also do HD and DVR service, but while their website listed a whole bunch of channels, the tiers they had them arranged in didn’t make it at all clear which ones I’d actually be receiving. I called them up to ask and they seemed kind of cagey on the topic.
“Well, you’ll get the 75 channels we offer, plus around 15 HD channels,” the rep said.
“Does that include BBC America?” I asked, staring right at that listing on their website.
“Uh, no,” they said. “But we are doing a big upgrade mid-December, so you’ll probably get it then.”
“But your website says BBC America is now,” I said.
“Yeahhhhh, but in mid-December.”
This seemed lame. I also felt guilty about having to ditch Dish Network after all this time, particularly when they were finally offering me networks. Local cable had those too, but they also had fewer than half the channels Dish offered. I decided the second opinion from Dish was my favorite option, but kept cable as a backup.
When I called Dish to ask when the second opinion would happen, they said it would have to be scheduled by the local Dish dispatcher, but would probably occur at the earliest on the following Saturday. So no HD for Thanksgiving. Ah, well.
By the time our Thanksgiving guests arrived, I’d rigged the new TV to receive our current receiver’s signal by running coax cable from the receiver directly to the TV, rather than first through our home theater setup. I then patched audio cable from the TV to the home theater. It worked, but it looked like crap and was far from HD. It would probably have looked better using HDMI cables, but our old Dish receiver didn’t offer that as an option for output. We even tried watching Planet Earth on it, but something in my Jerry rigging made it look less than pristine, too, and it all just pissed me off.
PERSPECTIVE BREAK: Current Death Toll from Australian Flooding = 23.
Saturday and Sunday came, our guests departed, and we'd still had no call from the local Dish dispatcher. On Monday I phoned Dish central back, explained the situation and asked if they had heard anything further about when we would receive our second opinion. The Dish rep on the phone had looked at the notes in our account, seemed confused, and then said, “Oh, I see it here. Yes, I see the order for installation of an HD dish and HD receiver for Tuesday, November 23, between 8 and noon.”
“Uh, November 23 was last week,” I pointed out. The phone rep got quiet, then asked to put me on hold. He came back on the line to explain he was now contacting the local hub to find out what the situation truly was. My impression from his urgent tone was that people on his end of the line were now hell bent on getting this thing solved for me ASAP. And, when he returned, this seemed to be the case, because he said they could have a guy come out that very afternoon. Again, awesome!
The second Dish dude arrived in quick time, calling ahead for directions and pulling up in his sparkly Dish Network official vehicle. (You’ll note this is the second time I’ve mentioned a Dish Dude calling ahead for directions. It’s an important fact to note for foreshadowing purposes.) Dish Dude #2 also had a doohickey and immediately used it to find the same line of sight in the middle of the back yard, exactly where the first guy had. However, he also found some places in the front yard and, intriguingly, on the back part of the roof. The roof option was an option I liked a lot, as it was one that had already been suggested by the wife. Dish Dude #2 said it was not a problem and that the dish could fit right at the edge of our roof and have clear line of sight, winter or summer. When I asked him why the first Dish Dude hadn't been able to see this, he explained that DD#1 worked for a subcontractor satellite installation service and very often if a job seems at all challenging they’ll run the other way and leave it for the official types to clean up. He assured me that the roof mount was not only possible, but would be an easy job. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do the job himself because he was one of their field managers in charge of second opinions, so I’d have to order the installation part from Dish central.
I went in, immediately made the order and they said they’d send someone out on Thursday morning.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Dishin' It Up 2.0 (Another Cautionary Tale) Part I
Before I start this, let me just note a few things: As of this writing, Australia is under water, Egypt is boiling over with protest, the nation of Malawi is considering outlawing farts, and famine, death, pestilence and war are ravaging the earth. A lot of shitty things are happening to a lot of people, much of it undeserved, and my paltry, first-world-white-guy problems amount to a tiny fraction of less than nothing in the big scary grand scheme of things. Yet, even in the face of all of the above, I’m still going to adjust my sac and complain about them anyway, cause they pissed me off at the time.
You’re welcome to read on, but please do so knowing that I am fully aware of what a colossal asshat I feel like for whining.
As some of you may know from my previous blog, my experience with satellite television services has been spotty over the past few years. See, we’ve been living in the boonies of a state known for its boonies for 8 or 9 years now. We have relied on Dish Network for our TV service for most of that and continue to be very pleased with them. Granted, we had some issues with satellite service in general, a few years ago, when the gub’mint’ told Dish Network they could no longer hand out access to network satellite feeds like they were cookies at a blood drive, we wound up losing almost all of our network TV access, save for Fox. We even briefly switched to Direct TV (MISTAAAAAAKE!!), who swore they’d be able to get us our networks back, then turned out to be a bunch of damned ass-sucking liars who we had to do mighty battle with for nearly an hour until they finally relented and gave us our money back without any early-disconnect fees. Win one for us and for Dish Network, who welcomed us back like the prodigal son. In short, were very happy being back with Dish Network. We love their DVR (rated one of the best on the market) and find the lack of actual local or distant network channels a small price to pay for the 250 other channels they offer, most of which we don’t watch either, but it’s nice that they’re there.
(So any of you Dish Network internet PR lurkers out there, who may have stumbled on this page after a morning of Googling your employer and are even now about to write me to ask if there's anything you can do, just know that I'm on your side, I'm not calling you out for anything and--SPOILERS--the situation was fully resolved and turns out good for Dish Network as a company in the end. Now, the installation subcontractors and the international call centers you guys tend to employ will be given no quarter from me here, so you might want to pass that much along to your bosses. Oh, and for any DirecTV lurkers reading, your lying company of filthy damned liars still sucks copious amounts of ass. In fact, I hear it's co-starring as the back-5th in Human Centipede 2. You may feel free to pass that along.)
A couple years back, we moved from the home in which the aforementioned adventures occurred to a new one a few counties away and took our Dish Network service with us. Since then, we’ve largely continued our nearly networkless existence without complaint. Sure, we had to watch LOST on ABC’s website and chose to wait for DVD sets of shows like The Office, Pushing Daisies, Scrubs and Community, but this too was not so bad. We still had the Simpsons and new episodes of Family Guy on Fox, so what did we care? Then, a few months back, our Fox disappeared. This too was not Dish Network's fault, as we were getting our distant network Fox service through All American Direct. I went through the usual waiver requests with them, to the tune of $10, but heard nothing and saw no channels return. Our networks, it seemed, were gone for good.
Shortly before Thanksgiving this year, the wife decided we needed a new TV. Our 27 inch JVC tube TV had served us well for most of our marriage, but the 15 plus people who were coming over to our house for Turkey Day were bringing at least 30 pairs of eyes with them and we didn’t want to cause them undue strain. We’ve been threatening to upgrade to an HDTV for a while, but saw no huge reason to rush into it. (Our only real regret for this came when Discovery would re-run Planet Earth--which is a-FRICKIN'-mazing in HD.) Given the go-ahead to proceed with TV purchase, I did my research and scouted one out at Sears.
Now, the story of how it is I finally came to be in possession of this quality television a full week and a half after I had been told it would be ready for me to pick up could be a tale all on its own. However, since it ended with me finally receiving it a day before guests began arriving, I’ll forgo telling it, cause I got no real beef with Sears.
Once in possession of this new 46” LCD wonder, I called Dish Network to see if they could hook me up with HD service before T-Day. Sears told me I could get free HD for life with them, which sounded nice. My expectation was still pretty low on getting it in time for Thanskgiving, cause it usually takes at least a couple of days to send someone out and I was sure I wasn’t the only one trying to sneak in new service before a holiday. However, Dish said that not only could they send someone out to install the HD receiver and dish the following day, but they’d throw in local network channels in HD as well, and indeed waive the usual $10 per month HD fee, giving me HD channels for life. Awesome!
PERSPECTIVE BREAK: current Egyptian riot death toll stands at 125.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
You’re welcome to read on, but please do so knowing that I am fully aware of what a colossal asshat I feel like for whining.
As some of you may know from my previous blog, my experience with satellite television services has been spotty over the past few years. See, we’ve been living in the boonies of a state known for its boonies for 8 or 9 years now. We have relied on Dish Network for our TV service for most of that and continue to be very pleased with them. Granted, we had some issues with satellite service in general, a few years ago, when the gub’mint’ told Dish Network they could no longer hand out access to network satellite feeds like they were cookies at a blood drive, we wound up losing almost all of our network TV access, save for Fox. We even briefly switched to Direct TV (MISTAAAAAAKE!!), who swore they’d be able to get us our networks back, then turned out to be a bunch of damned ass-sucking liars who we had to do mighty battle with for nearly an hour until they finally relented and gave us our money back without any early-disconnect fees. Win one for us and for Dish Network, who welcomed us back like the prodigal son. In short, were very happy being back with Dish Network. We love their DVR (rated one of the best on the market) and find the lack of actual local or distant network channels a small price to pay for the 250 other channels they offer, most of which we don’t watch either, but it’s nice that they’re there.
(So any of you Dish Network internet PR lurkers out there, who may have stumbled on this page after a morning of Googling your employer and are even now about to write me to ask if there's anything you can do, just know that I'm on your side, I'm not calling you out for anything and--SPOILERS--the situation was fully resolved and turns out good for Dish Network as a company in the end. Now, the installation subcontractors and the international call centers you guys tend to employ will be given no quarter from me here, so you might want to pass that much along to your bosses. Oh, and for any DirecTV lurkers reading, your lying company of filthy damned liars still sucks copious amounts of ass. In fact, I hear it's co-starring as the back-5th in Human Centipede 2. You may feel free to pass that along.)
A couple years back, we moved from the home in which the aforementioned adventures occurred to a new one a few counties away and took our Dish Network service with us. Since then, we’ve largely continued our nearly networkless existence without complaint. Sure, we had to watch LOST on ABC’s website and chose to wait for DVD sets of shows like The Office, Pushing Daisies, Scrubs and Community, but this too was not so bad. We still had the Simpsons and new episodes of Family Guy on Fox, so what did we care? Then, a few months back, our Fox disappeared. This too was not Dish Network's fault, as we were getting our distant network Fox service through All American Direct. I went through the usual waiver requests with them, to the tune of $10, but heard nothing and saw no channels return. Our networks, it seemed, were gone for good.
Shortly before Thanksgiving this year, the wife decided we needed a new TV. Our 27 inch JVC tube TV had served us well for most of our marriage, but the 15 plus people who were coming over to our house for Turkey Day were bringing at least 30 pairs of eyes with them and we didn’t want to cause them undue strain. We’ve been threatening to upgrade to an HDTV for a while, but saw no huge reason to rush into it. (Our only real regret for this came when Discovery would re-run Planet Earth--which is a-FRICKIN'-mazing in HD.) Given the go-ahead to proceed with TV purchase, I did my research and scouted one out at Sears.
Now, the story of how it is I finally came to be in possession of this quality television a full week and a half after I had been told it would be ready for me to pick up could be a tale all on its own. However, since it ended with me finally receiving it a day before guests began arriving, I’ll forgo telling it, cause I got no real beef with Sears.
Once in possession of this new 46” LCD wonder, I called Dish Network to see if they could hook me up with HD service before T-Day. Sears told me I could get free HD for life with them, which sounded nice. My expectation was still pretty low on getting it in time for Thanskgiving, cause it usually takes at least a couple of days to send someone out and I was sure I wasn’t the only one trying to sneak in new service before a holiday. However, Dish said that not only could they send someone out to install the HD receiver and dish the following day, but they’d throw in local network channels in HD as well, and indeed waive the usual $10 per month HD fee, giving me HD channels for life. Awesome!
PERSPECTIVE BREAK: current Egyptian riot death toll stands at 125.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Jury Duty Ice Road Trucking/Subaruing Blues (PART 7)
Upon hearing that King Subaru had received no notice about the insurance approval, I called my insurance company back, explained the whole thing to yet another rep and then asked why neither I nor King had been contacted as promised. The helpful and attentive agent (used with no sarcasm, as she was actually both) had a look in my record, saw everything I said documented and then she too wondered aloud why neither I nor King had been contacted. There was a brief moment in which the agent seemed to suggest that the supplemental had not actually been approved, but then she saw the note that it had (plus, probably a note saying I was likely to snap if unwisely told such a thing) and all seemed right. From what she was able to determine, less than a minute later, she had access to all the materials that needed faxing including, I confirmed, the much sought-after photocopy of the payment check for King Subaru. She said she’d FAX it right over and asked me to confirm the fax number.
“I have no idea,” I said. After all, I’ve never had cause to fax anybody in all this. I tried to look it up on King Subaru’s website, but it was not listed among the myriad of numbers they list.
“Well, I’ll just use this one,” the agent said. “It’s the one we have on file that we’ve been faxing things to all this time.”
A shudder of horror shot through me. This was about to turn into Barbara Turdmurkle faxing things to the wrong state all over again.
“No, really, I can call them and get the number, if you like. No problem at all,” I said.
She said, no, that it was fine. She had the number, so she'd just fax it over and put it to the attention of Mr. Loquacious in the body shop. After all it was the number they’d been using all along, right?
Yeah, but recent events heavily indicated a disconnect in fax communications between your two companies, I thought.
I tried explaining that King Subaru is a sprawling, multi-building complex and any fax sent to a central machine there would not likely be forwarded to the correct department with any speed at all. No, no. It would be fine, she said. I shouldn’t trouble myself.
I gave it a half hour of radio silence before calling King about it. Now, readers, you may want to sit down for this revelation: they’d had no faxes. I know. Shocking! The guy there, who was not Mr. Loquacious, said he was sitting right by the fax machine and nothing had come through for hours. He suggested this was some kind of ploy on insurance's part in order to keep from paying on time. I very nearly told him to shut the hell up, since he was talking to a guy who'd been defending his ass all morning, with no real just cause for doing so. Instead, I asked for his fax machine's number and called insurance back to tell them to start over. They were as shocked and appalled about the news of their earlier fax's failure as you'd expect.
This time it took only 20 minutes before King called me with the good news. My car had been released. Of course, there was then the matter of getting to King Subaru while at the same time leaving my wife’s car at her clinic, so she could drive it home. So I asked King Subaru to send a driver to meet me there and give me a lift over.
The driver showed up on time and rocketed me over, arriving a full 15 minutes before closing time. After finishing up the paperwork, the man who was not Mr. Loquacious said that there actually was a difference in the price he'd billed and the price that insurance had approved. But it was only $20, so he decided to just eat it. I told him that if I had only known that morning that I was going to have to do ALL the legwork for my insurance company, I could have just saved everyone a lot of time and done it all then. Or, better still, two days before. He smiled and nodded and handed me my keys.
The car drove great and got up the two major hills of my still icy neighborhood with hardly a fishtail. My driveway, however, said, “No, I don't think so.” I made it not even half way up it before the all wheel drive warning light began to shine and the car began sliding back down the hill until my braking finally slowed it. I had to turn around in the yard and leave it there, hoofing it up. The wife, too, could get no further during her arrival some hours later.
EPILOGUE
My in-laws came for Christmas Thursday night, and my father-in-law gave me one of the best early presents he could have: advice. “Maybe you should get your tires studded,” he said.
Now, I’d heard of studded tires before, but had no real inkling what this meant. My mental image was of little cones of rubber sticking out of the tires, like the Nazi Warwheel the Blackhawks used to fight in DC Comics. I’d never seen anything like that on the road, though. Turns out, studded tires look very much like regular tires that someone drove a series of nails into, all the way to the head. But I didn’t know that at this point.
Pa said that everybody back in Alaska gets studded tires during the winter months. Often, they have two complete sets of tires and trade out the studded set come spring thaw.
“You get your front tires studded, you’ll have no trouble getting up these hills,” he said.
I very much liked the sound of that. Why the hell hadn’t anyone told me about this before? This is the sort of thing that should be in a WV Handbook, given to you when you become a resident. It would fall somewhere between the chapters “Ramps and the Proper DeStankification There From” and “Moonshine: If you Have to Ask, You Already Drank Too Much.”
On Christmas Eve morning, after two more spectacular failures at getting up the driveway, I set out to buy a new set of studded front tires. Turned out, though, it was no good to get new front tires on an all wheel drive car with 30k miles on it. It would upset the differential. So I decided to go with four new winter tires and stud the front ones.
King Subaru even said they could fit me in as the last customer of their early closing day if I could get there by 11:30. Oddly, they tried to dissuade me from the studding on the grounds that most Subaru owners get by fine with just a good set of winter tires.
"They don't live in my neighborhood," I said. I added that the ice had already taught me the hard lesson that you can't drive through a boulder. The guy said he thought he recognized my name from the body shop roster.
Apparently the studding technicians went a little overboard, because they wound up studding all four tires. I didn’t care. It was about $16 more for twice as much stability, as far as I was concerned. The job itself seemed to draw some interest from some of the other employees at King, too. As I was paying for the job and was about to take my old tires and go home, one of them asked where the neighborhood was that gave me such trouble with ice. I told him.
“Oh, lord, yes,” he said, recognizing the area. “You’ll be lucky if some of your roads see sunlight before spring. Those tires will do you great. Unless you get two feet of snow, or something, you’ll be just fine.”
By the time I arrived home, the sun had indeed been out and my driveway was ice-free and practically dry. I didn’t have long to wait to test the new tires, though. From late Christmas Eve through Monday morning, it snowed and snowed. It might very well be the first White Christmas I’ve ever experienced—though how I’ve managed to avoid one after nearly 10 years in this state, I’m not sure.
The studded tires are amazing things. Driving on ice and snow feels pretty much like driving on dry pavement. Granted, I’m not abusing them and am still cautious, but just knowing they’re there makes me feel a lot safer. We’re even talking about getting a set for Mrs. Alaska Pants.
SECOND EPILOGUE
As of this writing, I’ve still not seen any jury duty. In fact, my wife and I are neck and neck for who's spent more time in the courthouse, as she was subpoenaed to appear as a witness in a case, testifying in her capacity as a physician. My particular jury group has been postponed for another few days, so it'll be a while before we see if the floor of the courthouse feels the imprint of my mighty snowboot again.
“I have no idea,” I said. After all, I’ve never had cause to fax anybody in all this. I tried to look it up on King Subaru’s website, but it was not listed among the myriad of numbers they list.
“Well, I’ll just use this one,” the agent said. “It’s the one we have on file that we’ve been faxing things to all this time.”
A shudder of horror shot through me. This was about to turn into Barbara Turdmurkle faxing things to the wrong state all over again.
“No, really, I can call them and get the number, if you like. No problem at all,” I said.
She said, no, that it was fine. She had the number, so she'd just fax it over and put it to the attention of Mr. Loquacious in the body shop. After all it was the number they’d been using all along, right?
Yeah, but recent events heavily indicated a disconnect in fax communications between your two companies, I thought.
I tried explaining that King Subaru is a sprawling, multi-building complex and any fax sent to a central machine there would not likely be forwarded to the correct department with any speed at all. No, no. It would be fine, she said. I shouldn’t trouble myself.
I gave it a half hour of radio silence before calling King about it. Now, readers, you may want to sit down for this revelation: they’d had no faxes. I know. Shocking! The guy there, who was not Mr. Loquacious, said he was sitting right by the fax machine and nothing had come through for hours. He suggested this was some kind of ploy on insurance's part in order to keep from paying on time. I very nearly told him to shut the hell up, since he was talking to a guy who'd been defending his ass all morning, with no real just cause for doing so. Instead, I asked for his fax machine's number and called insurance back to tell them to start over. They were as shocked and appalled about the news of their earlier fax's failure as you'd expect.
This time it took only 20 minutes before King called me with the good news. My car had been released. Of course, there was then the matter of getting to King Subaru while at the same time leaving my wife’s car at her clinic, so she could drive it home. So I asked King Subaru to send a driver to meet me there and give me a lift over.
The driver showed up on time and rocketed me over, arriving a full 15 minutes before closing time. After finishing up the paperwork, the man who was not Mr. Loquacious said that there actually was a difference in the price he'd billed and the price that insurance had approved. But it was only $20, so he decided to just eat it. I told him that if I had only known that morning that I was going to have to do ALL the legwork for my insurance company, I could have just saved everyone a lot of time and done it all then. Or, better still, two days before. He smiled and nodded and handed me my keys.
The car drove great and got up the two major hills of my still icy neighborhood with hardly a fishtail. My driveway, however, said, “No, I don't think so.” I made it not even half way up it before the all wheel drive warning light began to shine and the car began sliding back down the hill until my braking finally slowed it. I had to turn around in the yard and leave it there, hoofing it up. The wife, too, could get no further during her arrival some hours later.
EPILOGUE
My in-laws came for Christmas Thursday night, and my father-in-law gave me one of the best early presents he could have: advice. “Maybe you should get your tires studded,” he said.
Now, I’d heard of studded tires before, but had no real inkling what this meant. My mental image was of little cones of rubber sticking out of the tires, like the Nazi Warwheel the Blackhawks used to fight in DC Comics. I’d never seen anything like that on the road, though. Turns out, studded tires look very much like regular tires that someone drove a series of nails into, all the way to the head. But I didn’t know that at this point.
Pa said that everybody back in Alaska gets studded tires during the winter months. Often, they have two complete sets of tires and trade out the studded set come spring thaw.
“You get your front tires studded, you’ll have no trouble getting up these hills,” he said.
I very much liked the sound of that. Why the hell hadn’t anyone told me about this before? This is the sort of thing that should be in a WV Handbook, given to you when you become a resident. It would fall somewhere between the chapters “Ramps and the Proper DeStankification There From” and “Moonshine: If you Have to Ask, You Already Drank Too Much.”
On Christmas Eve morning, after two more spectacular failures at getting up the driveway, I set out to buy a new set of studded front tires. Turned out, though, it was no good to get new front tires on an all wheel drive car with 30k miles on it. It would upset the differential. So I decided to go with four new winter tires and stud the front ones.
King Subaru even said they could fit me in as the last customer of their early closing day if I could get there by 11:30. Oddly, they tried to dissuade me from the studding on the grounds that most Subaru owners get by fine with just a good set of winter tires.
"They don't live in my neighborhood," I said. I added that the ice had already taught me the hard lesson that you can't drive through a boulder. The guy said he thought he recognized my name from the body shop roster.
Apparently the studding technicians went a little overboard, because they wound up studding all four tires. I didn’t care. It was about $16 more for twice as much stability, as far as I was concerned. The job itself seemed to draw some interest from some of the other employees at King, too. As I was paying for the job and was about to take my old tires and go home, one of them asked where the neighborhood was that gave me such trouble with ice. I told him.
“Oh, lord, yes,” he said, recognizing the area. “You’ll be lucky if some of your roads see sunlight before spring. Those tires will do you great. Unless you get two feet of snow, or something, you’ll be just fine.”
By the time I arrived home, the sun had indeed been out and my driveway was ice-free and practically dry. I didn’t have long to wait to test the new tires, though. From late Christmas Eve through Monday morning, it snowed and snowed. It might very well be the first White Christmas I’ve ever experienced—though how I’ve managed to avoid one after nearly 10 years in this state, I’m not sure.
The studded tires are amazing things. Driving on ice and snow feels pretty much like driving on dry pavement. Granted, I’m not abusing them and am still cautious, but just knowing they’re there makes me feel a lot safer. We’re even talking about getting a set for Mrs. Alaska Pants.
SECOND EPILOGUE
As of this writing, I’ve still not seen any jury duty. In fact, my wife and I are neck and neck for who's spent more time in the courthouse, as she was subpoenaed to appear as a witness in a case, testifying in her capacity as a physician. My particular jury group has been postponed for another few days, so it'll be a while before we see if the floor of the courthouse feels the imprint of my mighty snowboot again.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Jury Duty Ice Road Trucking/Subaruing Blues (PART 6)
The next day, December 23, shortly after 9 a.m., I gathered my strength and called King Subaru again. They’d still heard nothing from the insurance appraiser. I sighed. More calls to the insurance company would be required and I could already predict the sort of delays inherent with the process. It was at that moment I decided that no matter which side was right or wrong in the matter (which I’d never ever be able to determine anyway, since both sides were blame-shifting like champions) it was time to pick a side in the fight and see if I couldn’t turn the tide of the battle in favor of that side.
So I picked King Subaru's side; not that I thought they were faultless by any stretch but ultimately because they were in physical possession of my car. My plan was to call the insurance company and if I was not immediately offered a satisfactory resolution to the matter I would begin showing as much ass as I needed to—in a verbal directional application of my ire sense—in order to get my car back in my possession before the day was out. It was already December 23, when most folks (including, I suspect, those working for the independent appraisal company) were already phoning in their jobs due to the proximity to the Christmas holiday weekend, so chances of getting anything done on the 24th were nil. This had to be finished today or I wasn't going to see the car until after Christmas. So I limbered up my ass and gave insurance a call.
After the whole explanation and agent researching the matter process, my new insurance rep phoned the independent appraisal company to find out what was up. She returned to the line shortly to say that my supplemental claim had still not yet been reviewed and the IAC had noted that it would likely take 24 to 48 hours for them to get around to it. She suggested I should probably think about calling back in about a day.
“Well, see, this puts me in something of a bind,” I said.
Then I took a super deep breath and in pretty much one long sentence reiterated for the record how even though my vehicle had been repaired for two full days now, I still couldn’t touch it because the independent appraisal company hadn’t approved the payment for it—independent appraisers who, I might and did add, had only initially approved $700 for a car that was SO VERY OBVIOUSLY going to be far more damaged than a dented bumper cover, a price differential which, I then suggested, had at the very least laid the groundwork for the price discrepancy issues the IAC was now having with King Subaru—a payment, which I had been assured when I first inquired about the lowball $700 figure two weeks prior, would be no problem at all and that insurance would pay for any and all other repairs that King found during their own inspection, and that said payments to be made directly to King Subaru; which now brought us to the matter of the IAC's assertion that they’d not received the supplemental claim until December 21st, when my dealership asserted they’d sent it on December 16th—a matter which seemed to be the crux of much of the blame-shifting going on, that was muddying the waters nicely but not getting me my car back any faster—a car, which, by the by, I hadn’t laid eyes on since December 6th, meaning I'd not had access to my own personal transportation in all that time, transportation that I required and which I could have very quickly if only the IAC would make the approval of the supplemental claim—a claim, again, that I'd been assured would not be a problem for them to make in the first place. *BREATHE*
The agent listened to my lengthy, calm-yet-firm rant and then said, “But, sir, they have to have time to review the documents. It takes at least 24 hours.”
“They’ve had the documents since December 21,” I said. “It is now December 23.”
The agent did the math, seemed a bit flummoxed at a response to this, but added that there was little she could do except mark the claim as one to be expedited.
“I was already told that my claim was being expedited back on December 21," I said. "It is now December 23.”
The agent had no real answer for this, but did seem annoyed with me—as well she should. She gamely tried another approach.
“Sir, if you like, I can call the appraisal company again and ask if they can tell me how long it should take them.”
“Yes. Please call and ask them that. I would really like to know so I can plan things here accordingly.”
Yeah, I’m an ass. But they started it.
Minutes passed on hold. Then the agent returned and sounded almost disappointed to report that the IAC had just approved the supplemental claim in full.
“Oh, that’s outstanding,” I said.
She told me next that it would take a couple of hours for the IAC and insurance to get all the details in order, but one of the appraisers would then call me to let me know the details and then they would send word to King Subaru along with a fax of the check they were writing for the full amount.
“Thanks so much for all your work,” I said, voice dripping with saccharine sweetness.
Of course, four hours later, at 1:30p, I’d heard from no one. My going theory on this was that the amount the IAC had approved and the amount King Subaru had billed were probably not the same figure despite claims of them approving the full amount. I imagined there was currently a quiet war of faxes going on along our nation’s phone lines. However, upon putting in a call, King Subaru said they had not even heard about the approval, let alone received any faxes of checks.
Motherpussbucket!!!
(TO BE CONCLUDED...)
So I picked King Subaru's side; not that I thought they were faultless by any stretch but ultimately because they were in physical possession of my car. My plan was to call the insurance company and if I was not immediately offered a satisfactory resolution to the matter I would begin showing as much ass as I needed to—in a verbal directional application of my ire sense—in order to get my car back in my possession before the day was out. It was already December 23, when most folks (including, I suspect, those working for the independent appraisal company) were already phoning in their jobs due to the proximity to the Christmas holiday weekend, so chances of getting anything done on the 24th were nil. This had to be finished today or I wasn't going to see the car until after Christmas. So I limbered up my ass and gave insurance a call.
After the whole explanation and agent researching the matter process, my new insurance rep phoned the independent appraisal company to find out what was up. She returned to the line shortly to say that my supplemental claim had still not yet been reviewed and the IAC had noted that it would likely take 24 to 48 hours for them to get around to it. She suggested I should probably think about calling back in about a day.
“Well, see, this puts me in something of a bind,” I said.
Then I took a super deep breath and in pretty much one long sentence reiterated for the record how even though my vehicle had been repaired for two full days now, I still couldn’t touch it because the independent appraisal company hadn’t approved the payment for it—independent appraisers who, I might and did add, had only initially approved $700 for a car that was SO VERY OBVIOUSLY going to be far more damaged than a dented bumper cover, a price differential which, I then suggested, had at the very least laid the groundwork for the price discrepancy issues the IAC was now having with King Subaru—a payment, which I had been assured when I first inquired about the lowball $700 figure two weeks prior, would be no problem at all and that insurance would pay for any and all other repairs that King found during their own inspection, and that said payments to be made directly to King Subaru; which now brought us to the matter of the IAC's assertion that they’d not received the supplemental claim until December 21st, when my dealership asserted they’d sent it on December 16th—a matter which seemed to be the crux of much of the blame-shifting going on, that was muddying the waters nicely but not getting me my car back any faster—a car, which, by the by, I hadn’t laid eyes on since December 6th, meaning I'd not had access to my own personal transportation in all that time, transportation that I required and which I could have very quickly if only the IAC would make the approval of the supplemental claim—a claim, again, that I'd been assured would not be a problem for them to make in the first place. *BREATHE*
The agent listened to my lengthy, calm-yet-firm rant and then said, “But, sir, they have to have time to review the documents. It takes at least 24 hours.”
“They’ve had the documents since December 21,” I said. “It is now December 23.”
The agent did the math, seemed a bit flummoxed at a response to this, but added that there was little she could do except mark the claim as one to be expedited.
“I was already told that my claim was being expedited back on December 21," I said. "It is now December 23.”
The agent had no real answer for this, but did seem annoyed with me—as well she should. She gamely tried another approach.
“Sir, if you like, I can call the appraisal company again and ask if they can tell me how long it should take them.”
“Yes. Please call and ask them that. I would really like to know so I can plan things here accordingly.”
Yeah, I’m an ass. But they started it.
Minutes passed on hold. Then the agent returned and sounded almost disappointed to report that the IAC had just approved the supplemental claim in full.
“Oh, that’s outstanding,” I said.
She told me next that it would take a couple of hours for the IAC and insurance to get all the details in order, but one of the appraisers would then call me to let me know the details and then they would send word to King Subaru along with a fax of the check they were writing for the full amount.
“Thanks so much for all your work,” I said, voice dripping with saccharine sweetness.
Of course, four hours later, at 1:30p, I’d heard from no one. My going theory on this was that the amount the IAC had approved and the amount King Subaru had billed were probably not the same figure despite claims of them approving the full amount. I imagined there was currently a quiet war of faxes going on along our nation’s phone lines. However, upon putting in a call, King Subaru said they had not even heard about the approval, let alone received any faxes of checks.
Motherpussbucket!!!
(TO BE CONCLUDED...)
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Jury Duty Ice Road Trucking/Subaruing Blues (PART 5)
On December 21, the day before my first jury duty session was scheduled, King Subaru phoned to let me know the car would be ready to pick up on the following day, a full three days earlier than anticipated. The catch, though, was that the cost of repairs had ballooned to over $4k, which they said insurance would have to both approve and provide proof of payment for before King could release the car to me. The other catch, they mentioned, was that while they'd sent the supplemental claim on the additional costs to the insurance company some time back, they'd yet to hear anything about approval. I offered to give insurance a call to get the ball rolling. And this I did.
Insurance put me on hold and called the independent appraisal company to find out what the delay was. The IAC, in turn, claimed they’d had no contact with King Subaru whatsoever, let alone received any supplemental claims for them to approve. I found this a little dubious, as I was the guy who'd given someone from their office King Subaru’s number when they’d called me by mistake.
With me still on hold, insurance then called King Subaru to find out what was going on from their end. Now here's where the story gets even murkier. After the insurance agent came back on the line and told me the above story from the IAC, she said that she was a bit disturbed because King Subaru had just told her that they really hadn't faxed the supplemental claim to anyone because they didn’t have a correct fax number to send it to. This also struck me as odd, because while it was consistent with the story from the IAC, King’s body shop is accustomed to dealing with insurance agencies and being paid by them on a daily basis and getting a fax number for one would be a simple matter of a phone call or a quick search online.
The insurance agent told me that she’d now given King the correct fax number for her own office and she would forward the documents to the appraiser’s office as soon as she received them. The insurance agent also said she would mark it to be expedited so I could get the car back ASAP. Since the time was nearly 5 o'clock, I knew nothing would come of it that day.
The following day, December 22, I headed out early with the wife. She had a doctor's appointment and I had jury duty, so I waited til her appointment was through, then we ate breakfast at our favorite biscuit place before she was to drop me off at the courthouse. I’d called the jury hotline the night before to make sure they still had me scheduled, and they did. However, a quick 8:30 phone call to the hotline, as advised by the hotline the previous evening, revealed that jury duty had been canceled altogether through the first week of January. Merry Christmas, indeed. See ya next year, suckers!
Back home, I kept waiting for a call from someone—ANYONE—regarding my car being ready for me to pick up, but received none. Around 1p, I phoned King Subaru, but they said they’d heard nothing either. So I phoned the insurance company to see what was up.
I got a new agent on the line (who all work for a central insurance agent assigned to my claim), and had to explain the whole case and how my fully repaired vehicle, which I’d not seen in half a month, would not be released to me until the IAC did some approving of funds. The new agent in turn phoned the independent appraisal company to see what was up. After a long time on hold, the agent came back and confirmed that the appraisers had now officially received the supplemental and had given it a cursory review, but were not going to approve it yet because it was for an amount greater than the one they’d initially approved.
“You mean the $700 for the new bumper cover?” I asked. Evidently it was. However, their concerns were not so much that costs were now for $3500 more than they’d approved, but that King Subaru had decided to raise their labor costs beyond the initially approved amount as well. The agent then put me back on hold to call King about this.
An enormous amount of time then passed before the agent returned to the line, sounding thoroughly disgusted. She said that despite King allegedly having admitted that they'd not sent the supplemental until December 21, they were now claiming they’d sent it back on the 16th. This and the increase in the labor costs found in the supplemental were red flags as far as the insurance company was concerned. She said she'd tried to assure them that insurance would pay them for their work, but they would take nothing less than a photocopy of the actual payment check, for the full amount they were billing, faxed to them before they would release my car.
According to her, all the delays were King Subaru’s fault. She then asked if she could put me back on hold and call the IAC again to see if more expedition could be put on the approval process for my case.
While I was on hold, King Subaru buzzed in on call waiting, so I clicked over to talk to them. It was King's body shop guy, let's call him Mr. Loquacious. I quickly let him know I didn't have time to talk much, as I was on the other line with insurance. I tried to ask him about some of the inconsistencies I was hearing about, but he started talking over me and would not shut up. He just wanted to let me know he’d just spoken with the insurance agent and to assure me that it was wholly my insurance company’s fault that things were so gummed up with the car, which he just felt so bad about holding onto.
“Yeah, as I mentioned, I’m on hold with them right now,” I said. “They say it’s your fault for not faxing in the supplemental sooner.”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Loquacious said. “We faxed that all in on the 16th.” The body shop guy then spent the better part of a minute reiterating his earlier statement about it being the insurance company’s fault and how he was only looking to get paid the amount he was owed and couldn’t release the car until they proved it because they could always say they would send it, but then only approve a lesser amount and then he’d be screwed. While he was doing this, I kept trying to interrupt him so I could tell him I had to go because, as I'd mentioned twice, I was still on hold with insurance. Mr. Loquacious still refused to shut it. Now I could see why it had taken the insurance agent so long when she'd called them earlier.
Finally, I just interrupted him long enough to say, “I’m sorry, but I really have to go now. I’m on hold with the insurance company waiting to hear if they’ll approve the—"
“Well, I won’t take much of your time, then," he began anew. "I just wanted to take a minute to call and let you know…” and then he began right back down the same path of explanation as before in almost exactly the same words. It reminded me of talking to Wal-Mart Jesus from my “Liberry” days.
Drastic steps would have to be taken.
“Listen! I understand that you want to be paid! I want you to be paid, too! But I’m going to need to CALL. YOU. BACK. because I am ON. HOLD. WITH. THE INSURANCE COMPANY. RIGHT. NOW.”
Reluctantly, Mr. Loquacious shut up and let me go.
When the insurance agent at last returned to the line, she said that she’d had no success with the IAC. The guy whose job it was to review documents was out for the afternoon and wouldn’t return until very late in the workday. Chances were not at all good that he’d get it approved and faxed over to King before 5p.
I remained quiet for a long time after she gave me the news. I was frustrated and furious and really wanted to scream at someone, but wasn't sure who precisely needed my ire aimed at them. Everyone was pointing fingers at each other as though covering their own asses, but since I was damned if I could figure out who was in the wrong I figured I’d better just be quiet about it until I figured it out. I thanked the insurance agent for her time and hung up.
After a bit more thought, I decided to call Mr. Loquacious back and see what his explanation for the inconsistencies and price gouging might be.
BIG. HONKING. MISTAKE.
Mr. Loquacious, you see, is either a certifiable genius or touched by more than a dusting of “the re re.” Maybe both. Throughout our largely one-sided conversation, he displayed a complete yet somehow still polite disregard for the basic rules of common conversation and poured forth such a river of words, with oft-repeated paragraphs floating in it, that it had the effect of driving me so bug EFF insane that I no longer gave a wet damn who was right or who was wrong just as long as he shut up about it.
Oh, believe me, I tried to ask about the inconsistencies in his earlier testimony concerning when and if he faxed the supplemental, but he replied to this with a filibuster Strom Thurmond would have been proud to have improvised. Apparently, there were no inconsistencies at all, because while he might have said something about not having faxed the supplemental, it turned out he was mistaken and his estimator actually had, on the 16th. As far as he was concerned, this was all just a trick by the insurance company designed to keep from having to pay out what they owed. Furthermore, the price increase was dismissed as a simple increase to rates common for our area which the insurance company was legally obligated to pay out at. He assured me that there was no ethical violation there, because all body shops do that sort of thing.
I then valliantly attempted to point out that his rate increase was the very thing that was causing all the delays now, but this was met with an almost verbatim repeat of ALL PREVIOUS SPEECHIFYING, with the added bonus info that the insurance company now had the gall to try and guilt him into providing me with a loaner vehicle until our matter was resolved. He didn’t think he was obligated to because he wasn’t in the wrong. Oh, but he’d do it in a hot second if he had thought he was in the wrong. (This was the first time the word loaner had ever come up and I wasn't sure why he'd brought it up, except that he was probably concerned that the insurance company had suggested it to me and was trying to head me off at the pass.) And then, with stones so huge that he must have been pinned immobile in his chair by them, he managed to end his soliloquy by saying, “I just feel like I’m the guy caught in the middle here.”
“Uh, no,” I corrected. “I believe I’m the guy caught in the middle here.”
He conceded that this was probably true, then went back for take three of his lengthy verbatim explanation from before. And he never seemed angry or upset, even when I’d been confrontational with him. He just calmly and doggedly kept forcing the same information at me until I finally threw up my hands and gave up. I explained that this was my first time going through an accident like this and I didn't know exactly how such things worked. Hopefully it would all work out shortly and he'd get his money and I'd get my car and we could all have a merry Christmas and a happy new year goodbye. *CLICK*
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Insurance put me on hold and called the independent appraisal company to find out what the delay was. The IAC, in turn, claimed they’d had no contact with King Subaru whatsoever, let alone received any supplemental claims for them to approve. I found this a little dubious, as I was the guy who'd given someone from their office King Subaru’s number when they’d called me by mistake.
With me still on hold, insurance then called King Subaru to find out what was going on from their end. Now here's where the story gets even murkier. After the insurance agent came back on the line and told me the above story from the IAC, she said that she was a bit disturbed because King Subaru had just told her that they really hadn't faxed the supplemental claim to anyone because they didn’t have a correct fax number to send it to. This also struck me as odd, because while it was consistent with the story from the IAC, King’s body shop is accustomed to dealing with insurance agencies and being paid by them on a daily basis and getting a fax number for one would be a simple matter of a phone call or a quick search online.
The insurance agent told me that she’d now given King the correct fax number for her own office and she would forward the documents to the appraiser’s office as soon as she received them. The insurance agent also said she would mark it to be expedited so I could get the car back ASAP. Since the time was nearly 5 o'clock, I knew nothing would come of it that day.
The following day, December 22, I headed out early with the wife. She had a doctor's appointment and I had jury duty, so I waited til her appointment was through, then we ate breakfast at our favorite biscuit place before she was to drop me off at the courthouse. I’d called the jury hotline the night before to make sure they still had me scheduled, and they did. However, a quick 8:30 phone call to the hotline, as advised by the hotline the previous evening, revealed that jury duty had been canceled altogether through the first week of January. Merry Christmas, indeed. See ya next year, suckers!
Back home, I kept waiting for a call from someone—ANYONE—regarding my car being ready for me to pick up, but received none. Around 1p, I phoned King Subaru, but they said they’d heard nothing either. So I phoned the insurance company to see what was up.
I got a new agent on the line (who all work for a central insurance agent assigned to my claim), and had to explain the whole case and how my fully repaired vehicle, which I’d not seen in half a month, would not be released to me until the IAC did some approving of funds. The new agent in turn phoned the independent appraisal company to see what was up. After a long time on hold, the agent came back and confirmed that the appraisers had now officially received the supplemental and had given it a cursory review, but were not going to approve it yet because it was for an amount greater than the one they’d initially approved.
“You mean the $700 for the new bumper cover?” I asked. Evidently it was. However, their concerns were not so much that costs were now for $3500 more than they’d approved, but that King Subaru had decided to raise their labor costs beyond the initially approved amount as well. The agent then put me back on hold to call King about this.
An enormous amount of time then passed before the agent returned to the line, sounding thoroughly disgusted. She said that despite King allegedly having admitted that they'd not sent the supplemental until December 21, they were now claiming they’d sent it back on the 16th. This and the increase in the labor costs found in the supplemental were red flags as far as the insurance company was concerned. She said she'd tried to assure them that insurance would pay them for their work, but they would take nothing less than a photocopy of the actual payment check, for the full amount they were billing, faxed to them before they would release my car.
According to her, all the delays were King Subaru’s fault. She then asked if she could put me back on hold and call the IAC again to see if more expedition could be put on the approval process for my case.
While I was on hold, King Subaru buzzed in on call waiting, so I clicked over to talk to them. It was King's body shop guy, let's call him Mr. Loquacious. I quickly let him know I didn't have time to talk much, as I was on the other line with insurance. I tried to ask him about some of the inconsistencies I was hearing about, but he started talking over me and would not shut up. He just wanted to let me know he’d just spoken with the insurance agent and to assure me that it was wholly my insurance company’s fault that things were so gummed up with the car, which he just felt so bad about holding onto.
“Yeah, as I mentioned, I’m on hold with them right now,” I said. “They say it’s your fault for not faxing in the supplemental sooner.”
“Oh, no,” Mr. Loquacious said. “We faxed that all in on the 16th.” The body shop guy then spent the better part of a minute reiterating his earlier statement about it being the insurance company’s fault and how he was only looking to get paid the amount he was owed and couldn’t release the car until they proved it because they could always say they would send it, but then only approve a lesser amount and then he’d be screwed. While he was doing this, I kept trying to interrupt him so I could tell him I had to go because, as I'd mentioned twice, I was still on hold with insurance. Mr. Loquacious still refused to shut it. Now I could see why it had taken the insurance agent so long when she'd called them earlier.
Finally, I just interrupted him long enough to say, “I’m sorry, but I really have to go now. I’m on hold with the insurance company waiting to hear if they’ll approve the—"
“Well, I won’t take much of your time, then," he began anew. "I just wanted to take a minute to call and let you know…” and then he began right back down the same path of explanation as before in almost exactly the same words. It reminded me of talking to Wal-Mart Jesus from my “Liberry” days.
Drastic steps would have to be taken.
“Listen! I understand that you want to be paid! I want you to be paid, too! But I’m going to need to CALL. YOU. BACK. because I am ON. HOLD. WITH. THE INSURANCE COMPANY. RIGHT. NOW.”
Reluctantly, Mr. Loquacious shut up and let me go.
When the insurance agent at last returned to the line, she said that she’d had no success with the IAC. The guy whose job it was to review documents was out for the afternoon and wouldn’t return until very late in the workday. Chances were not at all good that he’d get it approved and faxed over to King before 5p.
I remained quiet for a long time after she gave me the news. I was frustrated and furious and really wanted to scream at someone, but wasn't sure who precisely needed my ire aimed at them. Everyone was pointing fingers at each other as though covering their own asses, but since I was damned if I could figure out who was in the wrong I figured I’d better just be quiet about it until I figured it out. I thanked the insurance agent for her time and hung up.
After a bit more thought, I decided to call Mr. Loquacious back and see what his explanation for the inconsistencies and price gouging might be.
BIG. HONKING. MISTAKE.
Mr. Loquacious, you see, is either a certifiable genius or touched by more than a dusting of “the re re.” Maybe both. Throughout our largely one-sided conversation, he displayed a complete yet somehow still polite disregard for the basic rules of common conversation and poured forth such a river of words, with oft-repeated paragraphs floating in it, that it had the effect of driving me so bug EFF insane that I no longer gave a wet damn who was right or who was wrong just as long as he shut up about it.
Oh, believe me, I tried to ask about the inconsistencies in his earlier testimony concerning when and if he faxed the supplemental, but he replied to this with a filibuster Strom Thurmond would have been proud to have improvised. Apparently, there were no inconsistencies at all, because while he might have said something about not having faxed the supplemental, it turned out he was mistaken and his estimator actually had, on the 16th. As far as he was concerned, this was all just a trick by the insurance company designed to keep from having to pay out what they owed. Furthermore, the price increase was dismissed as a simple increase to rates common for our area which the insurance company was legally obligated to pay out at. He assured me that there was no ethical violation there, because all body shops do that sort of thing.
I then valliantly attempted to point out that his rate increase was the very thing that was causing all the delays now, but this was met with an almost verbatim repeat of ALL PREVIOUS SPEECHIFYING, with the added bonus info that the insurance company now had the gall to try and guilt him into providing me with a loaner vehicle until our matter was resolved. He didn’t think he was obligated to because he wasn’t in the wrong. Oh, but he’d do it in a hot second if he had thought he was in the wrong. (This was the first time the word loaner had ever come up and I wasn't sure why he'd brought it up, except that he was probably concerned that the insurance company had suggested it to me and was trying to head me off at the pass.) And then, with stones so huge that he must have been pinned immobile in his chair by them, he managed to end his soliloquy by saying, “I just feel like I’m the guy caught in the middle here.”
“Uh, no,” I corrected. “I believe I’m the guy caught in the middle here.”
He conceded that this was probably true, then went back for take three of his lengthy verbatim explanation from before. And he never seemed angry or upset, even when I’d been confrontational with him. He just calmly and doggedly kept forcing the same information at me until I finally threw up my hands and gave up. I explained that this was my first time going through an accident like this and I didn't know exactly how such things worked. Hopefully it would all work out shortly and he'd get his money and I'd get my car and we could all have a merry Christmas and a happy new year goodbye. *CLICK*
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Jury Duty Ice Road Trucking/Subaruing Blues (PART 4)
The first few days without a car were fine because the wife was still out from work on sick leave, resulting from a three day stay in the hospital with bilateral pneumonia. (Another lost tale for another time.) Fortunately, by the time of my crash, she was through the worst of it and on the road to the mend. Being from Alaska and therefore fearless on icy roads, the wife was fine driving us around when we needed to be out. However, once she was finished with sick leave, she made me get back on the driving horse and face my fears so that I would be able to drop her off and pick her up from work.This would have been fine with me, except the weather didn’t improve and it continued to snow more. The first night I had to pick her up, I spent the better part of an hour walking up and down the blind curve, flinging gravel out so the road would have some traction for me when I drove down at 9 plus o'clock at night. And even then I had her on speakerphone as I drove it so she could talk me through my first trip down the icy slope and serve as an audio witness to my demise should I take a tumble down Mr. Costello's yard. The trip was fine, though, with no slippage on the well-graveled road.
A few days into the icy stretch, the temperatures warmed enough to cause a lot of the ice to melt a little. Not enough to clear the roads, but enough to cause the snow to refreeze into an icy sheet in front of our house. I got to see just how slick it was. Having been unable to get more than a 4th of the way up the driveway, I later was attempting to leave and backed down that quarter driveway to the road itself, then proceeded slowly down the road in what I thought was 1st gear. Turns out, though, I was in reverse the whole time, but somehow the road was so slick that just the spin of the tires in reverse direction was enough to break the friction and keep me sliding forward. That makes you feel safe. After a few such trips, my wussiness faded and I got my snow legs back. I was still extremely cautious, but between me and the rest of the neighbors graveling the path, I never had any more close calls.
As for the car, it took the better part of three days for an insurance adjuster to be dispatched to Borderland to have a look at the damage. It took an additional day for anyone to tell me about it. In the end, I had to call King Subaru to find out that, yes, the adjuster had been there and gone, but they hadn't left any sort of damage estimate or report, preferring to fax that back to them once the adjuster was back at the home office. Eventually an agent of my insurance company phoned to give me the news. She said the damage estimate was around $750 to cover parts and labor to replace the bumper cover.
I was floored. The bumper cover was the only damage? Wow, they really DO make Subaru's tough! Still, my suspension of disbelief only went so far.
“There wasn’t any other damage?” I asked. “You do know I drove into a very large rock, right?”
The agent explained that the bumper cover was all that was mentioned in the estimate, though there was always the possibility that there was more damage within. The body shop at King Subaru would give it a look and if they found anything they would then let the insurance company know and insurance would pay King for it directly, since I’d already met my deductible with the bumper cover alone. Pretty sweet, I thought.
A day or two later, King Subaru phoned to let me know that there was indeed quite a bit more damage found, to the tune of over $3500. Among the number of things that needed to be replaced or repaired were a bent front tire hub, the passenger side control arm, and a radiator that had been pierced by spruce branches. If I was lucky, they said I might see my car again around Christmas Eve.
Wait a second, I thought. The radiator had been pierced by spruce branches, yet the insurance adjuster was only recommending a replacement for the bumper cover? What the hell? Some of the other stuff I could understand not being able to scope out in a quick inspection, but if the allegedly trained adjuster had opened the hood at all they should have noticed that the radiator was pierced by spruce branches, right? This didn't make sense to me. Someone was really paid money to drive from lord knows where all the way to Borderland to make a damage assessment and they hadn't even noticed spruce-branches penetrating my radiator at the bare minimum? Either this person was woefully bad at their job or there was something I was missing about how the process was supposed to work.
Turns out the missing info part was closer to the mark. During my next telephone call with insurance, I brought up the above matter on purely an information-gathering basis, rather than my usual bitter-complaining basis. The agent I asked about it said that the adjusters (who technically work for an independent, sub-contracted, third-party company) are only allowed to write down damage that they can see with their eyes. They're not allowed to touch the car in any way, so they were forbidden to pop the hood and have a gander at the damage within. This makes absolutely no sense to me, but what do I know about how insurance works? My next question, however, was: how the hell can I get that job, cause that sounds amazing! Getting paid to drive around just staring at cars and speaking their damage? Sign me up!
“Yep, that one’s damaged," I would say. "Dented bumper. I can see it right there, and I'm standing all of six feet away from it. Lemme mark that puppy down.”
Or, “Awww. Looks to me like someone keyed the ever-loving-shit out of this car's door. I’d be willing to bet the owner parked like an asshole at Wal-Mart, or something. That’s just unofficial speculation, mind you. I can’t actually see that.”
Or, “Well, that one’s really tore up. I can tell just by lookin’. Guy walk away from it? No? Oooh, that sucks. Yeah, by my eye, I’d say it’s pretty much a total loss. When he gets out of the hospital, we’ll send him a check. What? Universal Health Care got repealed? Oooh, sucks for that guy.”
Also, my jury duty date finally arrived, but when I phoned the jury hotline the night before I learned all jury service had been cancelled through December 22. Yay me.
For the next week or so, all was quiet, save for one call from an agent with the independent appraiser company who was trying to reach King Subaru and had, for some reason, been told that my number was the number to call. I had to look up King's correct number for her and told her to ask for the body shop. At least they were communicating, I thought.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
A few days into the icy stretch, the temperatures warmed enough to cause a lot of the ice to melt a little. Not enough to clear the roads, but enough to cause the snow to refreeze into an icy sheet in front of our house. I got to see just how slick it was. Having been unable to get more than a 4th of the way up the driveway, I later was attempting to leave and backed down that quarter driveway to the road itself, then proceeded slowly down the road in what I thought was 1st gear. Turns out, though, I was in reverse the whole time, but somehow the road was so slick that just the spin of the tires in reverse direction was enough to break the friction and keep me sliding forward. That makes you feel safe. After a few such trips, my wussiness faded and I got my snow legs back. I was still extremely cautious, but between me and the rest of the neighbors graveling the path, I never had any more close calls.
As for the car, it took the better part of three days for an insurance adjuster to be dispatched to Borderland to have a look at the damage. It took an additional day for anyone to tell me about it. In the end, I had to call King Subaru to find out that, yes, the adjuster had been there and gone, but they hadn't left any sort of damage estimate or report, preferring to fax that back to them once the adjuster was back at the home office. Eventually an agent of my insurance company phoned to give me the news. She said the damage estimate was around $750 to cover parts and labor to replace the bumper cover.
I was floored. The bumper cover was the only damage? Wow, they really DO make Subaru's tough! Still, my suspension of disbelief only went so far.
“There wasn’t any other damage?” I asked. “You do know I drove into a very large rock, right?”
The agent explained that the bumper cover was all that was mentioned in the estimate, though there was always the possibility that there was more damage within. The body shop at King Subaru would give it a look and if they found anything they would then let the insurance company know and insurance would pay King for it directly, since I’d already met my deductible with the bumper cover alone. Pretty sweet, I thought.
A day or two later, King Subaru phoned to let me know that there was indeed quite a bit more damage found, to the tune of over $3500. Among the number of things that needed to be replaced or repaired were a bent front tire hub, the passenger side control arm, and a radiator that had been pierced by spruce branches. If I was lucky, they said I might see my car again around Christmas Eve.
Wait a second, I thought. The radiator had been pierced by spruce branches, yet the insurance adjuster was only recommending a replacement for the bumper cover? What the hell? Some of the other stuff I could understand not being able to scope out in a quick inspection, but if the allegedly trained adjuster had opened the hood at all they should have noticed that the radiator was pierced by spruce branches, right? This didn't make sense to me. Someone was really paid money to drive from lord knows where all the way to Borderland to make a damage assessment and they hadn't even noticed spruce-branches penetrating my radiator at the bare minimum? Either this person was woefully bad at their job or there was something I was missing about how the process was supposed to work.
Turns out the missing info part was closer to the mark. During my next telephone call with insurance, I brought up the above matter on purely an information-gathering basis, rather than my usual bitter-complaining basis. The agent I asked about it said that the adjusters (who technically work for an independent, sub-contracted, third-party company) are only allowed to write down damage that they can see with their eyes. They're not allowed to touch the car in any way, so they were forbidden to pop the hood and have a gander at the damage within. This makes absolutely no sense to me, but what do I know about how insurance works? My next question, however, was: how the hell can I get that job, cause that sounds amazing! Getting paid to drive around just staring at cars and speaking their damage? Sign me up!
“Yep, that one’s damaged," I would say. "Dented bumper. I can see it right there, and I'm standing all of six feet away from it. Lemme mark that puppy down.”
Or, “Awww. Looks to me like someone keyed the ever-loving-shit out of this car's door. I’d be willing to bet the owner parked like an asshole at Wal-Mart, or something. That’s just unofficial speculation, mind you. I can’t actually see that.”
Or, “Well, that one’s really tore up. I can tell just by lookin’. Guy walk away from it? No? Oooh, that sucks. Yeah, by my eye, I’d say it’s pretty much a total loss. When he gets out of the hospital, we’ll send him a check. What? Universal Health Care got repealed? Oooh, sucks for that guy.”
Also, my jury duty date finally arrived, but when I phoned the jury hotline the night before I learned all jury service had been cancelled through December 22. Yay me.
For the next week or so, all was quiet, save for one call from an agent with the independent appraiser company who was trying to reach King Subaru and had, for some reason, been told that my number was the number to call. I had to look up King's correct number for her and told her to ask for the body shop. At least they were communicating, I thought.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Tales from the Lost Months: Jury Duty Ice Road Trucking/Subaruing Blues (PART 3)
While waiting for the wife, I got out of my car to go survey the damage. I had to walk down to Mr. Costello’s driveway and back along it to get a view of the passenger side of the car. It did indeed appear that I had struck the large rock there with the front right corner of the vehicle that would explain the sudden stop on a dime it had done, which hitting only the bush would not have. One of the body panels in the front had popped loose and there was some definite cratering of the bumper, but the headlight was not smashed. I had no idea what the internal damage might be, but the car was still running just fine and no warning lights had popped up. Could it be only cosmetic? They do make Subarus pretty stout, and all.I didn’t fully appreciate it until later, but it was probably a good thing I went off the road at the particular spot I had. While the rest of the right side of the road along the blind curve was dotted with varying sized rocks and shrubs, there were places where I could have gone between them and possibly off the edge of the road, over the embankment into Mr. Costello's driveway. Potentially, this might have rolled the car. Given enough momentum sent me over the far edge of his driveway and down the rest of his very steep front yard into the trees far below. Or, if I’d gone off further down the road, near the mouth of his driveway, I might have continued over the edge of the same hill there, crashing through trees on my way down toward the stream bed. For all intents, I’d crashed perfectly.
I knocked on Mr. Costello’s door to let him know I was lodged in his shrubbery. He wasn’t home at that moment, but drove up a few minutes later, about the same time the wife arrived on foot. He'd been out driving his own wife to work.
“Sorry about your irises," the wife said.
Mr. Costello was pretty jovial about the whole thing. He was just glad I was all right and that we’d let him know about the crash, as an earlier neighbor had slid down the hill and taken out his mailbox. They'd not left so much as a note about it, either. He told us not to worry about the plants, or the spruce, or the rock, because he and his wife had been planning on tearing it all out to put in new railroad tie supports at the base of the embankment next summer and we’d just got a head start on the demo for the job.With Mr. Costello’s help, we pulled all the smaller rocks from beneath my car and then made a couple of attempts at getting the Subaru unstuck from the spruce and back on the road. All such efforts, however, resulted in the car sliding further down the embankment, so we decided to leave it for the tow truck.
There on the spot, I phoned my insurance company. I don’t want to say their name here, so as not to sully their otherwise stellar standing in my opinion, but it’s the same Texas-based insurance company to which patron and loon Barbara Turdmurkle once drove me nigh unto insanity in her attempt to have me fax them something, during my days at the "liberry." Normally, the company is a delight to deal with on all levels, and I stand by that. However, for some reason the rep I spoke to that morning was less than the usual picture of efficiency. Perhaps she was simply not functioning with a full cup of coffee. Or maybe it was because they knew they would soon have to pay for something, rather than just letting me shovel money in their direction.
Naturally, there were 500 questions in the claims process. I understand this, but wish I'd had the forethought to wait until I was back in my warm home to answer them, rather than in the 10 degree driveway. Some questions were straightforward, such as “How fast were you going?” (Answer: “Well, I’d say probably 5 to 8 mph when I started down the hill, then much faster after I started sliding.”) However, the lady I spoke with, being a Texan, couldn't seem to wrap her mind around a key concept in the road-construction philosophy often used here in the Mountain State.
“Did the accident happen on a four lane road or two lane road?” she asked.
“It happened on a one lane road.”
“So, a one WAY road,” she said.
“No, a one LANE road,” I corrected.
“A one lane road?”
“Yes, a ONE. LANE. ROAD.” There followed a long pause, so I added, “Cars move in both directions, but I assure you it is a one lane road.”
“But... if cars move both directions, it’s a two lane road.”
I had to pause myself, then, and take a nice freezing breath of air before explaining an inherent truth about West Virginia: it’s a state geographically made of mountains, hills and hollers and the vast majority of the non-highway and non-city street back and side roads are basically one lane strips of asphalt which, if you’re lucky, will accommodate two vehicles passing one another due to the gravel shoulders on either side, provided the vehicles are moving slow enough.“Believe me,” I said, “no one’s flying down this road. The posted speed limit is 20 and I was only going about 5 until I started sliding.”
She still didn’t seem to believe me, but wisely let the matter go. Focus then turned to the fact that my policy does not come with rental car reimbursement, so I’d have to pay for that should I need one. Eventually the questions were all answered, she said they'd be in touch soon and she then put me through to roadside assist to arrange a tow truck to haul my car to the local Subaru dealership, hereafter to be known as King Subaru (not its real name).
The wife and I hoofed it back home so I could await the call from roadside assist and she could finish getting ready for shopping. She offered to hang around until after the tow came, in case I wanted to go with her, but I said I was done for the day and would likely just go back to bed and hope for better things on the morrow.
A bit later in the morning, the courthouse lady called back to tell me that I was being placed into Jury Group 2. She also reiterated how I was always welcome to phone them and bow out should weather or mere inconvenience present itself. However, group 2 would not be needed for service until the following Monday.
"Oh. I might have a car by then," I said.
I could not have been more wrong.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
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