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Not so fond farewells.
Feb. 22nd, 2013 07:50 pmAs February continues to careen into a ravine in many ways, we had moments of hopefulness on today's horizon. Our mortgage refi lunged ahead today, once Refi Guy finally got us a list of Final Final Pre-Closing Conditions he'd had since Tuesday. Only one was anything we, specifically, still needed to do: initial and sign a four-page document which we'd already signed, weeks ago, in its slightly slimmer three-page form. Everything else- ordering payoff information, updating our credit, getting the new bank on our homeowners insurance, and having someone actually inspect the paint job we did in January- is on them, not us. We might be funded and closed by mid-March. This would be good.
Not so good are the two other professionals I will likely be saying buh-bye to as a result of things that happened this week.
----
Mid-week, I needed to make an appointment with my doctor, because my two maintenance prescriptions were running low and the pharmacy made clear, last time they were up, that I needed to Be Seen before they'd be renewed. So I toodled in for my 11:30 a.m. appointment, and got seen far closer to 12:30.
I was weighed, BP'd, steth'd and not much else. I did mention that my Pain In TheAss Side, which caused much aggravation last spring, had briefly returned a couple of months ago and again just this past week or so. He sloughed it off, not scheduling any tests or even doing any poking or prodding. Fortunately, it has never gone beyond the level of brief inconvenience before then or since, and as of today it's receded to the point of nothingness again. But dude. I have only one kidney, and this might be, or related to, a kidney stone. I don't want to be overtested or OCD'd to death, but it would have been nice to at least ask me how comfortable I was with a wait-and-see-or-ache (whichever comes first) approach.
He renewed my two RX's and I was on my way to the second doctoring in my life, of the computer kind. Until today, when it became clear that my MD and I had had yet another Failyah to Comm-yune-i-kate. Wegmans deposited three of Eleanor's scrips in my lap at the end of the day, but only one of my two. The other, which has been two-a-day for years, needs a specific MD approval before the insurance company will authorize it beyond one-a-day. Which, um, they forgot to call in, instead just writing "BD" on the scrip, which has nothing to do with Doonesbury but also didn't pass Redshirt muster. So I have three remaining pills for three remaining days until Monday, when, hopefully, they will get said authorization from his office and everything will be hunky and dory.
Either way, though, I'm likely out of his office, between this round of mishandling and the even worse one where he prescribed a procedure the first time this owie-in-my-side thing came up that was utterly inconsistent with me only having one kidney. Eleanor moved on from him to a much bigger, more corporate, but more convenient and organized practice, where the same MD is accepting new patients. She has one or two issues with her, as you may know if you've been following her disability saga, but "one or two" is still <"buttload," which is where I kinda am with this guy.
----
Likewise, with the guy to whom I've entrusted most of my computer needs for going on 20 years.
My longtime guru is a computer geek straight from Central Casting- from the ADD to the horn-rimmed glasses to the ADD- did I mention that? He's bailed me out of kiloliters of bad shit, and I, him, but this latest crash proved to be a turning point. It took two weeks for his shop to diagnose and restore my laptop from its broken-ness from a bad external case, disconnected monitor, and, most and worst, from shutting off suddenly with the surrounding desktop feeling very, VERY hot. After my doctor's appointment Wednesday, I drove the remaining 70 miles to reclaim the re-cased, reconnected-monitored machine, and it was good. Wednesday night, I started restoring my two weeks worth of missing data to it. Thursday morning, I resumed my usual work routine with it- even though, hmmmm, something smells kinda hot-plasticky in there. And just past noon, poof! My on-again laptop was off again.
I called. No bright ideas. Maybe it was overloading from the two weeks of backloaded updates it had been served up by Windows and AVG. I left it out all night in the garage to start it from a cooler spot (hence its new nickname, Paddy O'Furniture;), and still it seized come this morning. So I abandoned my guru and sought out a friend.
Lisa was hired as a legal secretary, mainly for me, when we first moved here almost 19 years ago. I lasted at that firm for a year; she just left a year ago. On the way, she became their in-house I.T. go-to and accumulated a wealth of knowledge about shit like this. So, for the down payment of a Timmy Ho's blueberry muffin, she took a crack at figuring out what was still broke.
In time, she found quite a bit:
In fairness, Guru, Master of Mysterious Powers, had cleaned out plenty of cat hair from the keyboard and the undercarriage of the beast- but it took Lisa's mad skillz to remove that much from the actual fan, which wasn't functioning and was clogged with that much. She also found the plastic part down two and left, which was floating round the guts of the assembly and was presumably getting sucked into the fan and shutting it, and everything, off on a regular basis.
As of late today, she'd gotten the fur-less beast to run happily for up to three hours at a time, downloading and installing weeks worth of updates. It's still not right-right, but it all seems to be issues with drivers and files rather than gorked hardware. I think she's now earned the other 109% of my trust I'd put with Guru to get it right- and I doubt that he will be more than a purchase source for me after this.
Not so good are the two other professionals I will likely be saying buh-bye to as a result of things that happened this week.
----
Mid-week, I needed to make an appointment with my doctor, because my two maintenance prescriptions were running low and the pharmacy made clear, last time they were up, that I needed to Be Seen before they'd be renewed. So I toodled in for my 11:30 a.m. appointment, and got seen far closer to 12:30.
I was weighed, BP'd, steth'd and not much else. I did mention that my Pain In The
He renewed my two RX's and I was on my way to the second doctoring in my life, of the computer kind. Until today, when it became clear that my MD and I had had yet another Failyah to Comm-yune-i-kate. Wegmans deposited three of Eleanor's scrips in my lap at the end of the day, but only one of my two. The other, which has been two-a-day for years, needs a specific MD approval before the insurance company will authorize it beyond one-a-day. Which, um, they forgot to call in, instead just writing "BD" on the scrip, which has nothing to do with Doonesbury but also didn't pass Redshirt muster. So I have three remaining pills for three remaining days until Monday, when, hopefully, they will get said authorization from his office and everything will be hunky and dory.
Either way, though, I'm likely out of his office, between this round of mishandling and the even worse one where he prescribed a procedure the first time this owie-in-my-side thing came up that was utterly inconsistent with me only having one kidney. Eleanor moved on from him to a much bigger, more corporate, but more convenient and organized practice, where the same MD is accepting new patients. She has one or two issues with her, as you may know if you've been following her disability saga, but "one or two" is still <"buttload," which is where I kinda am with this guy.
----
Likewise, with the guy to whom I've entrusted most of my computer needs for going on 20 years.
My longtime guru is a computer geek straight from Central Casting- from the ADD to the horn-rimmed glasses to the ADD- did I mention that? He's bailed me out of kiloliters of bad shit, and I, him, but this latest crash proved to be a turning point. It took two weeks for his shop to diagnose and restore my laptop from its broken-ness from a bad external case, disconnected monitor, and, most and worst, from shutting off suddenly with the surrounding desktop feeling very, VERY hot. After my doctor's appointment Wednesday, I drove the remaining 70 miles to reclaim the re-cased, reconnected-monitored machine, and it was good. Wednesday night, I started restoring my two weeks worth of missing data to it. Thursday morning, I resumed my usual work routine with it- even though, hmmmm, something smells kinda hot-plasticky in there. And just past noon, poof! My on-again laptop was off again.
I called. No bright ideas. Maybe it was overloading from the two weeks of backloaded updates it had been served up by Windows and AVG. I left it out all night in the garage to start it from a cooler spot (hence its new nickname, Paddy O'Furniture;), and still it seized come this morning. So I abandoned my guru and sought out a friend.
Lisa was hired as a legal secretary, mainly for me, when we first moved here almost 19 years ago. I lasted at that firm for a year; she just left a year ago. On the way, she became their in-house I.T. go-to and accumulated a wealth of knowledge about shit like this. So, for the down payment of a Timmy Ho's blueberry muffin, she took a crack at figuring out what was still broke.
In time, she found quite a bit:
In fairness, Guru, Master of Mysterious Powers, had cleaned out plenty of cat hair from the keyboard and the undercarriage of the beast- but it took Lisa's mad skillz to remove that much from the actual fan, which wasn't functioning and was clogged with that much. She also found the plastic part down two and left, which was floating round the guts of the assembly and was presumably getting sucked into the fan and shutting it, and everything, off on a regular basis.
As of late today, she'd gotten the fur-less beast to run happily for up to three hours at a time, downloading and installing weeks worth of updates. It's still not right-right, but it all seems to be issues with drivers and files rather than gorked hardware. I think she's now earned the other 109% of my trust I'd put with Guru to get it right- and I doubt that he will be more than a purchase source for me after this.