![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tetch-nickel Difficulties
Oct. 20th, 2018 04:41 pmAll in all, the past workweek wasn't bad, despite four straight days of court and one day being a brutally long one. Most of the court was mostly standing in place and marking time, without any real progress or regress on the cases themselves. So instead the Technology Gods escalated their long battle to drive me crazy. I still don't have my new keyboard installed or even ordered, and the externals (now three of them- home and in each office) continue to get in my way. Unsatisfied with that, each of the last few days brought another annoyance or two.
Thursday morning, on walkies, I checked on my phone to see if Eleanor's paycheck had posted. I got this message, which I get virtually every time I use their mobile site:
(As a side rant, I hate Hate HATE when sites use Millennialspeak like this "working hard" shiz. The AT&T site always spins around with the message "please give us a minute- we're almost there!" Turbo Tax opens with "Wait a moment," then instantly updates that to "okay, we know it's taking longer than a moment." If you wasted fewer lines on snarky code, you wouldn't need the snarky code:P)
I know that messages like that usually come from cranky cookies, so I relogged in on the phone with cookies disabled- which of course generated a new problem: now it didn't recognize the phone, even with password provided, and demanded I answer a security question. Fortunately, I remembered the one they unwisely let me choose for myself:
Got right in after that. (I've had to report that answer to tech support people. They seem to appreciate it.)
----
That was how my longest of days began; it would have been even more stressful if I'd been receiving my usual complement of phone calls during the day, but I wasn't. A few calls came from people who had my actual mobile number, but most people reach me by calling my office landline, which forwards to that phone, except when it doesn't. Worried by the silence, I tried calling the number myself from my mobile, which usually goes straight to my AT&T voicemail, but this time I got "call failed" errors all day. I later tried it from another landline, which gave a "network error" message. Whatever it was, by the next morning it was all fixed, but it's frightening how quickly you can lose touch with your world and not know it, much less be able to do a damn thing about it.
To take the edge off the long day, my solution was to make it longer. My final Rochester appointment ended around 6:30, so I kept a plan to meet up with friends who were doing one of the Geeks Who Drink theme quizzes at another client's eating and drinking establishment. I'd forgotten that the venue, part of a historic local beer hall, had been renovated in the 80s by yet another client and had once hosted, in this very lower-level space-
a high-end prime rib joint co-owned by one of my then law partners originally named the Down Under. (This was the site of one of my most famed-ever snarky lines, to a waiter who brought me the wrong selection: "This is very nice. It's not what I ordered, but it's very nice.") It's now a combination of Asian food and craft brew- I ordered the KFC, which around here stands for Korean Fusion Chicken:
Coincidentally, "KFC" was also one of the answers in the eight-round quiz, all based on the first two seasons of Stranger Things. Our team of four, the Eggo Bandits, did quite well, snagging a bonus question and holding down second place for most of the evening until a killa final two rounds pushed us to fourth of seven. Here's the quiz's post of us at our table:
(If you don't understand the angle of that photo,click here, or even better start watching the damn show;)
----
Friday's court was two different ones in the morning. The first, adjourned, which I'd have known if the phones worked. The other was my first foray into Bankruptcy Court since they moved over to the fancy schmancy new Robert H. Jackson Courthouse. It’s sleek and cavernous and everything’s up to date in Jackson City- other than no public search terminals yet, and quite purposely and permanently, no paper calendars of what cases are scheduled and in what order. Yup, everything’s on these scrolling monitors arranged by judicial precedence- so the redheaded stepchild BK judges display after eight other District Judges and magistrates, who each get at least 20 seconds even if there’s nothing on- and then the stepchild calendar stops in the middle when the whole thing times out. So the only way I found my case was on was for it to BE on. Maybe by December, when I go back, they'll have straightened the bug out- or they will have discovered papyrus.
----
Not to be outdone by Speculum's phone problems of Thursday, they proceeded to misery me some more yesterday by disabling my email. Again, I noticed only by not noticing anything. That's when I did, finally, see that they had passed through a message two days before:
Nice of them to send that on 10/16/18, huh. I pretty much ignored that because so many phishing emails are made to look just that important and scary, but when I suddenly couldn't send or receive anything, I manually went to the twcc dot com site (a year since the merger and they STILL do everything as Time Warner), I got it easily fixed.
On this computer.
I then had to do it again on my mobile. Twice. (POP and SMTP are separate in iLand.) And will again on every backup device I ever use to access my mail.
Oh, and the weak password? THEY picked it out last time. I hope I gave them a good challenge question answer involving death and flames if I have to remember the new one.
----
So far, the only thing that's broken today was a small plant pot. (Not to be confused with a pot plant, which we haven't smuggled over from Canada yet;) That was during this morning's Get Both Cars Back In The Garage cleanup effort. I was bringing Ebony's old crate out to the back yard to rinse it- the SPCA is looking for donations of them- and the pile of patio dirt piled out there, which we've named Poopy Boy after this scene from Dogma, tripped me up and led to a cascade of garden things. They're cleaned up, as is the garage- at least enough to get both cars in.
Best of all, nobody died in a fire;)
Thursday morning, on walkies, I checked on my phone to see if Eleanor's paycheck had posted. I got this message, which I get virtually every time I use their mobile site:
(As a side rant, I hate Hate HATE when sites use Millennialspeak like this "working hard" shiz. The AT&T site always spins around with the message "please give us a minute- we're almost there!" Turbo Tax opens with "Wait a moment," then instantly updates that to "okay, we know it's taking longer than a moment." If you wasted fewer lines on snarky code, you wouldn't need the snarky code:P)
I know that messages like that usually come from cranky cookies, so I relogged in on the phone with cookies disabled- which of course generated a new problem: now it didn't recognize the phone, even with password provided, and demanded I answer a security question. Fortunately, I remembered the one they unwisely let me choose for myself:
Got right in after that. (I've had to report that answer to tech support people. They seem to appreciate it.)
----
That was how my longest of days began; it would have been even more stressful if I'd been receiving my usual complement of phone calls during the day, but I wasn't. A few calls came from people who had my actual mobile number, but most people reach me by calling my office landline, which forwards to that phone, except when it doesn't. Worried by the silence, I tried calling the number myself from my mobile, which usually goes straight to my AT&T voicemail, but this time I got "call failed" errors all day. I later tried it from another landline, which gave a "network error" message. Whatever it was, by the next morning it was all fixed, but it's frightening how quickly you can lose touch with your world and not know it, much less be able to do a damn thing about it.
To take the edge off the long day, my solution was to make it longer. My final Rochester appointment ended around 6:30, so I kept a plan to meet up with friends who were doing one of the Geeks Who Drink theme quizzes at another client's eating and drinking establishment. I'd forgotten that the venue, part of a historic local beer hall, had been renovated in the 80s by yet another client and had once hosted, in this very lower-level space-
a high-end prime rib joint co-owned by one of my then law partners originally named the Down Under. (This was the site of one of my most famed-ever snarky lines, to a waiter who brought me the wrong selection: "This is very nice. It's not what I ordered, but it's very nice.") It's now a combination of Asian food and craft brew- I ordered the KFC, which around here stands for Korean Fusion Chicken:
Coincidentally, "KFC" was also one of the answers in the eight-round quiz, all based on the first two seasons of Stranger Things. Our team of four, the Eggo Bandits, did quite well, snagging a bonus question and holding down second place for most of the evening until a killa final two rounds pushed us to fourth of seven. Here's the quiz's post of us at our table:
(If you don't understand the angle of that photo,click here, or even better start watching the damn show;)
----
Friday's court was two different ones in the morning. The first, adjourned, which I'd have known if the phones worked. The other was my first foray into Bankruptcy Court since they moved over to the fancy schmancy new Robert H. Jackson Courthouse. It’s sleek and cavernous and everything’s up to date in Jackson City- other than no public search terminals yet, and quite purposely and permanently, no paper calendars of what cases are scheduled and in what order. Yup, everything’s on these scrolling monitors arranged by judicial precedence- so the redheaded stepchild BK judges display after eight other District Judges and magistrates, who each get at least 20 seconds even if there’s nothing on- and then the stepchild calendar stops in the middle when the whole thing times out. So the only way I found my case was on was for it to BE on. Maybe by December, when I go back, they'll have straightened the bug out- or they will have discovered papyrus.
----
Not to be outdone by Speculum's phone problems of Thursday, they proceeded to misery me some more yesterday by disabling my email. Again, I noticed only by not noticing anything. That's when I did, finally, see that they had passed through a message two days before:
|
Nice of them to send that on 10/16/18, huh. I pretty much ignored that because so many phishing emails are made to look just that important and scary, but when I suddenly couldn't send or receive anything, I manually went to the twcc dot com site (a year since the merger and they STILL do everything as Time Warner), I got it easily fixed.
On this computer.
I then had to do it again on my mobile. Twice. (POP and SMTP are separate in iLand.) And will again on every backup device I ever use to access my mail.
Oh, and the weak password? THEY picked it out last time. I hope I gave them a good challenge question answer involving death and flames if I have to remember the new one.
----
So far, the only thing that's broken today was a small plant pot. (Not to be confused with a pot plant, which we haven't smuggled over from Canada yet;) That was during this morning's Get Both Cars Back In The Garage cleanup effort. I was bringing Ebony's old crate out to the back yard to rinse it- the SPCA is looking for donations of them- and the pile of patio dirt piled out there, which we've named Poopy Boy after this scene from Dogma, tripped me up and led to a cascade of garden things. They're cleaned up, as is the garage- at least enough to get both cars in.
Best of all, nobody died in a fire;)