When Zoey met Zoë at Zoé

That actually didn't happen. But it was too good a line not to find a way to use.

Late this morning marked the first time since the Before Times that Eleanor and I returned to the inside of a restaurant at the same time to sit down and eat a meal at the place's own table. Zoey, of course, is our crime cancer-fightin' (and until recently wanderin') kitty cat. Our lunch company was Becky, a lawyer friend of mine who befriended Eleanor through our Facebook connection and had never met her in person. Zoë is the name of the beagle Beck has raised from a pup and who snugs the world out of her. (I tease her mercilessly about the umlaut.) And our meal was at Zoé, which fancies itself as a fashionable east side bistro but remains unmistakable as the descendant of the Greek diner that it began as and, deep down in the spanakopita, always will be.

Rebecca's been going through some rough times in both quantity and quality. She's deeply involved in local party politics from the chairing-and-pavement-pounding end, as well as working in county government in a related role. New York has moved primaries up to this week from their traditional September date, so she's busier than a cat having kittens, or in her case a fixed beagle having whatever a fixed beagle has. We shared stories and laughs and I'm sure she came away knowing she has two friends here who think the world of her and will do anything we can to help smooth out the roughs.

Before that, we did more than our usual morning fighting with tech.  When I finally got going around 7:15, Eleanor, who more typically is out of the rack well before 6, announced that the Amazon order was ready. These would be reno-related things.  Since these are perfectly appropriate things to pay for with the insurance buck we parked in a savings account of hers, I asked if they'd given her a debit card and she could just deduct it from that.

Well.  Unce, tice, fee tines a mady, and the number didn't work. I checked the card number. Looked legit and correctly entered. Sixteen digits beginning with a five, which is the way Mastercard credit and debit cards begin.  I tried entering it myself in the Amazon account, and it still no work.  Then I took a different tack:

Let's put it into a bankruptcy.

No, not an actual case. Just into the program I use to file them.  Major credit/debit cards all have a "checksum" feature in the way their digits add up.  Unless you were told there would be no math, you can see it explained and illustrated on this site.  But I didn't bother with that, because my filing software has it built in, and if the 16-digit V or MC is a legit possible number, the program will confirm that by placing the dashes between each four-digit component. If it's not, it leaves it as a string of sixteen. (Only the last four display on the actual filing; the full numbers may be sent electronically to the creditor if it has signed up for that service, but I'm not even sure of that.)

So, a major bank issued a card with the wrong credit card number? Erm, no. It's not a credit or debit card at all, but an ATM-only one. This, oddly, is not unusual; I used to have separate debit and ATM cards for our joint checking account, but the ATM card never began with a 4 or 5 so you'd mistake it for the other. Why this bank chose that, no idea. She's going to find out tomorrow if they can convert it into a V or MC-branded one. Meanwhile, I just slapped it on a credit card and we'll have to shovel dollars around when the bill comes in a few weeks.

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Then, while working on that snafu, I decided to print Eleanor's schedule for next week. This is a necessary annoyance for two reasons. First, because the printing process here is crap; her laptop almost always loses wifi contact with our one shitty printer and has to be troubleshot, while the printer itself prints shit quality unless you clean the printhead twice right before you print.  More annoying, though, was not even being able to get to the schedule to encounter these annoyances.

Her employer uses Office 365 as the interface for accessing schedule, pay and other information. About a year ago, the schedule, at least, started hanging up when she tried viewing it in Chrome. I had a theory to test: would it work in the dreaded Microsoft Edge?  Indeed it did. And for every weekend since, we've used that stupid thing for this, and only this function on her laptop, just as I use it for one, and only one, website that won't work with anything else.

I clicked on the wavy-E looking icon, which was close to a new widget in her systray, showing the temperature next to Mr. Golden Sun. Ah, she got the last update. Windows 10 dropped that on me, as well, and I promptly killed it.  Unfortunately, what she also got was a completely new Edge install that killed off everything- saved tabs, favorites, browsing history, the works.  Fortunately, we never deleted the Office 365 link from Chrome even though it didn't work, and by pasting it back in to Edge, we were able to start over and save it again. 

The weird thing, though? I hadn't opened Edge myself since Sunny came home in the bottom tray. When I opened mine, my clerk's site, history, and everything were all as before.

I don't get it. We both have the same OS and got the updates around the same time. And we're both fully vaccinated, so our microchips should be equally operative.