ikoniMedifast Status: Day 233, Down ~72lbs
I spent a bit of my morning dealing with an issue with UPS. I had to get on the phone with customer service and they actually have no means of doing that. I was really treated poorly and I was very painfully reminded why I prefer to always use FedEx if possible. UPS really went dramatically out of their way wasting tons of their own resources just to make me a very unhappy customer. They even had the audacity to tell me that I needed to call Canada to get what I needed – even though I had looked up Canadian customer service and called them rather than the American customer service. They refused to answer why they were saying I needed to call another country and would not tell me in what country they were in. I got passed from person to person, each one saying that the next person would help me but each one couldn’t and eventually they couldn’t even transfer me and had to give me a different phone number – the one that the web site claimed that I had called. Their IVR system, the phone prompts, doesn’t even have a means by which to reach customer service. If you have a problem you have to pick a choice and no choice leads to a human, none.
Considering that four UPS staffers had to assist me this was not a cheap process for UPS and at least two admitted that every single person who gets through to them is furious because of how poorly they have been treated by the IVR before reaching them. I found that the only way that I could get through to someone was to swear at the IVR loudly and, from what I can tell, that finally triggered the voice detection algorithm to determine that it had failed. I have no idea what got me through to someone and I could not reliably reach UPS every again if I had to. So not only did UPS completely alienate me but they paid a lot of money to several workers to do it. That the IVR is set to completely screw with their customers just highlights that this was no accident and required a lot of planning to make me so dissatisfied with them. That they knew that it was an issue and were not changing it just show that the results were what they actually wanted.
Simple solution – stick with FedEx. I’ve never had customer service issues there.
For lunch today, Nicki and I went to Brookhaven. After lunch we ran to the house and let Oreo out. The living room carpet is really starting to look good after I began my process of boiling a pot of water on the stove, mixing in Oxyclean and dumping it out on a bad spot of the carpet and letting it set for five to ten minutes. That works great. I can’t believe how well the floor cleans up from that. It is labour intensive work but the carpet is starting to look, more or less, like new. One spot at a time.
I went in to the office this morning and things were very slow. Very, very slow. I talked to my boss and told him that I was going to leave a day early and go to Houston this afternoon rather than waiting until tomorrow night. He was like… “whatever, there is nothing going on here.” We all agreed that this is the slowest that we have ever seen it. Absolutely nothing happening. No point to me being in the office at all. There is no one here and no work needing my attention.
So I left around three thirty to run home and get everything packed up for the drive. It always takes a while to get everything packed. I don’t need to bring all that much, though, since I am only going for about five days and Dominica already has most of everything that we need there.
It was probably five thirty or so when I finally managed to hit the road heading south. The drive went pretty smoothly, nothing really to report on the trip. While driving I listened to Bill Bryson’s At Home which Dominica and I had been reading together at some point, probably over the summer. I have given up on saving books to read with her because she can easily go years in between wanting to read something and I want to finish them and know what happened.
I did not quite finish the book on the drive but listened to the end of it in bed. We are staying at Joe and Britt’s house while down here. We have the entire upstairs “suite” to ourselves giving Dominica and I a room, Liesl a room and Luciana a room all to ourselves plus out own bathroom. It really makes it easy for us to keep living normally. The girls would not sleep well if we had to start sharing rooms all of a sudden.
I was tired when I arrived and Oreo and I went to bed a bit before everyone else.