It feels like I spent half of today in fruitless phone calls to customer support. One was an hour long tech call with a trusted company who has unfortunately outsourced their customer support to a country where I have trouble understanding the accent. I gave the tech guy remote access and then got to sit there and watch while he did the same things over and over as if somehow things would magically go differently this time around. Then he found one little setting to change (which I hadn’t known existed) and did a new thing over and over until I got fed up and ended the call. Then in only a few minutes I found the link he kept clicking past so I never got time to see it. It was the “set up account” button. No wonder his attempts to sync things kept failing. I did not have an account in a place where I needed one.
The second customer support call, to find out warranty information on our couch that broke, was even more frustrating. I waded through a phone tree to be “placed on hold” except it was a dead silent limbo that made me think my call had been dropped into a pit somehow. A second wade through phone tree got me to an endlessly looping hold recording. I got to listen to the loop for 20 minutes before I decided to do something better with my day. At least with the tech call I was able to reach a resolution. For this I’m still going to have to wait on hold or drive myself 30 minutes to the store.
In good news, I figured out how to e-file some important tax forms. This was essential because Utah laws have changed and I’m no longer allowed to file them on paper. (Hence the tech phone call.) This means that my year end accounting is complete. Now all I have to do is gather up all the necessary tax documents so that our accountant can file taxes for 2015. That is when I’ll learn if the financial management I did in December was sufficient to reduce our taxes to a comfortable number.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be more able to dive into creative work. We’re finishing up the Planet Mercenary card deck. We’re also beginning to move fast on edits and re-writes for the rest of the book. I keep looking at my calendar to see the spaces that I have available. Most of my days are pretty free, where in 2015 they were constantly impacted by school things and diagnostic appointments for kids. For now it is time for bed so I can get up and do creative things tomorrow.
Some phone trees will allow you to say “operator” or otherwise break out and get a real live person. Sometimes.