the everyday adventures of sabrina

i’ve gotten used to the spams that know my real name:

From: Gene Smith
Subject: Sabrina Downard How are you, Sabrina Downard Your Cr-edit isn’t a issue. If you have Property and
want capital to expend anyway you wish or simply
want to decrease your fees;

and even gotten used to the ones that apparently made up a name for me because i get that not-my-name a lot:

From: Hunter Philips
Subject: Sabrina Brochure Eligible sabrina brochure, I spoke yesterday, After further review of your details our office is glad to
alert you of your approval.

but today, while checking my spam folder, i got some very creepy ones: they list valid, old addresses for me. i got nine of them in the past two days citing my old address on S. Racine, where i lived in 1996-1997, and eight of them citing my old address on N. Hermitage (1997-1999).

that’s just more than a little bit disturbing. i was willing to accept that receiving spam with my real name on it was just part of the hassles of having ever written anything with said real name on usenet, the web, a mailing list, et cetera, but … i don’t make a habit of making my address public. this could be data trolled from domain registration records, wherein i’ve always listed my correct address (uh, except for now … i guess i didn’t get around to updating it when i moved, oops!), or, i suppose, any one of a number of other sources. still, i do not like it, sam i am.

it’s done.

it’s the Stepping Out Coat from Hip to Knit, made with brown sheep burly spun in prairie fire (for which i paid entirely too much from the LYS, but what the hell).

i started this sweater in november. i had most of the parts done by march or so, and started sewing the front pieces to the back over at kim’s place, but i didn’t get around to putting on the pockets or sewing in the sleeves until now. i still have to attach the frog closure, and block it, but oh my god the fourteen thousand ends that had to be woven in are done and … holy crap, it’s finally done! oh my god. i can’t believe it’s done. i get a whole empty knitting basket back now that the sweater won’t be sitting in it!

LOSE A FUCKING GAME, ALREADY.

hmmmf.

so as some of you know, i got ahold of a pattern to make starsky’s sweater (from starsky and hutch, of course!) that i was all excited about. i wrote off to Leisure Arts, the publisher, to ask — since i had had such a hard time trying to find the pattern, and i knew of other people who would be interested as well — if they would be willing to publish the pattern as a free download on their site, or if they would permit me to post it if they were not interested (with attribution and original copyright information, since i also wrote that i knew it was still covered under copyright and that i was not allowed to reprint it without permission). i even offered to scan it and send it in to them if they weren’t able to find the original themselves, since it is thirty years old. their first response was like “this is still covered by copyright and permission is denied to reprint it. we’ll pass your question about making it available for free up the line to see if the editors will publish it.” being polite (and frankly surprised to have gotten a response that soon), i wrote back and said thanks for responding so quickly, and added that i would appreciate it if they could let me know whatever the final decision was. then they wrote back again and sounded really cranky, and went on about how their publishing schedule is set a year in advance and they don’t know if they’ll ever hear back and so on and so forth. i’m like … dude. i already *said* i wasn’t going to distribute your thirty year old, very kitschy seventies pattern in violation of copyright, and then i thanked you for redundantly telling me i couldn’t do so, then you get all grumpy at me for asking if you could let me know if it gets approved, so i can send it to some other people who want the pattern? jeez, pardon *me* for living. i’d think someone would be pleased that there’s still any interest at all in a pattern published in 1977, especially since it’s pretty damn kitschy at this point and it’s not like if you republish it — especially if you just reprint the whole booklet, wherein it’s paired up with a truly repulsively-seventies women’s hooded sweater — you stand to make a million bazillion dollars. also: dude, it’s a knitting pattern. nobody’s gonna get hurt if you pretend you care about my silly question. and to top it all off, their instructions are annoying. it calls for yarn by the ounce, without specifying content (so, are we talking wool weight, or acrylic?). and it remains to be seen if i can make sense of the stitch instructions. hmpf. (none of this is going to stop me from trying to make the sweater, naturally. i just like complaining.)

woke up this morning to continued lack of cell phone service. alas, poor phone sitting at the bottom of niqui’s laptop bag, passing time thinking forlornly on its late, lamented network authorization. niqui is, naturally, sitting on hold with cingular. again. b., the agent at the cingular store who offered to call me friday, never did, so i am trying to ascertain my migration eligibility on my own. i tell you, explaining the whole situation just never gets old.

currently, i am on hold listening to the obligatory awful hold music while a recording of a too-perky woman alternates every thirty seconds or so between asking me to use good judgment while phoning and driving, or to switch to online automatic bill payments. whoever manages this call center clearly has never been forced to spend significant amounts of time listening to their hold music/reminders because if they had, they would realize why i really could not give a shit about their automatic 411 service offering to text-message me numbers so i can have them later, especially after being told about the service approximately 300 times.

* niqui sings a little song. “on the phone again, i just can’t wait to get on the phone again, the life i love is using a cellular phone, and i can’t wait to get on the phone again!”
<niqui> obviously /me is full of lies, but…
<niqui> nonetheless i’ve begun today’s exercise in frustration trying to get my cingular issue resolved
<wasy> niqui is remarkably persistent
* niqui is painfully stupid.

in response to folks asking why i don’t just change providers: i would, except i’m pretty sure you can’t transfer a cancelled number to another provider — you’d have to have an active phone to transfer it. in order to get uncancelled, i’m going to have to get a new phone. in order to get a new phone, i’m going to be forced to get a new two-year contract, because i can’t afford the inflated prices of a contract-free phone, even if i did get the awful $30-with-contract low-end model. quel scam!

…

woo! only 45 minutes on the phone today. the nice Customer Service Agent Number Six found out that no, i was still not eligible for migration — thanks, Customer Service Agent Number Five from Thursday, not that i really expected anything different — so she called over to billing and collections and got them to push it through. (or so she said. who knows if they actually did. remember, they don’t love me anymore because i didn’t give them the $169 i didn’t owe them.) then i threw caution to the winds and pleaded with the agent to see if maybe, by any chance, perhaps, somehow, some way they still had a stash of old ATTWS sim cards that would work in my phone, so i wouldn’t have to upgrade, since i love my old phone (i do! the t68i is the best phone i’ve ever had. besides, i have a bunch of accessories for it. and, okay, yeah, i’ve been planning to replace it because the ‘Yes’ button’s broken, but i would really appreciate the opportunity to upgrade on my own terms, when i am not faced between buying it and, say, paying my renter’s insurance premium. but i digress.). she put me on hold and went off to find out. … and it turns out that yes!, they can replace my sim card, despite being told no, no, no, a thousand times no by every previous customer service agent. well, what the hell. if they send me a cingular SIM card that won’t work in my ATTWS phone, at least i’m no worse off than i am now. so, i spring the extra five bucks for expedited shipping (which probably won’t really matter since i won’t be home for fedex/ups/whoever to deliver to, but … what the hell, it’s worth a shot), and she didn’t even mention until much later that there was a replacement card fee at all (because she waived it for me without even having to ask). anything else she can do for me today? nope; thank you for calling, have a nice day. so, five minutes after i get off the phone, i try to turn on my phone, just out of “what the hell.” guess what? despite the hardcore cinnamon fragrance now permanently imbued in the plastic from sitting for so long in the laptop bag pocket where i keep gum, …

IT WORKS! i can call people! they can call me! i can even receive text messages! OH FRABJOUS DAY! and, no, cingular, don’t worry, i won’t let my phone distract me from driving safely. so, just to recap this for my own entertainment:

• i had no phone service for two and a half weeks. still have no idea why (my personal assumption is that when ATT consolidated the bill into my home phone bill, they “discovered” the “delinquent” account-that-never-was, which prompted them to cut off my real phone — but no one has been able to actually tell me what happened.);
• i probably have a complaint on my credit rating now (oh goodie!) for the account they sent to collections after they failed to realize that i had cancelled it;
• i was told repeatedly that i had no, no, absolutely no choice but to purchase new equipment;
• i actually did purchase a replacement sim card, which it turns out i don’t appear to need;
• i was sent off to cingular stores twice because everything was straightened out, when it wasn’t, and so got to enjoy north side rush hour driving i would normally have stayed far, far away from;
• i wasted 90 minutes standing around in stores while store sales agents sat on hold with Cingular Ground Command trying to figure out if they could sell me a phone or not;
• i invested three and three-quarters hours on the phone; and
• i talked directly to six ATT and cingular customer service agents in my various phone stints, and they interacted with several others during the course of researching my problem.

… and in the end, all they had to do was to cancel the bogus account and push the approval to reinstate service through their systems and my phone just started working fine again.

(in defense of the customer service agents, despite their cluelessness on the “you must upgrade phones!” issues, each one of them was very friendly and genuinely seemed invested in getting me working again, and it was easy to work with all of them without even getting grumpy despite the complete ridiculousness of the situation. i actually blame ATT-the-entity, as a corporate amorphous bureaucratic blob which can’t get its act together from acquiring ten billion business units and squashing them together, for not giving them adequate training or the resources to actually get my problem figured out in a timely manner. in short, ATT *deserves* the phone bill they’re gonna get from paying for me to sit on their 800 number for hours! …oh, wait. damn.) (and, i wonder what i should do with my spare sim card once it arrives?)

so, two weeks ago, my cell phone stopped working.

approximate timeline:

• july, 2000: i get a new cell phone, from at&t wireless, since i’m dissatisfied with cellular one cingular.
• may, 2003: upgrade from my crappy nokia to my sony-ericsson t68i, which i love, love, love.
• 2004 sometime: cingular buys at&t wireless. of course. i sulk, but keep the service because i still like the phone and don’t want to change my number.
• july, 2005: i decide to upgrade my phone before leaving on my road trip, because my beloved t68i is getting a little beat up. despite going in to the store and listing as my priorities “bluetooth ppp capabilities, size, and keypad that doesn’t suck,” the guy sells me a phone without bluetooth, which i discover about ten minutes after walking out of the store, while playing with the menus in line in a different store in the same strip mall. i immediately return the phone, with an obligatory 24-48 hour wait for service to be restored to the old phone.
• july, 2005: apparently cingular “forget” that they credited my account for the phone i returned — which had necessitated an entirely new cingular account, because it was a “real” cingular phone instead of an inherited at&t wireless phone — and promptly start billing me for an account for the phone that i returned. except they don’t actually get around to the “bill me” part. apparently they finally sent it off to collections for non-payment, which would probably have been nice to have known about. the account is “written off,” which is a technical term that apparently means “at some undetermined point in the future we will screw this customer over in return for them not paying us the $169.61 we gave them back.”
• march, 2006: i call ameritech sbc at&t to arrange to move my landline phone service from my old apartment to my new one. while i’m at it, i decide to take them up on their offer to consolidate my cingular wireless bill into my at&t phone bill (and thus the acquisition renaming “what company were you a customer of?” nightmare comes full circle). this was a mistake, as it apparently gave them an excuse to mess with me.
• early june, 2006: i go to clear my text messages *again* after my memory fills up *again* because of this one really whiny server at work that’s been paging us every four hours for like three months now, and the phone display no longer says AT&T Wireless or any other carrier name, but instead reads SIM ERROR. rebooting it has no effect, and it refuses to talk to the network.
• last week: spend 90 minutes on the phone with at&t, going through four different departments and four different customer service agents in order to make sense of the mess. agent number three claims that my cell phone was cancelled because i forgot to pay my bill, except i had paid my phone bill earlier that day. agent four said that they would note on my account that the bill was paid and send my account off for reactivation, which would take 24-48 hours. that was on thursday.
• monday, tuesday, wednesday: my phone is still broken, but so is my spirit. cannot cope with another hour and a half on the phone with people who thank me for being an AT&T customer, as though i had a choice in the matter or were, say, receiving actual service from them.
• today: suck in my gut and pick up the phone, out of desperation to get my phone back before they give my number out to someone else. listen, it took me like five years to get everyone in my family accustomed to calling that number, and i am not going through that again even if it is a stupid 847 number and i haven’t lived in 847 in like five years. spend another 85 minutes on the phone, only two agents this time, and the second one, gary, brings up the written off account from the bollixed upgrade last summer as the source of the trouble. apparently i’m a bad customer and they don’t love me anymore, and that’s why they are refusing to reinstate service. (though note that i still don’t have a clear answer as to why the phone was actually cancelled in the first place.) gary reverses part of the charge and credits me the rest (huh? oh, fuck it; whatever), and tells me that i’m going to have to get a new sim card to get back online. (what? my old sim card worked fine until YOU CANCELLED ME FOR NO REASON.) okay, whatever. i just want my phone back. he looks up a local cingular store in my zip code, calls over there and tells one of the sales guys what to do to get me back, gives me the guy’s name and the store’s hours. i manage to squeak over to the store twenty minutes before their seven o’clock closing time, and find my sales guy. he then spends twenty minutes on the phone with the mothership, only to learn that (a) i am going to be forced to upgrade my phone, because since it’s an ATTWS phone and not a cingular phone no one will have a sim card that works in it, and, (b) furthermore, he can’t do it at his shop because they’re only an “authorized dealer” and not an actual cingular store (although the big sign says cingular and there’s bloody enough orange decor to blind you), so he calls up the next cingular store up the road and sends me over there to get set up. i make it to the next cingular store with fortunately about 40 minutes to spare before they close, and find my designated sales guy, who has been briefed about The Situation. he tinkers and says i’m going to have to buy a phone. never mind that i can’t afford to buy a new phone at the minute, what the hell ever, i just want to get a phone and get it working and get the hell out of dodge. i pick out a razr —
  

  <wasy> niqui should get the pink one!
  <wasy> PINK!
  <wasy> PINK PHONE!
  * niqui looks ashamed.
  * niqui … was planning on it.
  <wasy> ha!
  <niqui> they only had one left, so they put it aside for me.
  <niqui> shut up.
  <wasy> PINK PHONE!
  <niqui> dude, if i’m gonna be forced to get a new phone, i’m going to get the one that amuses me

  — despite the cost being nearly twice what i wanted to pay for my forced upgrade. we retreat to the sales desk so that he can hook me up. only,
    there’s
      just
        one
          more
            problem:
  the credit for the written off account that cingular forgot i returned — TO THIS EXACT CINGULAR STORE! — has not been processed enough, and so i am still ineligible for a migration, i.e. to get a working phone. dude offers to check the system as soon as he gets in to work tomorrow afternoon, and give me a call when he knows if i should come in to get my new phone, or if i should just not bother yet.

so. i still don’t have a working phone. i don’t even know why my phone stopped working. i’ve put three hours in on the phone, gone through half a dozen customer service agents, another several in person, about ten miles of extra driving in rush hour traffic (so let’s say that was about an hour and probably a gallon of gas). i’m going to have to go back, so there’s an extra half hour of driving (at least it’ll only be to one store). i’m being forced to buy a new phone, which, okay, i could have gotten the awful low-end model for $30 after rebate and instead i picked out a nicer one for $130 after rebate, but still, an expense i wasn’t planning for — despite the fact that i was still more or less happy with my old phone. and i still don’t know when my damned phone will be back on!

i have been completely pwned by ma bell. this is just sad.

that was a fine show. i very much enjoyed the new material; that was exciting, and of course there was plenty of old material to enjoy as well. i had a marvellous time, and i’m so glad i spent the money on the ticket so that i could go see them play again. i’d write more except i’m falling asleep on the keyboard.

but, before i go, i have a couple of bits of feedback for the audience:

Dear Whoever Thought It Was A Good Idea To Shout “CHICAAAAGOOO!” during “Exit Music (for a film)”:

you were mistaken.

and

Dear Everyone Smoking Weed In The Damned Auditorium:

you’re a twit.

via mistergrumpy comes this: decapitated teddy USB drive.

i especially love the t-shirt.

Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 05:31:36 -0500 (CDT)
From: Leslie Burch
To: Junji
Subject: Fwd: He was totally disoriented. Could I have five minutes to. Forgetting to make the quarterly property-tax payment is a
hell of a lot more serious than forgetting to change the calendar page, and youre upset
because this is the first time you forgot something that big. But there was still that
strong, hurtful moment of guilt — like a quick deep stab-wound. So this was Memory
Lane, was it? I thought of gagging you, but gags are dangerous, especially if youre taking drugs that
affect respiration. (“I dont know where he gets. He hoped he would be okay. I know how
to hurt you. Annie was not swayed by pleas. He crawled into the parlor and that was when
he heard the drone of an approaching motor. The first two blows had perhaps not gone
deep enough to do much damage, but this time the crosss support post went at least three
inches into the kneeling troopers back, driving him flat.

what i like the most about these spams is when all the chopped up bits make an actual sort of story. a cracky story for cracked-out crackheads, but a story nonetheless!

ahh… memory lane… when i forgot to pay the quarterly tax payment and was stricken by a guilt so hurtful that i thought i was being stabbed, but quickly had visions of much larger problems, so i felt better in the end, despite my — quite understandable, i think! — disorientation. (the obligatory spammy link takes one to a hoodia diet pill site. (what the hell is hoodia? it’s got a stupid name, whatever it is.) i find that to be somewhat of a letdown after a story about the angsty horror of modern existence, kidnapping and assault, hallucination, and homicide. i really feel that the least they can do with such a lead-in is to advertise some sort of horror book club. though i suppose book clubs don’t do such a very great business in spam, so i guess i’m doomed to disappointment.)

1. wikipediafs hurt niqui’s brain. grumpy-sysadmin consoled me: hooray for martinis!
2. i missed out on buying a ticket when they went on sale, and i passed up one opportunity to pick one up from someone trying to sell one, but then today another opportunity came up, and, going on the history of recent events — wherein upon denying myself something i wanted (but decided i couldn’t spare the cash for it) i received a parking ticket the next day — i ponied up and snagged a ticket for the radiohead show next monday at the auditorium theatre. so now i am poorer, but i will feel vindicated when i do not get a parking ticket tomorrow morning (or if i do, at least i know i have something to be pleased about).
3. for those who have found me hard to schedule social things with, i am playing with Google Calendar, and have a publicly-available calendar now. i note a distressing lack of baseball in my immediate future. get to it, folks.
4. my (real) mobile, which has been unworky for the past few days because in my proven-unreliable-yet-still-unavoidable optimism i trusted at&t cingular sbc at&t to do the right thing when i asked them to consolidate my mobile and landline phone bills, resulting in my cell phone being “cancelled” (!!!) and a many customer service agents-long adventure through phone trees, supposedly might be working again by tomorrow. (they said 24-48 hours yesterday, but it’s been 24 now and it’s still not back on, so i’m guessing they’re going to use up the entire window, if not more!) if you don’t have my other mobile number and need it, email me.
5. am going to go see his latest vehicle tomorrow, mostly because while i am not a particular fan of Jack Black, i am a fan of seeing movies with friends. fortunately, going in to films with low expectations can result in not being too disappointed, so that’s what i’m hoping for here.
6. Yarn Car. check it out. ’nuff said.
7. i had to bring two changes of clothes to work today. two! one because of softball, and the other because i’m going to the cso right after that. this is a new changing-clothes-at-work record for me, thankfully.
8. that is all.

my car is paid off*.

that is all. –
(* except for the part where the automatically-debited payment was $313.03 less than my normal car payment, whereas i had thought that i had exactly one full payment left, but i am going to leave looking at the invoices for when i get home and continue WOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOO!! for now.)

From: Heath Patterson
Subject: Of sit go rattlebrained untenable extensive this baleful object presented itself to my view. I was very merry,
sound of which I thought had been borne towards me among the her with this discovery; but only said, I have not the heart to
In the back kitchen, I raved as became me. I went there, I down the hill. He told me, as soon as I came up with him, that
aspect had become morose, yielded to his better feelings, and underlet, and that I dont believe. The last man died here.

indeed. indeed.

perhaps what i shall do next is make up a pattern for a knitted car toy, to celebrate my car being paid off.

of course, the final car payment won’t go through until tomorrow, i don’t think, but nothing says i can’t start this evening if i feel like making something up. i have indigo blue yarn for the car body, dark grey for the tires, but i need silver/light grey for the rims and license plates… and not sure what color i should make the windows. (light grey was tempting, but then i thought about knitting in shapes for the seats, which are light grey, so that means the windows would have to be something else. i think i might have some white yarn, but i’m not sure. i definitely have some fisherman’s wool, so that might work. in my googling for car patterns, i didn’t find much help so i think i may be on my own here, but i did find this, which is vaguely amusing (though i’m not sure i’d want to go around with a VW logo on my head. i mean, i love my car and all, but, … a project! hooray for a project!

note to self: when making cupcakes to take in to the office, make more than two dozen. maybe four would be a good starting place.

man, i barely made it down the hall — and forget about upstairs! (sorry, webadmin and web services! :( )

okay. sitch:

• a couple of weeks ago, i took my cat to the vet, and parked on state street, in a rush-hour no-parking tow zone. i always park there on the street when i take my cats to the vet, but i usually go after 9AM, and so i didn’t realize it was a rush hour tow zone (as that’s newish, thanks to the dan ryan construction). in fact, i even fed the meter, because it said the meter was from 8AM – 5PM. (so i think that’s a bit misleading! i want my 50� back!) nonetheless, when i came out of the exam room, my cat was fine but my car was gone. this resulted in a $150 towing fee and a $50 ticket (which i felt was really just them being snarky).
• (it’s important to note that that towing fee prevented me from going back to Baker’s on State to get a totally cute pair of louboutin knockoff platform pumps that i really, really wanted, but which were $80 and so i passed them up on the day i made my awesome shoe sale score. I WANTED THOSE SHOES, DAMMIT.)
• at the end of may, my license plate tags expired, which i forgot about. so yesterday i came out to get my car to go to work and i had another $50 ticket to greet me.
• today, because apparently the meter maids think that you can extract license plate stickers from the secretary of state like magic and it doesn’t take any time at all, i had another $50 reminder that my tags are expired.
• (it’s also important to note that these two tickets are now preventing me from acquiring another pair of shoes, some fabulous mary janes from Topshop. THIS TREND [parking tickets interfering with shoe acquisition] SUCKS. i swear to you, the next time i see a pair of shoes i really want, i’m just going to freaking *buy* them because i will know the next day something bad is going to happen to me!)

since three parking tickets is a bootable offense, and the last thing i want is to get booted, i went to pay my parking tickets today. as the ticket envelopes trumpet you can:

Pay & Search for Your Tickets On-Line @: cityofchicago.org/revenue

okay! i am on board with this plan. i will go, plug in my tickets, give some shoe-denying fucker $150, and prevent the booting of the niquimobile. this is a great plan. nothing can go wrong with this plan!

except … there’s just this one thing. nobody knows what my license plate number is. see, i have “save the boobies” license plates: pink ribbons which bear the legend “Mammograms Save Lives.” a short number appears to the right of the ribbon picture on the plate, and on the right edge is the plate classification, “CD” written vertically. so the question is, is my plate number just the literal number, 1234, or is it the number plus the designation, 1234CD? no one knows! during the “omfg, my car is stolen! no, no, wait, no it’s not, never mind. hey, where’s my car?!” towing fiasco, i asked various and sundry police officers — who, really, you would think would be up on their plate numbering trivia — what it was, and none of them knew. i’m certain that that’s actually the reason my car was never reported un-stolen, because they reported it un-stolen under the wrong damn plate number. so here i am with these three parking tickets, and they have my plate numbers down as 1234, 1234CD, and 1234 (respectively). well, no worries. i’m sure the one i got today won’t be in the system, but i can just find the others and pay them, at least. right? (of course you know where this is going because if it had actually been straightforward to Search For and Pay My Tickets On-Line @ cityofchicago.org/revenue, i wouldn’t be writing a damn blog entry about it, would i?) no! no tickets turn up when searching for IL plate 1234, class MAM, owner’s last name Downard. … odd, because there were two without the CD. okay, try with the CD. … none! okay, maybe they … mistook the pink ribbon for, like, road dirt, and filed me under normal passenger plates. let’s try 1234. no! 1234CD? no! oh-kay … maybe they have it indexed under my ex- (and car loan co-signer)’s last name instead of mine? let’s try 1234, MAM, Smith. … nothing, of course! okay. try searching by notice number. plug in ticket numbers … nothing! hm. driver’s license number? what do you think? the last option available for searching is the vin, but i don’t have my vin handy, so scratch that. so, apparently the conclusion that i am to draw from this is, according to the city of chicago department of revenue, these tickets don’t exist. (except you know that they do, and they’re going to boot me just to piss me off, so i have to get this figured out.) so i designate this as time to find the section on the site that will allow me to pay my tickets. a little diligent poking around and i find another page that will allow you to specify the ticket numbers. up to like 12 tickets on one page! how convenient. (twelve? jesus.) so i plug in all three ticket numbers like a good citizen. and, hallelujah!, the two older ones come up, along with an area to fill in the info for the one i got today, which wasn’t in the system yet. praise jesus and pass the cornbread, i may not get booted yet after all. so. select all three. hit continue. fill in address information, fill in debit card information, hit continue, it helpfully lists the tickets it’s going to pay. both of them. as in only two, not three. … quoi? okay, back out of this transaction, it must have bobbled something, try again. select all three. fill in address again. fill in debit card again. it tells me about the two tickets it’s going to pay. the latter two, not the rush hour tow zone one. huh? okay, whatever, i’ll pay that one separately, you stupid thing. submit. print off proof of payment (it’s not that i don’t trust you; it’s that i just really don’t trust you.) start over, put in remaining ticket number, select to pay it, hey, cool, i don’t have to fill out my address this time, fill out debit card info…

Your Credit/Debit Card Could Not Be Debited Authorization to debit your credit/debit card was not completed for the following reason: We are sorry, but security requirements prevent the use of this card at this time to pay a violation.

but … but you just accepted that card as valid like three minutes ago! you stupid idiots. i’m guessing that this must be some sort of fraud-stopping thingy, to prevent stolen cards from being used to pay off lots of people’s tickets in quick succession, but … it wouldn’t have been necessary to use it twice if your moronic web site hadn’t decided to disobey my instructions to pay all three tickets and substituted its own will to pay only two of them! so now i either have to not pay the ticket, or have to put it on a credit card instead of my checking account? YOU SUCK. YOU SUCK, SUCK, SUCK, SUCK, SUCK.

and i really wanted those shoes. *sulk*

1. my mouth hurts. it’s very strange, but it feels like … i feel gravity tugging down on my jaw. walking jostles my jaw, thus hurts. it’s more strange and weird than explicitly painful (though it does wear me down over time). overall, i’m not really regretting coming to work today, but i would have been happier if i had stayed home (but i would have gotten much less done, so it’s a trade-off. i’m glad to have gotten somewhere, today, on at least one project.)
2. it’s finals week. we had a tech support request come in to restore someone’s crashed nethack session on the shell server. d. and i spent some quality time playing nethack — swear to god — so we could crash our games and learn how to recover games. we ended up going to tape to get lock files back for this user, then recovering from that. i am terribly, terribly amused.
3. (also, it was kinda fun playing nethack. i may have to play some more. for, uh, … research purposes … yeah, that’s the ticket …)
4. [cranky remark deleted about people at work being less than helpful]
5. i got a parking ticket today, because i forgot to send my license plate sticker renewal in and my plates expired at the end of may. stupid city of chicago and your stupid bastard street-cleaning days drawing extra attention to my car. stupid $50 ticket. stupid stupid stupid stupidity.
6. on the other hand, my !!!!! FINAL !!!!! car payment is scheduled to go through on the 13th. I WILL FINALLY OWN MY CAR. i have waited for that day for YEARS and it’s so close i can taste it. i think i’ll celebrate auto-ownership by taking my car to the car wash that day … it’s kinda dusty (and has a butterfly cocoon on the left rear passenger door, of all things).
7. as you probably noticed, i’m participating in �secretpal_lj2. i came up with this super neat (well, i think!) idea. and i’m very excited about it. and i’m not going to tell anyone what it is. neener, neener, neeeeeeener! but it’s super neat. SUPER NEAT! and i want to go yarn shopping right now.
8. blair is really super awesome.
9. i am feeling totally crafty lately. i swear to you, there’s an excellent likelihood of me dragging out the sewing machine and making myself a new shower curtain or sheers for my windows or something. i may also be planting flowerboxes and painting. YOU CANNOT STOP THE CRAFT!
10. words i find myself using a lot lately, for no apparent reason: “super” and “deeply.”
11. that is all.