Story of the Day 7/ 1 / 2013 - #3

It has been a long day. I know that because this is my THIRD Story of the Day.
At least it is now evening, otherwise, I would be worried about how much more there is yet to come....

Aaron and Sarah took off to go to the American Legion.
Aaron had gotten the address and mapquested it. He also had his GPS in the car.
Despite that, I got a call, after they had left.
The GPS was misbehaving, he was supposed to be on one street, but he wasn't.
Being the kind mother that I am, I opened up map quest on the computer and searched for the street, then I explained what the computer showed.

A bit later, he called,again.
Should he take a right or a left? How much farther was it?
This time, he gave me the exact address.
I opened up map quest, again. I gave him detailed instructions, grateful that he was less than half a mile from it.

About 45 minutes later, I get another phone call from my son.

No, he did get there.
Safely.
And they sat down at a table and Aaron ordered a coke.
Then he found out that they did not accept credit cards.
And he had no cash on him.
But he did have his debit card, and they have an ATM.
Did I know his PIN number for his debit card.

I explained to him that his PIN number and mine were different, and that , "no" I didn't know his.
He was getting ready to either wash a lot of dishes, or maybe go out on the street corner to beg.

Fortunatley, the American Legion Post is all of 8 minutes from our house, even though it took him more than twice that long to get there.

So being a wonderful mother ( please remind him of this, the next time that you see him) , I drove over and paid the bill.

Have I explained that Aaron is deaf? Deaf means you can't hear.
I also found out, tonight, that he is illiterate.
On entering the American Legion there were two signs, one on the door and one on the wall you face when you walk in.

They only accept cash.

Story of the Day 7/ 1/ 2013 - #2

My son, Aaron, received an email from Sarah, today. The subject was "Reply Aaron" which certainly would make him open it, to see what he needs to reply to.
Except, the email was something generated by a program that hacked into my daughter's email.
Aaron didn't open the attachment or the link.
Apparently, however, his father did.

Aaron figured this out because he also received an email from my sweet husband.
Telling him how to enlarge his penis.

My daughter is mortified.
I told her not to worry.
That is the difference between being a teenager and being in your 50's.

Someone her age might joke about it, but would be truly horrified if this email was sent from their email account and was received by their friends, family and school teachers.
Someone my age, or my husband's age would do the reverse.
We would experience a moment of mortification.

And then hours of laughter.
Especially imagining our parents opening it.

Story of the Day 7/ 1/ 2013 - #1

My daughter asked me to listen to something for her.
She does this fairly often.
She will watch something on the internet, and it will not be captioned; or she will want me to describe a piece of music for her that goes with a movie or an ad. Ads are almost never captioned, so I get to listen to a lot of ads and either interpret them - where there is spoken dialogue- or tell her what the sounds are that match the video.
Since she is profoundly deaf, even though I am bad at this, I am much better than hearing aids.

So, when Sarah asked me, today, to listen to something for her, I assumed it was on the internet.
I was surprised, instead, when she ran off to her room and returned a moment later carrying a greeting card.

Someone who has known her for her entree life sent her a greeting card for her graduation.
One with a sound chip.
Sarah wanted to know if it was music or a message.
So I listened, dumbfounded, that this was the card the friend had chosen to send to her.

Story of the Day 6/ 23/ 2013

I have been publishing these out of order.
I apologize.
June 23rd finds us back to Aaron and the saga of his EMT practical exam, up in Hobart, IN.




My son drove off to Hobart on Saturday evening.
He couldn't leave until after our Sabbath was over, and after he had come back from services and until after he had peed, thrown his bags into the car and received severe last minute frantic directions from his mother.
One of which was to let me know as soon as he got to the Hotel in Hobart.
I mean in Merrillville, since, I did not, after all, reserve a room for him at the Hobart Budget Inn.

It was about 11 PM when he finally pulled out of our driveway and took off.
I called and let the hotel know that he would be arriving there in a couple of hours. I had already given that instruction when I reserved the room, but there was that nagging worry that they would give his room to someone else and he would nd up sleeping in the car.
In his case, that could be dangerous, not because the cops might stop and make sure he wasn't sleeping in his car, but because there was no outlet for the alarm clock he had with him- the one that vibrates his bed hard enough to make it practically dance on the hardwood floor in his bedroom. The only alarm clock pretty much guaranteed to get his butt up in the morning and to the test.
As for the hardwood floor in his room, someday, in the far flung future when we sell this house, I can only imagine what bedroom activities or the level of bedroom activities future home shoppers will imagine us partaking of when they see that floor- gouged in a million places from the bed jumping up and down.....

You might be wondering why we have a vibrating alarm clock to send off with him to Hobart, and yet, we do not have a portable flashing fire alarm.
Especially since this made getting a hotel room for him such a complicated affair.
We did have one.
A flashing fire alarm that was portable.
I ordered it from a company for Aaron to take to Israel.
It costs about $250. I also ordered the $13 adaptor for the different current.

I did this because not only did the dorm in the yeshivah in Israel NOT having flashing some detector, it had NO smoke detectors.
So, in case of a fire, that smoke detector would not just be saving my son, but all of those other little boys in the dorm. Hey their mothers think of them as little boys, so....

My son, obediently plugged it and his alarm clock in shortly after unpacking his socks and underwear.
And the lights went out.
In the entire dorm.
Oh, and at the same moment the lights went off, there was a bit of a noise. A kind of a bang, as best as my son, who is deaf, described it.
Well, the circuit breaker was taken care of , or the fuse that had been blown, and the lights went back on.
However, the smoke detector was dead to the world.
As was his slarm clock.

The alarm clock had only cost about $40 , and we have since replaced it, but the smoke detector............

Story of the Day 6/ 13/ 2013

This morning, I received an email from the college my daughter, Sarah, is attending.
Or, at least, will be attending, this August.
It's subject was " Admitted Student Questionnaire"

I opened it and started to read.
The email informed me that Sarah is not attending RIT.
She is not enrolling in RIT.

This is Sarah who has been walking around wearing a collection of RIT t-shirst in which we have invested, picking out towels and texting to her roommate. The one who is supposed to live with her at RIT.

My first thought is, "Oh My G-d, what did I fuck up?"
Let's be real, not only am I not Einstein, I am not competent, so this was a reasonable thought.
I went through a mental checklist:
I paid the deposit.
I paid the dorm deposit.
Sarah had been assigned to a specific dorm room.
I had registered for the parent's orientation.
I had called the school to make sure we were dropping Sarah off on the correct date.
I had run the directions through Mapquest.

What did I miss????

Sarah walked into the room wearing one of her RIT t-shirts.

I decide that I am very capable of messing up, but Sarah would not have allowed me to miss any critical things.

So, I shoot off an email to Dr. Miller.
I tell him:

Dear Dr. Miller,

Sarah IS enrolling at RIT. It was the only college to which she applied, because she fell in love with it, when we visited , two years ago.
I am not sure where the information that she is not enrolling is from.

Sincerely,
Cassia Margolis


The original email was sent at 10:36 AM and my reply to Dr. Miller was sent back 19 minutes later.

At 11:16, I received another email from RIT:


You may have recently received an email regarding the Admitted Student Questionnaire for "Non-Enrolling Students". THIS MESSAGE WAS SENT TO YOU IN ERROR.



As a result of this morning's chain of missives, I have decided that:

#1- I need to go buy more hair dye, because I am certain my entire head is now grey.
and

#2- I may have prematurely assumed that Sarah graduating from high school was leaving me with a dearth of material for the "Story of the Day".

Story of the Day 7/ 2 / 2013- Saga of the camera- addendum to the addendum

So, we have the camera back.
After a month.
And it isn't working quite right.
Although, it is working.
And I also have a gift card from Best Buy.
The place that lost it, lost it again, and sort of fixed it.
And we need a new TV.

You see, our TV is great. Wonderful picture. Really great. Much better than most TVs I see in showrooms.
But the dvd player will no longer work with it.
And that is the main pruprose of it, for us.
We do not have cable, or a satellite dish.
We watch dvds.
In fact, the original excuse, I mean reason we bought a large screen TV for a lot of money was to watch movies- the movies that are shown uncaptioned in theaters and therefore cannot be understood and enjoyed by my family, which cannot hear.
Instead, we wait the 6 months until the films are released on DVD, and then we watch them.

So , having a nice, large screen TV becomes our only really good access to movies.
And it is worth it.
Or, it was, until we stopped being able to watch dvds on it.
So, last week, Aaron and I hauled it down the stairs and out to my car- where, with careful maneuvering, it barely fit.
I had taped the cable, the remote and the instruction book in a ziploc to the back, and a large note on the front explaining what worked and what didn't.
Then my son drove it off to the thrift store that benefits the battered women's shelter, where they can hopefully get $20 for it; and someone can hook it up to cable and enjoy it.

And now, we are hunting for a new TV.
But not at Best Buy.
Because even though they sent us a gift card that would pay for some part of it ( thought not a substantial part), I cannot face going through another "Best Buy experience".

Story of the Day 6/26/2013- Saga of teh camera- Addendum

The saga of the camera may or may not be over, but my telling of it was not complete.
I left off some things that happened, but I will now add them and explain how they influenced me.

Before the camera was lost and found, - I mean before they lost it a second time , but not after they had misplaced it, lied to me and then sent it off to be repaired, and lied to me about that, I dealt with a supervisor at the 800 number.
She was very apologetic, especially after she realized the local store had not been honest with me.
She offered me a gift card to help assuage my negative feelings to the company.
I accepted and even thought that this would provide a positive spin to the story.
Or stories, I was probably already up to two on this topic.
Best Buy was being hard on my nerves , but good on my writing output.

Unfortunately, it was after that when I started being given different dates that it would be back at the store, and being told that I would be called, and wasn't, and then the camera was once again "missing" and then.....
So, by the time I did, finally , get the camera back, any warm feelings I had from getting the gift card , had faded. Faded into the head-butting feeling of "what more are you going to d to me?"

It was also before I started being irritated by the wrong information up on the geeksquad website.
Which kept insisting that I had dropped the camera off to be repaired 2 weeks after I had.
In fact, I was so irritated, after seeing that time and again, as I kept waiting for the camera to be repaired and come back to the local store for pick up, that I sent the internet site a message.

On June 9, I wrote:

Comments: I find this insulting. I called and got a service/repair number. then, on May 9th, i dropped it off to be repaired. on may 23, i called to see if it was back and repaired , yet. i was told it wasn't. Why wasn't it? because u forgot about t it. so, you gave it a new repair number and then pretended i dropped it off on may 23rd and that is what this site says. this hides the fact you've had the camera for over a month. i dislike this insult added to injury.


Amazingly, I received a reply, the next morning:

Good Morning Cassia,
Thank you for contacting Geek Squad. I do apologize in regards to the delayed response as we do understand time is valuable. I have reviewed your service order and do show that the unit has been shipped off to the service center.
I would also like to apologize for the delay in the repair. If you would like I can contact the local store on your behalf in which to inquire on other options at this point?
Thanks
C....



I have removed his name, just in case someone from his company thinks that he should not have been so pleasant.


And I promptly responded:

I do not think there would be any benefit in you contacting the local store.
According to your site ( I just checked) , it is still not there.
Further, when I spoke with them on the phone, they lied. I know this because it was between two phone calls to the 800 number. When I reported what i was told to the supervisor at the 9800 number, she verified that. So, I have zero confidence in my local store, at this point.
If, in the future, I need to deal with Best Buy, I will drive half an hour in the other direction and go to a different store.
Sincerely,
cassia

Now, you would think this would be the end of it, but it wasn't.
I received the following reply on June 11:

Cassia,
I do apologize for the mis information that was said to be provided. However I can contact the store to request a replacement or inquire on a replacement.
Thanks
C...



This was a nice offer, but too late. I had just finished picking up the camera at the local Best Buy, before getting this.

That is , picking up the camera after calling the 800 number and having someone search the dock and realize it had been sitting out there and not checked in because they couldn't figure out how to check it in...




I emailed C.. and let him know that, after more than month, we actually did just get the camera back.

I will also add the small detail. Even after i got home with the camera, the website did not show that it had yet arrived at the local store.


Now, I figured everything was done and over with, but it wasn't.
I received this email from C...


Cassia,
I do apologize for this entire inconvenience. I would like to offer on behalf of best buy a 50 dollar gift card due to the inconvenience. If you would like to accept this offer please provide me the shipping address.
Thanks
C....




Well, if you know me well, you can guess what my response was to this:



I sent C.. this reply:


Hi C....,
You are being kind, but no thank you. It is not the fault of your department. The 800 number, after they realized what happened ( sequence of events) on the 23rd, also offered me a gift card, and I do not want to abuse the situation and also take a card from your department. I did tell them that what I really wanted was that someone would look over how things are done and fix the places where the problems occurred.
I have also decided NOT to use that Best Buy location, again. A slightly longer drive in the other location might be a good idea.

My issue with the website is that I did not take it for repair on the 23rd. I brought it in on the 9th ( after eating the repair number on the 8th).
I am sure that sounds like silly detail, but , thin of this- when we went to get it, I did not have paperwork with the "new" repair number on it ( that hey gave it on the 23rd) , just the number from the 9th........Of course, they also accepted my daughter's ID ( it is her camera, my husband got it for her.) It also made it necessary for me, each time i called, to explain that the camera was taking a long time, since i hadn't dropped it off on the 23rd......
Thanks, cassia



I thought that would be it, but I received one more email from C....:



Cassia,
I completely understand and once again do sincerely apologize. I have sent this to our corporate office in which to review and address. I have also sent this to the store leadership to address and correct. Anytime that you have any questions or concerns please let me know and I will work toward a resolution for you
Thanks
C




Now, in the meanwhile, we do have the camera back.

I have a gift card that does not come close to making up for what happened, but which will get us an extra memory card ; but , at least, I did also end up in contact with someone who seemed to both take it seriously and try to do something besides get me to go away. Something like address the actual problem.



So, things were better, and I felt that at least someone at the website was responsive.


That was on June 26th.


But I do not always promptly post my stories.

Sometimes because I am awaiting approval, or because I need to fix the 735 typos per paragraph and sometimes because I sharea computer with two teenagers, well, a teenager adn a 22 year old and I cannot get a turn to use it for a few days.
And sometimes....

because some higher power knows the story isn't really over yet.

So:


July 1st- Addendum to the Addendum:


The kids used the camera, tonight, for the first time since getting it back.

Well, the second. My son did some audio recording with it, but no video.

They are starting to shoot a new video- and .....something isn't working quite right.

And the warranty runs out at midnight, tonight.

Of course.

Story of the Day 6/ 11/ 2013- Saga of the camera- Part 3

Best Buy.

On June 9th (which is now two days ago) I find myself calling their 800 number, again.
I will not call the store.
The store lied to me, so I will not call them, but I need to know if the camera is back there.
If it has been repaired.
If we can finally get it back.

The 14-17 days I was originally told it would take has morphed into a full month.

It is 3:32 PM.
I am transferred to a woman named April.
I give her the case number and ask her to check on my camera.
She looks it up.
She tells me that the camera was shipped to the vendor to be repaired on May 10th.
I groan.
I would like to pretend that I groaned silently, but I didn't. I groaned aloud.
I tell her the chain of events.
I ask her why I do not have the camera yet, if it was shipped out to be repaired on May 10th.
She agrees that this looks wrong. It doesn't match up.

She puts me on hold.

For 20 minutes.

At 3:54 she is finally back on the phone with me.
There was a shipping label made out on May 10th, but it was never shipped.
She is checking.
The store manager is checking.
And I am back on hold.

Eventually, I am told that it was shipped out from the vendor to the store.
She knows it was repaired on June 4th. It was also shipped out to the store on June 4th.
But it is not yet back at the store.
I am told to keep checking.

On June 10th (yesterday), I find myself calling the 800 number, again.
I still refuse to call the store, directly.
I have some faith that while the 800 number is not well run, I haven't been lied to by them.
At least not on purpose.

I have already checked on the Internet- at geeksquad.com. The camera is not yet at the store in Indianapolis.

I explian to Britanny that I am not calling to have her check, I am calling because I want to complain. And I want her to record my complaints because hopefully someone at the company is interested in fixing how things work.
I explain that it is bad enough that they misplaced the camera, or forgot about it, or whatever it is they did with it for the 2 weeks before I called them and reminded them that they were supposed to send it out to be repaired; but what I am really upset about was that I was lied to, and that every time I check on the website, it is adding insult to injury when they thank me for dropping it off on May 23rd to be repaired.

I tell her that it is now over a month that they've had the camera.
No videos, no photos of my niece's graduation, no use of it.
By the time we get it back, if we do get it back, the warranty will have expired and if they haven't properly repaired it, we will be further screwed.


Today is June 11
The website still insists that I dropped the camera off on May 23rd to be repaired.
It thanks me for it.
I think a few choice words in its direction.

How can UPS take an entire week? This is not the UPS that I know.
I decide to call the 800 number again.
Yes, I am a glutton for punishment.

They transfer me.

Dennis asks me for the tracking number. He tells me he will put it into their website to see if it has been received at the store.
I explain that he can do that, but I just checked it, again, and the website still says that it was shipped on June 4th.
Shipped, but not received.
And, since they managed to lose it once, I want him to make sure they haven't done it a second time.

I think he is irritated by my asking him to investigate this.

Too bad.

10 minutes later, Dennis tells me that the geek squad person at the local store cannot locate the camera. The local person thinks there may have been a mix up in how it was written up and that it might still be at the warehouse. He will speak with the manager.
I am told that they will get back with me in a couple of hours.
I am polite.
I say "thank you" and don't relate that I have never received a phone call back, yet, from the previous time I was told that I would be called back.
And that was 9 days ago.


Amazingly, less than half an hour later, I really do get a phone call from Saul.
The same guy who was supposed to call me over a week ago.
I am polite and do not ask him why he didn't call me then.
At this point, I consider it a major accomplishment to be polite.

They do have the camera.
It was sitting at the dock area.
They had been unable to check it in.
It was sitting there for a while.
The numbers didn't match up, so it had to be overridden by a manager.
If I had not called the 800 number, and if the person from the 800 number had not called, it would have sat there a few more days, judging by the fact it had already been sitting there a while.

Oh, and the icing on the cake?
I cannot pick it up with the paperwork they originally gave me.
That is no longer the number attached to the camera.
Instead, I will need the new repair number, which they assigned it on May 23rd.
Of course, because they handle this with the same competence as everything else they have done regarding our camera, I do not find this out until I arrive at the store.

In fact, because I do not have it, the only way I can get the camera back is to have the owner show a picture ID and sign for it.
The owner is the person to whom the camera was originally shipped when my husband ordered it.

Fortunately, my husband did not have it shipped to himself.
The owner is my daughter, Sarah.
My husband had the camera shipped to her, at our address. After all, the camera was for her and her brother to use making films.

I, of course, only find out that the owner will need to sign for it after I am already at the store.

This, however, is the one moment in all of this that luck is with us.
I mean good luck.
Sarah happend to have come along, which she did not do when I dropped off the camera.
And she has her learner's permit with her.

Leaving they store, I feel like I am escaping from a bad dream.

I am desperately hoping that the camera is actually repaired.