07:52 – Today is Barbara’s and my 29th wedding anniversary. Barbara has now been married to me for half her life. I’ll have to wait until our 30th anniversary next year to have been married to Barbara for half of mine. Neither of us makes a big deal about birthdays and anniversaries, so we’ll just go out for dinner tonight.
09:25 – Back when I was in college, one of my friends had a car with a fuel gauge that was next to useless. When he filled the tank, the gauge would read full, which it would continue to read for a long, long time. Eventually, it’d suddenly drop to a quarter full, where again it’d remain for a long time. When the tank was really nearing empty, maybe a liter left, the needle would start falling precipitously toward empty, and he knew it was time to stop at the nearest gas station. Either that, or get the gas can out of the trunk and start walking.
That gas gauge was far more useful than the gauge on my Brother color laser printer. Last night, all of the status lights and the screen were perfectly normal. I printed one black-only page. As it came out of the printer, the Data fault light came on, and the screen told me it was time to replace the black toner. I powered down and powered back up. No joy. So I opened the cover, slid out the black toner cartridge, tilted it back and forth, put it back in the slot, and powered up the printer. No joy. That toner cartridge wasn’t nearing empty. It was empty.
So this morning I checked the web site where I buy most of my office supplies. Their prices are always competitive, so I didn’t bother to check elsewhere. Replacing the four toner cartridges with Brother TN210 cartridges would have cost me $213 plus shipping. That was for the Brother-branded cartridges, so I checked for aftermarket replacements. Four of those would have cost me $252 plus shipping. I thought maybe the after-market cartridges were rated for more pages than the branded ones, but they weren’t. Hmmm. So I went over to Laser Monks and ordered four after-market cartridges for $136.76, including shipping.
14:02 – Geez. Cable companies wonder why their customers hate them. We switched to PhonePower on Wednesday, 29 August. They gave us a choice of cut-over dates. I chose the ASAP option. I’m sure they sent the number porting request to TWC immediately. So, Saturday the 8th we got a bill from TWC, billing us in advance for service from Friday the 7th through 6 October. That bill included VoIP service, which they’d just increased from $35/month to $45/month. I told Barbara I’d call them and get it taken off our bill.
This morning, I called their billing support number and was told that they were experiencing unusually high call volumes and that the expected hold time was 30 minutes. I hung up and tried again periodically throughout the day, getting the same story. Finally, I decided just to hold as long as necessary, with the cordless on speaker phone while I cleaned up the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. After more than 20 minutes on hold, the call was finally picked up by a singularly unhelpful woman who claimed that there were “no notes” on our account and that as far as they were concerned it was active. I told her that was pretty strange since I was talking to her from that number using a different service provider. She finally admitted that we might in fact not be using their phone service. Finally, after much back and forth, I got her to reduce the invoice they’d just sent us from $116.36 to $73.79. I then asked her what our new monthly bill would be. She said $67.44 without tax and $68.24 with tax. I asked her why then we had to send them $73.79 instead of $68.24. She said it was because they’d been providing phone service to us from the 7th through today. I explained to her that she’d just admitted that they hadn’t been providing phone service during that period, since we’d already cut over and that we’d been using our cell phones since then because we had no service from them. She went back into her “there are no notes on your account” spiel. I finally told her that it wasn’t worth my time to argue with her for the $5.55 difference, but that this kind of shit was why people hated cable companies. I just wish we had a good alternative for broadband. Of course, people hate phone companies just as much.