lizvogel

I finally cowboyed up, picked a web host, and got myself an author website. lizavogel.com exists!

It is very much just a placeholder right now (though I am rather proud of the construction sheep).

I went with Namecheap; it seemed to have pretty good pricing, whois privacy included free, useful and easy-to-find how-to docs, and actually acknowledged the possibility of someone wanting to code their own pages. When I had a question, their live chat responded promptly with a clear answer from a real human.

Unfortunately, the shine wore off a little when I had to spend half an hour on the phone with my credit card company to get the payment to go through (and jumped through about a dozen security hoops with them). But I eventually got it cleared, and went through all the purchasing process again, and got my new account. Whee!

And then an hour later, got an email from Namecheap's "risk management" department that my brand new account was frozen, and I had 24 hours to tell them the "payment descriptor from your statement" -- meaning my credit card statement, apparently, which I'll get in the mail in about a month. They have absolutely no facility for any other verification, and no acknowledgement that, yes, there are some people who don't do all their financial stuff online. So there went another twenty minutes of my life on the phone with the credit card again, jumping through all their ridiculous security hoops again, to finally fight through to a very confused rep with limited English who tried to tell me that since the charge was still "pending" they couldn't tell me anything but the amount. Like who the charge is from, maybe?! Oh, yes, they can do that. And then, finally, got that to the account-lockers, and got my shiny new account back -- rather tarnished from being driven to screaming frustration for hours.

I feel like I need to keep checking it to make sure it's still there, and not frozen again. Oh yes, and apparently they're going to make me get a verification code every single f'ing time I sign in.

Swear to ghu, between the credit card and the hosting company, if this crap gets any more secure I won't be able to use it at all.

But. I have a website! And soon I will make it both pretty and informative. This is only about six years past when I first said I ought to do it, so I'm feeling pretty good about getting this far.

So help me, if one more person sees the flyer for our FIV stray and sees fit to use the contact information there to lecture me about things anyone who's spent five minutes with a decent search engine already knows, I'm going to... become extremely impolite.

The most recent one even had the gall to tell me "there's lots of information on Google." Because of course anyone who's spent hours designing a professional-quality flyer and distributing it all over town couldn't possibly have spent that aforementioned five minutes already. (Also, information is on the internet, not on Google. Google is a search engine. If you're going to be a pedantic busybody, at least do it right.)

I sincerely hope all these people are someday in the position of advertising for something they badly need, and they get lots of texts that start with the equivalent of "I saw your flyer about Nelson..." only to find that it's not the offer they've been desperately hoping for, but just another arrogant know-it-all assuming they're a moron who hasn't bothered to find out anything about the problem they're trying to solve.

Tl;dr: people suck.

Ran across this via network. The context is entirely unrelated to why I'm posting it, but it struck me strongly enough that I wanted to immortalize it here.

"If one wants to be treated as a community member rather than as a customer, one must put in work that will be hard and often unpleasant. It is not actually unethical to ask people to do this work."
     -chestnut_pod, 20 May 2023

They're talking about the OTW mess, but I found the sentiment remarkably applicable (again, with very different context) to a certain convention I may or may not be running. No, it's not unethical to ask people to do the work for the thing they want to have -- and people who act like it is probably aren't trying to build the same thing.

I may have a vaccine appointment next week. Actually, I definitely do.

Somewhere.

The fact that most vaccine venues only let you sign up online or through apps has become An Issue for me. We've just spent a year in this country discovering that a sizeable swath of the population does not have regular internet access, and that "Just do everything online!" leaves a lot of people out in the cold. So now we get to the actual life-saving vaccine part of the process, and the option for people who can't sign up online is...?

For my mother (who has neither computer nor smartphone), I was willing to jump through those hoops. (Though I find it significant that for the local hospital where she finally got her shots, I spent half an hour fighting with their terrible web site only to ultimately be unable to schedule the appointment, and had to phone up and talk to a human being anyway. Said human being was polite and helpful and when I mentioned the web site, she said "Yeah, it's terrible.") But for myself (who has both computer and smartphone, but really hates doing that sort of thing on crappy web sites and really really hates doing anything via the smartphone interface), I'm willing to make something of a cause of it.

Meijer will let you sign up in person... if you can find a pharmacy staffer who knows how to do it. I had to go through three of them, and only persevered because my mom had signed up there on her own, and I knew she hadn't done it through the smartphone app they kept pushing at me. Rite Aid has only the online and app options, and when I asked the staffer there what people without access were supposed to do, I stopped existing for her; she literally ceased even acknowledging that I was standing there. (I guess Rite Aid figures people without internet access can just die.) Lansing Urgent Care also has only online sign-ups, but at least the person I spoke to there was apologetic about it, and agreed it was not cool and said she'd forward the issue up the food chain. (Whether it will do any good is another matter, but at least it's something.)

Walgreens, bless 'em, has an automated voice-phone thingy where you can sign up for vaccine appointments. And it's pretty well designed: their general store voicemail offers it as the first option, and while it starts by telling you the wonders of signing up online or via app, it does so fairly quickly and then gets on to business. It doesn't collect any more information than it needs (ZIP, phone number, date of birth, and name). I had to spell my full first name three times before it finally got it right, but we got there in the end. (Amusingly, I had resisted saying "zed" instead of "zee" because I didn't want to confuse it. That still seemed to be the sticking point, and when it finally spelled my name back to me correctly, it said "zed". Apparently it was programmed by a Canadian, which perhaps explains why it was remarkably polite and pleasant for a voicemail thing.) It was a bit tedious, but I ended up with an appointment for Tuesday. Whee! Except...

The address it told me does not exist. The street address is on the main drag that runs all the way through the metropolitan area, so it could refer to a store on the other side of town, but it very clearly said the barnacle-city where the store I thought I was calling is located. I tried googling the address provided; according to Google Maps, that address is a tree.

Probably it's just a mistake for the address of the store in question; it's only a difference of one digit. But I have a thing about getting to appointments at the right place & time anyway, so I wanted to make sure. So I went to the store in person last night. Unfortunately, by that hour the pharmacy was closed, and the regular staff have no access to pharmacy information. (Also, the cashier I started with was rude and stupid. "You just have to look it up. Just look it up." Uh, the point is that it's obviously a mistake; I just need to know whether the mistake is the number or the city. Your precious smartphone is not going to tell you that, child.) The best the manager could tell me was that the pharmacy opened at ten today.

So I called after ten today. And I waded through their regular voicemail system (which was evidently programmed by different people, as it mispronounced the city it's in), and got to a live human pharmacist... who agreed that it's probably a mistake for their address, but can't tell me for sure because they don't get the printouts of their schedule for the week until Monday morning. So I should call back then.

Thank goodness I don't have an appointment first thing Monday, is all I can say.

Monday morning was already going to be devoted to calling mechanics, because the exhaust pipe on the car broke right behind the engine yesterday (on the way to Walgreens, in fact), and I need to find out if it's going to be an expensive repair or an it's-time-to-junk-the-car repair. So I'll just add calling Walgreens to the list. And it'll probably all be fine, but the number of things I have to hurry up and wait to deal with has officially reached the red line, and I just want to get something settled, dammit!

I set today aside to catch up on convention stuff, including tax filings and other bureacracy.

The tax thing has been a learning experience indeed, but the practical upshot is that a tiny little organization like Narrativity need only file a 990-N. Sounds pretty painless. Only trick is that in our situation, we first need to register with the IRS that we're going to file a 990-N, and wait until they've got that processed before doing the actual filing.

Filing can only be done online. Registering to file can only be done by phone.

So in April, I called to register. IRS customer service was closed due to Covid.

I checked back a few times; still closed. Then with one thing and another, time got away from me. But I did finally call when they were finally open, talked to an IRS rep (eek! but actually it was fairly painless), and got us registered. Except that it takes eight weeks for that to process. They don't notify you when it's ready, you just have to try it and see if it works.

Eight weeks have finally passed, so I went to file the 990-N and see if it works. "This service will be unavailable due to system maintenance."

I am feeling decidedly thwarted.

Compare this to Minnesota's annual renewal for non-profits: They send an email reminder when it's time to renew. The email contains clear, step-by-step instructions and a link to the appropriate starting page. Both creating an account for online filing and filing the actual renewal generate confirmation emails, and both arrived within moments.

Maybe the IRS should hire some Minnesotans.

We have our stuff! According to the tracking website, it was loaded onto a delivery truck at 8:02 this morning, but obviously with all the nonsense we weren't going to count on that until the package was in our hands. And it is!

Shockingly, it got sent along without the "mandatory" information like the manufacturing address of the pads, or the manufacturer and composition of each pair of novelty socks. So I guess that info wasn't really so mandatory as all that, was it?

Haven't dug through the boxes yet -- will do that with the housemate when she gets home -- but at a cursory glance it looks like everything's as it should be. It'll be nice to finish unpacking and finally feel like the trip is done.

How about a day that starts at 1:30 in the morning with what sounds like a bomb going off behind the house?

I jerked awake to what sounded like an explosion, and looked out back to blazing orange shooting into the sky behind the garage. Threw on clothes, grabbed flashlight, and extremely cautiously went back to discover a sizable chunk of tree down right on the electric pole. No downed wires, and the power was still on, but it was raining fat orange sparks. Hoo boy.

So I phoned it in (had to report it as a downed wire, because DTE's stupid automated system doesn't have an option for "the wire's still up, but you guys might want to get out here and deal with this ASAP"), and then sat up reading and periodically checking out back to make sure there still wasn't a fire. About 3:00 am, the beep of a utility truck heralded DTE's arrival on scene. Luckily the guy was on shift anyway and wasn't fussed about the inaccurate report. Apparently, what I heard and saw wasn't the branch itself hitting, but the power company's automatic response of sending a surge through the lines to try to blow off whatever had landed on them. "Looks like the world's biggest firework?" "Yep." Which, well, let's just say it's a good thing it's still very wet back there.

(It actually was kind of cool, now that I know the house isn't going to burn down.)

So then he phoned it in, and 9:00 am brought three utility trucks and a pickup, the inhabitants of which all went back, said "Yeah, that's a branch on the pole," and called the actual tree crew. Who eventually arrived, sent one guy up the tree like a monkey with a chainsaw, and chopped the offending former tree-top into firewood and brush.

And then they all went away, and everything was fine, and the worst effect was that we had to reset the clocks after they turned off the power so the guy could clear the line.

Can't say I'm particularly sorry that the planned mailbox project got rained out just after they left. Because maybe five hours cumulative sleep plus heavy physical labor is not the world's best combination.

We researched things to do. We compared flights. We picked dates. We committed to buying tickets, and we even picked our seats.

We spent three fucking hours on the British Airways website, while they asked creepy "security" questions pulled from who-knows-where to which they wouldn't accept the correct answers, and then finally they insisted something was wrong and wouldn't take our money or even let us start over (again).

Swiss Air keeps insisting we're a bot and making us do jigsaw-puzzle Captchas, and refusing to even start the booking process.

Yeah, everything's so much easier on-line. [/sarcasm] We have the name of a highly-recommended travel agent; assuming we can ever find out when they're open (because neither their website nor their voicemail divulges that secret), we'll see what they can do.

I am drinking tea out of my Marvin the Martian mug.

For those who don't know me well enough to know what that means: It is never a good thing when I am sick enough to consume large quantities of tea and also in a mood where I greatly sympathize with the desire for "an Earth-shattering kaboom!"


(Awaiting emails on Thing. Contemplating emails on Thing related to Thing. Need to be working on other Thing.

...May need more tea.)

So I was all set to buy the 20-year-old computer that I previously mentioned, but for due diligence I called them first -- ostensibly to confirm that they tested their floppy drives, but really to make sure I could talk to a human being who sounded legit.

So I asked, and the answer seemed to depend on what machine I was looking at, and when I told him I got "that's been replaced". Apparently the listing on the website that still says it's available isn't valid, and if I tried to buy it the order wouldn't go through. But I can buy something else and tell them in the comments that I need a floppy drive, and obviously I should know this, they sell these machines to businesses that need a particular OS and they sell 20 computers a week and it's a labor-intensive process to refurb these machines and apparently it's completely unreasonable of me to expect to be able to buy the exact machine that their website still says they have.

Yeah. Your website tells lies about what you have in stock and you're condescending to customers who don't roll with that? I think I'll keep looking in friends' closets, thanks.