If I get a different job? Well, I'll worry about that one when the time comes.
* * *
Here's an important safety tip: if you're going to have someone on your cellphone account, make sure he's trustworthy before you let him have a $700 phone.
When he breaks it, gets a new one under his insurance, and then waits five months to send the broken one back? Don't be surprised that you've been charged a non-return fee. If you really want that money back, get it from him, because you are the account owner and you are responsible for all the charges incurred by all the lines on that account.
Today I had no fewer than three "so-and-so can't be fucked to..." calls, including that one, and in each case I was completely helpless to do anything to help those people. Your ex-girlfriend has an older phone of yours and you're getting all her calls? She's going to have to call in to get the SIM card changed because I can't do it on your say-so: you're not authorized on her account.
There was a third, but I can't remember it now--it's been eclipsed by the other two.
I mean, I would love to help you; really I would. But if I do anything to an account you're not authorized on, I lose my job. Period, do not pass "Go", do not collect $200. So you can bitch and moan and whine and complain to me as much as you like, but I can't even get into the account without the password, and besides which the account is in a system I don't even have access to (Prepaid) so I have to transfer you to them anyway. No, I cannot have Prepaid call you, or her. (We are an inbound call center. We make outbound calls once in a long while under certain very specific circumstances, but we have no system to tell another sector to place a call to so-and-so.) No, I cannot shut off her phone. No, I cannot fix your issue because the problem is with her phone, not yours.
My hands are tied.
On the plus side I was able to save one guy about $60 per month on his bill. He bought a couple of smartphones and the sales rep didn't bother looking at his account to see if another plan would be better; I switched him to a plan that--gasp!--included a data allowance, and didn't require a $30 surcharge per line for 2 GB of data each (he wasn't even using one gig across both devices anyway). Presto, your bill is $60 lower. Further he got unlimited talk and text in the bargain (he had a 1400 minute talk-only plan before).
This is what Verizon wants the reps to do. A guy who's just been given a $720 annual savings is much less likely to find a different carrier than the one who's not helped.
* * *
So we watched a few things over the past few days.
Having repaired my rocking chair, finally, I'm more inclined to sit in front of the TV since I've got a comfortable rocking chair to use again. When I went to Menard's the other night to get the new trap for the bathroom sink, I also bought some wood screws of the correct dimension; these will hold the bearings in place a lot better than the screws that I salvaged and/or scrounged to do the job. The loose bearing got the duct tape treatment (wrap a strip of duct tape around its perimeter to keep it snug) and two new screws to hold it in.
That was Sunday; and Mrs. Fungus and I watched The Theory of Everything Tuesday night and the first ep of the new season of The Leftovers last night.
ToE: I don't like saying "no" when Mrs. Fungus wants to watch something with me. I like making her happy; besides, the last time I tried to refuse (I was working on a blog post) she said, "You don't like entertainment!" (She did start laughing as soon as she said it, and I joined her, but I didn't watch what she wanted me to watch just then. I did watch it later.)
But I knew, more or less, how the story of Stephen Hawking's life goes. Mrs. Fungus found the movie depressing, and that's about what I expected it would be like. I'd hoped it was more like the other version I've seen, the mini-series where Benedict Cumberbatch played the eminent scientist as a graduate student at Cambridge; that one was more positive than this one.
Bonus points, though, for the newly speech-synthesizer-equipped Stephen Hawking tearing around in his electric wheelchair, chasing his kids and having the voice box say, "Exterminate! Exterminate!"
Leftovers, then--last season left off in a quiet NY suburb; this season started with a cro-magnon woman pissing outside the cave her tribe calls home, then giving birth after an earthquake causes a cave-in, leaving her and her baby the only ones left alive. She gets bitten by a rattlesnake and--I assume--the wound becomes septic, killing her. Another cro-magnon woman takes the baby from her dead arms, and then we fast-forward about 50,000 years to pick up where we left off...with an entirely new cast of characters.
After perhaps twenty minutes of this, finally the police chief guy and his daughter from last season show up in the narrative. The new theme song is shit and my wife and I have no f-ing clue what the hell is going on, here.
Way to go, HBO. What the fuck.
* * *
Bonus: apparently everyone who works on the Verizon project got a Bluetooth speaker. I got mine today. It's not really the best-ever sound, but it's more than worth what I paid for it. Pretty cool.