The good, bad, and the ugly when it comes to “customer service” which is almost certainly going to kill me before cancer ever has a chance!
Whilst ordering the TY2024 tax returns for next year’s tax season, the system duplicated the order. Getting “customer service” to mend the situation turned out to be somewhat less than stellar… :(
Apparently my abilities to project menace work over a much further distance than I imagined possible. After a long day of kid schlepping, being harassed by two labradoodles, and the odd server move for the websites…I was relaxing on the floor of the living room when my sister Meghann hits me up on the ol’ text message delivery device. Their condo had apparently suffered a total power outage and she sends me a couple of…
The Traverse somehow engaged stealth mode on mobile and ended up with an unexpected sweet tea! :)
My fastest time through a Chick Fil-A queue ever just occurred at the Mos Eisley location and it was during dinner time no less! 90 seconds from entering the queue to having the food aboard and leaving. 90 seconds!
The marketing geniuses at Wegman's completely change the heart of the store and the groceries that should be their core business offering are pushed toward the back and all jumbled up to boot so I have no clue where anything is!
I was going to give the new Mos Eisley Chick Fil-A a couple of weeks to get their feet under them before trying the drive-through. Yeah, that plan worked a treat. ;)
I'm sure Tom Smith must be rolling in his grave with the state of the Food Lion grocery stores round here! :(
There was no way I was going to visit the new Chick Fil-A in front of the Mos Eisley Wal-Mart. A special trainer imported from Fuquay-Varina convinced me otherwise! :)
They may not be Rectum Cable but Dook Energy Progress definitely has some work to do on the customer service front when it comes to demanding the last four digits of my SSN when they truly have no need to do so.
When a door-to-door salesman is apparently too thick to take the hint the first time, frankly they deserve what comes their way...
Since canceling Amazon Prime, Amazon has done wonders validating why I should have done it much sooner by not having the courage to ask the most dangerous question of all: WHY?
Is it too much to ask for an office supply store to not be a temple of suckage?
It's been a while since I've had to hire a car (in fact, two years ago was when the Traverse spilled her guts on the I-87 flyover bridge) which is long enough for me to forget just how much fun the process...isn't. And having to hire one having just experienced a catastrophic breakdown in downtown Raleigh in a very short time-frame in order to retrieve kids from school is never going to be ideal. Then…
It's that time of the year where Amazon's shipping estimates range from the surprisingly accurate to the outright fanciful and everything in between. To be fair, I've generally had reasonably good luck with the vast majority of my Amazon Prime orders arriving when they're scheduled if not a little earlier. And most of the time, a delay in shipping or arrival really isn't the end of the world. But every now and then the shipping…
A couple of months ago, I got a text message from AT&T indicating they were intending to lower the "discount" for paperless billing and automatic bill payment when using a credit card as the stored payment method. Whilst I have no problems with electronic billing, ordinarily I'm not keen on "automatic payment" schemes when my credit union has a perfectly acceptable bill payment solution built into their banking portal. This forces me to keep a…
As I was heading toward the self-checkout kiosk with my shopping trolley during a recent early morning visit after dropping the kids off at school, I noticed Wegman's has installed a new camera and video display mounted above the main touch screen showing the space in front of the scanning station with a seemingly ominous message in red at the bottom of the camera display: "MONITORING IN PROGRESS". I wish I could say this was…
Being at a bit of loose ends after retrieving Julia's van from the garage, I thought I'd pop through the Chick Fil-A at Brier Creek to get a bit of nosh prior to doing a bit of airport therapy at the RDU observation park. Brier Creek has long been the definitive standard of efficient service with arguably the most intelligently designed drive-through in the area. You can do the traditional route with the order takers…
A few days ago, I was starting to get a wee bit nervous about not seeing the EMAIL from the NC Secretary of State directing me to make another trip downtown to the Register of Deeds office to re-take the two oaths to be commissioned to do electronic notarial acts. After all, I had actually attended the class and passed the examination above the required grade of 80%. Though yes, I was more than a…
One of the unbridled joys of tax preparation season is unearthing a relevant document from the pile of tax-related papers upon which it was tossed nine months prior with every intention of dealing with it that week only to have life intervene and other crises divert our attention. Such was the case with a rental check from one of the coal mineral rights leases in southern Illinois that's passed through several generations of Dad's family…
Imagine you've had a lovely hot bath and your aching back and knees are feeling far better now than they did prior to getting into the tub and relaxing to the point of...ooops, what time is it?!? Oh, 0100. As I'm drying off, it suddenly occurs to me that I was supposed to have a delivery from Amazon for a six-pack of Cavender's Greek Seasoning (the big 8 oz canisters) but curiously I've not seen…
This morning, we woke up to a situation we've not experienced since Google Fibre was installed here at the Nerdery...an actual outage! That red "Alarm" light on the fibre jack was certainly a surprise after many months of rock solid connectivity without Spectrum's usual "we'll re-partition our network every fortnight" (that needed a cable modem and router reboot) or the more rare "we'll upload a brand new firmware on our side of the head-end and…
Someone must have put out a memo that today is Raleigh's "let's T-bone a Traverse" day and didn't bother to let me in on that little secret. I've noticed over the past few years that the quality of driving round here has gotten dramatically worse. Not that it was particularly good or less harrowing with all of the people apparently trying out to be the next big NASCAR star by showing off their tailgating (my…
It has been quite a while since I've done a Chick-Fil-Audit thanks primarily to Chick-Fil-A no longer making with the free bird when the Hurricanes win a home game which they did quite a bit of in the previous season and this year looks like they're continuing that positive trend. I can't really blame Chick-Fil-A for doing so as the resulting queues the following day made their already notoriously industry longest queues through the drive-through…
After publishing the first four stories in the series of "The DMV Chronicles", it occurred to me that there's two more tales to tell of the joys of navigating the joyful process that is the in-person visit to DMV. The first one was in 2018 which was the first opportunity to renew the driving licence with the REAL ID version. Coming up with the required paperwork was a breeze aided tremendously by the passport which…
So here we are after discovering that the NC DMV appointment system isn’t fit for purpose and our reconnaissance of the New Bern Avenue licence office leaves a bit to desired…today we’re going to make our first attempt to score Katie’s permit and Alexander’s state-issued ID. We immediately headed to the New Bern Avenue location as it’s the closest to Enloe High School right after dismissal thinking that based on the amount of people waiting…
