Harrowing Tales of Customer Service

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…

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…

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…

Having abandoned any hope of getting an appointment in a timely fashion before Katie's eligibility certificate expires, we now need to figure out where we're going to turn up and wait our turn in the queue to hopefully get the REAL ID applications sorted. With that in mind, we stopped by the DMV licence office on New Bern Avenue on Monday afternoon after Katie's lacrosse training to see just how bad the crowds were and…

We're going to start our journey down the DMV's variation on the River Styx with what is arguably the ugliest part of the experience: trying to actually secure an appointment through the online system that is supposed to make visiting the DMV driver licence office easier with less waiting. Because the first REAL ID application must be made in person due to having to present additional identifying documents which are physically scanned into the ID…

With Katie having recently completed her behind-the-wheel training and after a couple of weeks of waiting on what her school laughingly calls "Student Services" to finally cough up her Driving Eligibility Certificate (which is the school essentially blessing her grades and attendance at school), what remained for us to do was complete what is arguably the most harrowing task of them all: getting her REAL ID-compliant Level 1 Limited Learner Permit from the NC DMV.…

This afternoon, I quickly ducked into the Nerdery to blast 531 photos I'd taken at the hockey rink the right before up to Google Drive before ducking back out for another errand. I'd known that the Google Fibre upload speed was going to be much faster than I'd ever experienced with Spectrum's cable internet service. But seeing 5.67 GB of edited photo files take a little less than 5 minutes to finish uploading to the…

(It helps to imagine the title screamed in Steve Dangle's voice when he's yelling "if you're a goaltender, TEND THE GOAL!" :) ) Yesterday evening, Katie met with one of her friends from middle school who now attends Sanderson High School who were the latest to demolish Enloe's footy team in the Sanderson stadium. It's all good...you generally don't go to footy games when Enloe is one of the sides that's playing for the quality…

With the massive wall of water coming at us courtesy of Hurricane Ian and knowing the 771 signal loss that would inevitably come with it, it's about time I finally get off my duff and reject yet another price increase from DirecTV satellite service and also give the vastly faster fibre network connection a little more to do. Do keep in mind that I actually liked DirecTV's service and had it for many years and…

Today will mark the first day since I moved back to Raleigh after graduating from university that Time-Warner Cable and their successors will no longer be part of my life and I can assure you that I will not miss them in the slightest. To be fair, the actual broadband cable internet service was generally rock-solid and it was a very rare outage that couldn't be cured by resetting the cable modem and letting it…

I'm still rather in shock that it looks like it's finally going to be happening...the long dreamt of upgrade in the Internet connectivity to Google Fibre is finally happening here at the Nerdery in East Raleigh. I've been waiting for about seven years from the first time I signed up for the EMAIL notification when they'd finally pushed their install out to my neighbourhood. Seven years! Since then, AT&T came through a couple of years…

Another day, another sandwich thanks to the Hurricanes staying perfect in the playoffs at home. Now, if only they could win on the road... ;) This trip through the queues from hell takes us to the Knightdale location which often features the longest queues and wait times. Interestingly enough, this would be the second straight trip through the drive-through where Karma will make an appearance. This location has what appears to be a single-file queue…