Month: November 2010

While I was in Pleasanton….

staying in John Madden’s boutique hotel, the Rose, which is GORGEOUS (and John M was actually there in the lobby bar the night we arrived, oddly enough but of course I had no reason to speak to him or harass him so I just smirked)… I had a dream.

About five in the morning the night before I came home, I dreamed that Katie K was taking me to meet a friend.  We climbed the stairs to say hi and the woman took one look at me and started screaming “What is she doing here?  I don’t want to meet her, get her out of here!”  I obligingly booked it down the stairs and out into the street and across the street to a little park, where I sat down on a bench.  I felt warmth next to me and turned my head.

John was sitting there, dressed in black, and hatless (which would not be normal at this time of year… felt like Vancouver on an overcast day).  His hair had grown out a little and he had a much better pair of glasses, but it was John all right – nobody looks, smells and sounds like him.  He commiserated with me briefly on my contretemps, and then, and a couple of times he laughed, that breathless chuckle, and then with that same brainwoosh that had accompanied the sensation of him joining me on the bench, I realized I was dreaming.  I don’t lucid dream, at all, and it’s actually been many months since I had a memorable dream.  As soon as I realized I was dreaming, I knew John was dead, and I was FINALLY getting my visitation dream, which I have longed for.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

He smiled.  And we all know that shit eating grin.  And just like the Cheshire Cat, he faded, and left the grin hanging in the air for a few seconds, and then I woke up.

I’ve been a little teary for the last few days, because honestly I had given up.  Somehow my brain gave me permission to let him visit, and I am so, so glad.  Cried my eyes out at the Remembrance Day service yesterday at church, because I’d been going to say his name and Tom did it for me.

Pointless, but o so satisfying – Rogers letter

Office of the President
100 Westmoreland St
Moncton NB
E1C 0G1

customer.service@rci.rogers.com

Dear People,

As an aside.  Office of the President, my lavishly upholstered sitzplatz.  Who on earth are you trying to fool?

I would like to advise you folks that you have something seriously, seriously broken with your customer support.

It’s not that the phone I paid for over many years dropped calls and generally did unspeakable things to long dead goats for the duration of its life; nor that Rogers made transferring ownership of the account to someone else, ie the person who was using the phone during that time, impossible; not that going to paperless billing after I was harassed into it nearly wrecked my credit and how I had to go back to asking you to kill trees to bill me, because your website is a universe-destroying abyss of suck; nor that your pricing was abominable, because all Canadian cell phone pricing, thanks to the CRTC, sucks a Greyhound bus station men’s room mop; nor that every person I spoke to in customer service sounded like they’d all been whipped and shown pictures of puppies being tortured prior to being allowed the privilege of answering the phone for you….

Nope, this is something quite simple.

Your accounts receivable department…. an important department to be sure …. DOESN’T LEAVE A MESSAGE when it calls.  No name, no TELEPHONE number.

Does anybody see the delicious irony in how A TELEPHONE COMPANY …. because in essence, that’s one of the arms of the Rogers cephalopod … doesn’t leave a TELEPHONE NUMBER when it’s harassing customers to pay up?

I owe Rogers money.  I feel quite comfortable saying this.  I owe you money, and I’m gonna KEEP on owing you money until I get a final, paper bill.  I have no intention of giving you any money until I get my last piece of mail from Rogers.

Yes, I owe you from the previous month.  Yes, I’m supposed to keep my account in good standing.  Yes, there were a few months in that three years when I didn’t pay promptly, but I always cleared my account.  Not the best customer, far from the worst.

I cancelled my account.  Let me repeat that.  I cancelled my account.  I will never, ever, so long as Rogers is a legal entity and the Dominion stands, buy a Rogers product or service again.

Here’s my earnest request.  Give me a paper bill after November 14 and in the meantime, leave me alone.  Not because I don’t owe you some money, oh yeah, I do.  But because your system is too stupid to advise the poor sods who work for you to LEAVE A NUMBER where they can be reached.

As a phone company – or a feeble simulacrum of one – Rogers does not deserve to survive.  If we had American style competition in this country (and no CRTC), not that I want it but in Rogers’ case I’ll make an exception, Rogers wouldn’t survive into its third year.

I promise I’ll pay up, but if your poor accounts receivable employees or collectors or whatever stupid weasel word you use, don’t start leaving a number where they can be reached, I’ll be advising my brother, with whom I live, and who has received EVERY ONE OF YOUR CALLS so far, just to hang up if you don’t reach me in person.

My regards to the workers of Rogers, all of whom probably need that crappy job or they would indeed be working elsewhere; as for the management, may the great winnowing fan of Capitalism wreak its havoc on you soon.

Allegra Sloman
Proud to be a recovering Rogers customer

Here in Pleasanton

Pleasanton is extremely pleasant.  The hotel is lovely, the meal we had last night at Terra Mia was of surpassing excellence, the company was intelligent and convivial, and we have an appallingly hard day of presentations and work ahead of us, followed by another appalling hard and long day.

Obviously the loaner laptop is working fine.  Nice big keyboard, ya gotta like that.

Okay, back to work.  Oh, just one more thing.  Who needs boys?  Not this snake!

Various

I spent the weekend in the bosom of my family (having declared a mental health emergency) and am feeling much restored.  I’d like to thank Paul for coming over and dragging me off to Deer Lake for a walk and then cooking dinner at Geekhaus AND cleaning up after.  Sanity ++, thank you.

Keith took fireworks over to a friend’s place last night.  I expect a report on the reports.

Katie worked midnights on Saturday and I felt so sorry for her I went to pick her up.

Nasty hydroplane conditions on the hill this morning … really nasty.