Thursday Thots

Becky did a long post on Facebook, which makes me think I should explore that site more. I've pretty much ignored it because I don't have that many pictures of myself drinking beer at a party and because a 120-character "Thot-of-the-moment" ("I'm eating Cheerios and feeling good about my day") never seemed to be worth my trouble. But Becky's post is several paragraphs that actually say something. I didn't know Facebook could do that.

Today, I'm off for a four-day whirlwind trip to Washington. I do enjoy the drive, but it will be sort of hectic. Not the leisurely vacation time of past years, alas. Brief time with my mom and sister (who will be driving up from Texas), retrieve a chair from Mom's house before the place gets sold, then back to M'field.

While I'm gone, Jared will be watching the place. He's got a new job at a kennel, which means he's always oh-so-fragrant ... and the apartment is too.

Random Stuff

More than Ultimate?

I parked next to a Mercury Grand Marquis Ultimate Edition today. What will they do for an encore? What will they do if they make a car that is better? "Ultimate Edition Plus"? Maybe there is a good reason that some cars just have numbers and not evocative names.

I fear for my hair

Got a haircut yesterday at a place my regular hair person refers to as a "chop shop." I came quite close to leaving before the big event though—all the women seemed to be sisters. All were overweight (the impression wasn't helped by their identical black nylon smocks). All had dark hair in the "bedhead" style (which looks to me like too much oil and too little shampoo). All had Mimi Bobeck eye shadow (in different colors: green, blue, pink). I asked myself whether I could trust my head to these people.

Opera in my life

So friend Joel is now back in South Carolina. I'm still in an opera mood and have been listening nonstop to the Kevin Kline version of Midsummer Night's Dream which, as you remember, has almost nonstop Italian opera. I've got it circling through my head.

Wallace and Gromit

I wrote some checks this morning and finally figured out what online bill-paying is like. Wallace and Gromit. Remember the episode in which he has a motorcycle in his garage and an automatic starter? It's a foot that comes out of the wall and pushes down on the kick-start pedal. How about the shopping trolley that navigates to the corner store to get cheese? It's all in the same category as a half-hour episode with a million dollars in equipment so I can avoid writing a check.

Time-Saving in the Electronic Age

Sure, I'm a nut on electronic things. That love affair is growing sour.

I didn't flinch when I got the notice from U of Akron that I had to give my students mid-term grades but the computer couldn't handle things, so I had to e-mail them all. One by one.

I'm sort of keeping track of the latest meltdown in electronic bill-paying, and wondering just what I have saved, either in time or in money. As I write (5:00 p.m.) I've been working off and on for 48 hours to get a $305 bill paid. The money has come out of my bank accounts. $305 from FirstMerit and another $305 from Chase. It just didn't go into Toyota. I've already spent something like four hours on this project, and now I'll have to deal with straightening out the mess tomorrow. Maybe another four hours? I can only hope.

My friend Jon Weaver says he refuses to use anything now except a paper check because he doesn't want to deal with the problems. I'm with him on that.

Sometimes the old "tennis shoe network" (just carry it over there) is better, even though it's not so cute and fun.

Last night I spent an hour troubleshooting to get a file to move via Bluetooth from one of my computers to another. I could have just loaded it onto a flash drive. But no. I had to use the fancy thing that took over an hour.

Today I learned my lesson. I needed to pay my Target bill, so I drove to the store, walked in, and wrote a check.

Electronic customer service

I guess this one is all my fault. The trip to South Carolina sort of distracted me and I didn't send out checks on time to pay bills. The Obvious Electronic Age Answer: pay the bills online!!! After all, I still had 48 hours.

Electric company bill worked instantly. Cell phone account worked—sort of. Sprint thinks they got the money, but my bank doesn't think they sent it. Car payment? Total disaster.

After logging into the website, setting up an account, answering all the weird questions, putting in my account numbers and everything else, I thought I had succeeded. I checked back 24 hours later and still owed them the money. Phoned the woman at Toyota Financial and she said there was no record of me ever doing anything (though I was welcome to make a payment through her for a $10 fee). My bank says the money never came out of the account. I raced downtown to another bank where I have an account and asked what we can do to expedite a payment. They very helpfully set me up for online payment (apparently pushing the money works better than pulling it). And guaranteed that the money would be there within 24 hours. Back to the apartment. Digging through an obscure corner of the Toyota website, I discovered that the original payment is "in process" and will be made tomorrow too. Two payments for Toyota. Cheers!

The moral of the story:

1. Online bill payment is slow. I would probably have been better off driving to the dealer and handing someone a check. Figure at least three working days (not counting weekends and holidays).
2. Online bill payment can be very expensive. Sure, the electric company did it for free, but Toyota financial wanted $10. Citibank wants $15 to allow an online transaction.
3. Reliability is questionable. Did it work? Didn't it? Keep checking back, folks.
4. Online bill paying is very time-consuming. I can write a check and pop it into an envelope in five minutes. I can pay a bill online in ten, but that doesn't count the time wasted in returning to the website to make sure it actually worked, time on the phone to straighten out things, and (at least with the car payment) time to drive downtown to ask someone to expedite a payment. The time discussion doesn't include the initial fifteen minutes per bill that's needed to set things up, either.
   
5. Customer service reps are variable. Sprint's phone people are wonderful. They need to be because the guys at Best Buy really don't know what they are doing, and the phone support people at Sprint have to keep straightening out screw-ups. Toyota's people haven't a clue what they are talking about.

The lady at Chase Bank was really eager to get me to set up online bill paying. Said it would save me so much time and money. Let's see.

• Six bills @ fifteen minutes set-up time per bill (one time) = 1.5 hours
  
• Six bills per month @ 10 minutes each = 1 hour per month
• Add another five minutes per bill to check whether the payment posted = half an hour per month

Annual time investment to pay six bills online = 19.5 hours. Money saved on stamps = $15.84. My rate of pay = 81 cents per hour.

Back again

My other faithful follower (Inkling) has been urging me to write again, so I'm going to give in and do it.

Things got complicated here. I had a beautiful idea to spend the summer working on fall courses and live on savings. It was all going very well until I got a phone call at 1:30 in the afternoon on Monday, June 22. "Have you forgotten something?" No, I hadn't. I had applied to North Central State College to teach a couple of courses, but they didn't get back to me, so I assumed that they didn't need me. Well, they had gotten back, but they used a secret, private e-mail account that I had no access to, and included the message "If you have problems with this schedule, let us know." I didn't get back to them, so they assumed I didn't have problems. The bottom line is that I've been furiously slamming material together for literature courses for the last couple of weeks.

I did have the good sense, though, to take off the weekend of the Fourth and visit friend Joel in South Carolina. I didn't even take papers, books, or laptop. It was wonderful.

So now I'm back, teaching, grading papers, trying to pull my material together for Ashland. I guess the Spring semesters will have to wait.