can you hear me now?

working from home has its advantages... yes. i've discussed many of these advantages in past blog posts. a 10-step commute. moderately flexible hours. working in bed, if i so choose. but it also has its disadvantages. socializing is limited to IM and email. no coworker lunches. 4-hour conference calls. FOUR-HOUR conference calls! and yard workers. yes, yard workers. each and every tuesday morning, it begins. i hear the faint roar of a lawn mower in the distance, and i remember... tuesday. curse tuesday. curse the yard workers who seem to take extra special care of the small patch of grass just outside my office/guest bedroom window. on tuesdays, i can generally be found on the floor in the hallway (the furthest i can get away from the lawn mower, aside from sitting on the toilet), cordless phone hung between my chin and my shoulder, laptop propped on my legs stuck straightout in front of me, trying to converse with clients and coworkers who i'm praying can't hear the obnoxious weed-wacker that might as well be cutting the carpet in my livingroom. "i'm sorry, can you say that again? i didn't hear you... oh no, i know it sounds like a chainsaw is hacking away at my phone, but it's just a riding lawn mower." ah yes, working from home. the glamor of it all.

idiocy challenge: dmv vs. simply wireless

so, i'm not certain which is worse: waiting three hours to talk to an idiot... or talking to an idiot for three hours. lucky for me, i've recently become well acquainted with both. (strap yourselves in... it's a long one).

it all started with the decision to go to the dmv (dept of motor vehicles) on a saturday morning. i'll whole-heartedly refer to myself as an idiot for thinking this was a good idea. THIS was not a good idea. although, we thought the line looked long when we tacked ourselves onto the back of it just outside the front door, we could not have prepared ourselves for the image of 300+ people on the INSIDE of the building each holding a ticket to be seen at one of about 8 windows. we got to the first checkpoint where we explained that we were there to get a new VA title for our vehicle, new plates, new registration, new drivers licenses, etc. the gentleman rattled off a list of items he expected us to have in order to proceed with the transactions and we agreed we had all of them. he handed us the forms to fill out and two tickets. we moved our way into the maze of chairs and people to find a seat. we started filling out the forms and the paranoia set in. "what if we don't have what we need? what if we wait all this time and they make us come back 'cause we're missing something?" you can take your positive thinking theories and shove them... i can't help myself. my brain is wired to think of all possible scenarios. and aside from the scenario where everything works out perfectly, the remaining scenarios all consist of something not going right. so, there i sat. waiting and worrying.

i will point out that i had a good reason to worry. we had discovered that morning that the only piece of "acceptable" mail we had to prove burton's residence in virginia was a comcast bill with our neighbors address on it. (another really long and annoying story about how our apartment lease listed the wrong apartment number, so we had all our mail forwarded to our neighbors apartment, and it's been one big long nightmare to get it fixed.) so even though only an idiot wouldn't be able to see that we were clearly married, that we were clearly not living next door to one another and that we were clearly living in virginia regardless of the apartment number... i was nervous.

and so the seconds, minutes, yes... hours, ticked away and there we sat. "A093 to Window 12. B145 to Window 10. D989 to Window 2. C286 to Window 6." there is no doubt in my mind that this system makes sense to SOMEone. but mostly it just made me want to scream and punch people. our numbers were C303 and C304. although the "C" seems insignificant... trust me, it's not. "C" means that you end up in a different que than those lucky jerks who have something other than "C". which means while the A's, B's, D's, E's and F's are all filing through the windows like a happy visa card commercial, the C's are all in a que with the other idiots who thought saturday would be a good day to come to the dmv and do a long list of things like get new licenses and register their cars. the breaking point for me was when i saw the people who had been behind us in line, walk out the door with a smile on their faces... an HOUR before my number was even called.

anyway, while the frustration of waiting 2.5 hours to talk to someone was painful and driving me to the brink of total insanity, actually dealing with the dmv employees was almost worse. i'll just jump to the part where they wouldn't give burton his drivers license with the correct address on it. instead, what they were willing to do... HAPPY to do... was give him a drivers license with our neighbors address on it. sure, we were stupid for thinking we could convince dmv workers that there was no logic in this... but we tried. burton got that look on his face... the look that comes when i know he's about to go from really calm and collected to "i hate stupid people" mode. he explains in the are-you-stupid? voice, "so you're willing to knowingly give me a drivers license with the wrong address on it... issue me an official state document with the WRONG address on it... when i am telling you that it is not correct?" unfortunately for our sanity, that answer was yes. ironically, the dmv employee i was working with nearly printed a totally different apartment number on my drivers license, due to human error... perhaps if we'd switched idiots we'd have been totally fine. (is that mean? because really... honestly... someone explain to me how these people were anything but that word.)

so as i was wrapping everything up, the woman helping me asked "do you want to register your car for one year or two?" and i asked if there was any benefit in doing it for two, since there seemed to be no apparent financial benefit... she responded, "well, you don't have to come back here for two years" ... i replied, "don't take this the wrong way... but sign me up for two." and so after 45 minutes of dealing with dmv lemmings, we got to stand in another line and wait for our drivers license pictures to be snapped. then we waited another 30 minutes for burton's drivers license to get printed (after asking three different dmv employees multiple times why everyone else's was taking 30 seconds). and we finally walked out... just over three hours later.

as we were walking to the car i looked at burton's drivers license and burst out laughing. they spelled our street name incorrectly. and as we expected, according to the state of virginia, burton lives with the mexican family next door.

this is getting long, but i hope this is as entertaining for you as it is therapeutic for me.

so, last night... was the simply wireless experience. in hindsight, if only we'd known the ACTUAL sprint store was just around the corner. to make a painfully long story a little bit shorter... we were given the impression, by a sprint store employee at a different mall, that we could get a new "instinct" phone for free, with all our credits and discounts and rebates. these phones are tough to find right now, but we located two at a mall about 30 minutes away. we got there, they only had one. the girl, who was nice... but young and an (is there a nice word for idiot?), spent some time on the phone tracking down another one of the phones at a different store and said she'd be happy to go pick it up while we went to ikea for a couple hours. and so we left. a couple hours later, we returned and began the process of switching our numbers over. she estimated it would be about 20 minutes (cue hysterical laughter). after 2.5 hours of listening to this girl and her crazy haired coworker (literally, a black kid with hair that looked like my grandmas wig in the 80s) flirting and fighting about how to make this all happen, i was losing my patience. the mall had long since closed by this point and the only person left was a strange female security guard riding around on a segway with a helmet on (very intimidating, i must say).

so, they got our phones switched over, we were playing with the cool new features of the phone as they fought over how to ring everything up (they LITERALLY called their manager at least 25 times... who, although i only know through the other side of a series of phone conversations, was clearly an idiot as well), and the total came to $700 (which they assured us multiple times we would be getting back as a rebate in the mail). this was not how it was supposed to go down and the numbers just weren't adding up. as we tried to explain that this amount was AFTER our two $150 discounts... and the two $100 rebates we would be getting back in the mail still left us paying $500 out of pocket (i had to draw it out for them on a piece of paper)... it finally clicked and they said "ya... that's right... you'd still have to pay $500... you didn't think you'd be getting these phones for free, did you? 'cause that would never happen! these phones are cool." at this point, it was about an hour passed our bedtime... we were still 30 minutes from home, and we were PISSED. so... needless to say, we still have our crappy phones.

so... you decide... who wins? and you can't say us. :)

1644 miles from everything i own

point A - where we packed up everything we own and loaded it on to a HUGE moving truck a week ago tomorrow.

point B - where everything we own is currently sitting in a HUGE moving truck and will be sitting until THURSDAY when the movers will pick up another load... oh, and then ANOTHER load... and THEN will drive to point C... "by the earliest, next tuesday."

point C - where we are right now... waiting... and growling slightly... and almost cursing...

p.s. having a really cool driver named pedro who also happens to be mormon and couldn't get over how funny it is that you both have green cards, doesn't guarantee a smooth cross-country moving experience... but DOES kind of make you feel the urge to wear a "vote for pedro" t-shirt when he delivers your stuff two weeks later.