In Common with Humans

It’s International Women’s Day. It’s also Kenneth Grahame’s (The Wind in the Willows) birthday.

Quick Updates…

I’m quiet at the moment because I’m finally at the mouth of the tunnel of the long and disruptive computer/Internet transition that started in January when my new Dell desktop was delivered. Since I was already backlogged from the holidays, I now have my nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, fill in the all-work-all-the-time cliché of your choice, in a big way for the foreseeable future.

But I’m getting serious stuff accomplished. Right now I’m finishing up the first round edits of the next book scheduled to go out in galleys, and I’ll be buckling down to cover design work as soon as those have been sent off to the author. First round edits take me several days of non-stop focus. I do a main pass and then I do a second pass in which I read the entire book aloud as I go. Amazing what pops out with that technique! It might not work for everyone, but as an actor and aural learner, it’s a stage that I, personally, can’t skip. I didn’t do it for Mortal Touch and I hugely regret that now. (It burns more calories, too! 😀 )

Account Cancelation Saga: As far as I know (I haven’t checked my post box since last Friday), I’m set for final cancelation as of March 17. I asked for written confirmation to be mailed to me but I don’t know if that will happen. At this point, I’m sure that Ms. Billing Department, at least, will be very glad to see me go. *wry look* I shipped the modem and associated widgets last Wednesday, UPS, and according to the tracking number, they were delivered and signed for on Friday morning. I also mailed a second follow-up letter by ordinary First Class mail. The delivery-confirmation postcard for the effing Priority Mail letter that took seven days to be delivered showed up in my post box, signed. Between that and the UPS Ground shipping fee it has, so far, cost me $21 plus the $58.95 for a full month of service I have not been using, to cancel my account with NET1plus. Fooey.

The modem line has been disconnected, and I only have to pay Verizon up to the day that was done, not a penny more. My new DSL service is working great. I haven’t lost my connection a single time, whereas that was a regular occurrence with NET1plus’ DSL.

I’m settling into my new sleep routine, although I’m still staying up too late! This morning it was close to full light outside before I finally went to bed. I’m actually looking forward to Daylight Savings next weekend: I’ll have another hour of daylight for (hopefully) yard work later this month, and I can get to bed before sunrise! But I’m now getting up at the same time every day without an alarm clock. The cats are still all confused, though.

I’m still struggling with my dietary regimen but I seem to be getting that back under control. My meal routines have all been shifted around, as well, and whenever I significantly increase my workout intensity, I always gain weight the first couple of weeks, as my body fights to maintain the status quo. That seems to be turning around now. I hate to admit it, but I’ve been having trouble eating too much before bedtime. I’ve started brushing my teeth early, which effectively stops that. I won’t eat after I brush my teeth and I can’t stand to brush my teeth again. Silly, eh? But pitting irrational compulsions against each other can be fruitful. 🙂

I finished doing the styles for BLU Media Blog, and then I coded my own “widget” from scratch so the most recent blog entry titles are displayed in the sidebar of the main website’s index page. Now I need to get a blogging routine established. Rewriting the Rules blog auto-posts to my Amazon Author Central blog and that means all my Amazon buyers get a notice that the blog has been updated. I hope that includes Kindle buyers, because Kindle sales of Mortal Touch continue to be strong as March progresses.

I better get back to making myself hoarse! 🙂

I feel like I’m disappointing all my readers! I know you’re there because I have LJ Stats. 🙂

Since my last entry, I’ve been cracking the mystery of customizing WordPress to perfectly match my websites. I’ve been 100% successful. Of course, I’m not opting for a lot of the fancy optional functions–I just want a basic blog. But after a certain amount of beat-head-against-wall, I figured out the essential procedure:

Download WordPress
Set blog to the “classic,” bare bones, minimal template
Throw just about everything in the template away and replace it with the styles and formatting from website

Voila! I’m still building the links list in BLU Media Blog, but I spent about a day and half figuring out how to customize my author blog, Rewriting the Rules. Then I spent about 35 minutes doing the exact same thing to BLU Media Blog because now I’ve got it down. I’m very pleased.

If you want to see how well I’ve matched the WordPress blogs to the websites, just go to the sites, take a quick look at their formatting, and then click on the blog link, which is at the right side of the top menu bar on each site.

Inanna Arthen dot com
By Light Unseen Media

Before I customized BLU Media Blog, I finished the re-coding of By Light Unseen Media’s website, which is much more complicated than my author site. It’s so much more complicated, in fact, that I ended up with The Stylesheet From Hell and was grumbling to myself about why I had to be so gosh-darned creative. *wry smile* But By Light Unseen Media’s website is really in good shape now. I’ve added review quotes and updates. I’m still tweaking it, though! It was a lot of work, because I was running all the pages through the W3C Validator tool to make sure they were fully xhtml-transitional compliant, and of course that caught every frellin’ little mistake I made, most of which the browsers didn’t care about, they parsed the pages anyway. But I wanted the code to be perfect–or why bother? I sure have learned the rules for xhtml, sheesh, not to mention improving my fluency in css.

But all that has been keeping me very busy the last few days. On Saturday, I caught up on a few chores I’d forgotten to do earlier in the week, and I did a Full Moon ritual before I went to bed. (The Full Moon was Sunday morning and I didn’t want to get up for it.) On Sunday, I went up to Nashua and ran errands because I needed bulk cat supplies, and I had a full agenda for Monday (yesterday, that is). On Monday, Dad finally came down to see the new computer that he helped pay for ( 🙂 Thanks, Dad!) and visit, and we had Chinese food (which was a mistake 🙁 ). Monday evening I had Parish Committee meeting. And my workouts are taking a bit more of my time now that I’ve ramped them up, especially the three Bowflex workouts.

Further update on the Account Cancelation Saga:

Yesterday, I went to the post office, and I finally spoke to the Postmistress (who, at 2:30 p.m., came to the counter bundled up in her coat, hat and scarf, I don’t know if she was coming or going!). All she knew was that my certified Priority Mail letter, which I mailed on Tuesday the 23rd, had arrived at the Leominster post office–or so Leominster said–at 4:47 a.m. Saturday morning. She didn’t have a clue where it could have been for four days. It would have gone down to Shrewsbury, Mass. and back out to Leominster (which is about eighteen miles from Pepperell). I think someone at the Leominster post office has the warmest, most well-covered ass in the Commonwealth. *wry look* But it’s all moot now. The letter was finally delivered yesterday morning, according to the tracking information. The annoying thing is that it was mailed three days before I spoke to Ms. Billing Department, and I hope it doesn’t create any confusion or changes in the terms I arranged on the phone.

But I’m going to send another letter–plain old snail mail–and I’m shipping back the modem tomorrow. I’m giving my dad a ride to the airport and I come home through Nashua, going right by the drop-off locations for both UPS and Fedex. I think I’ll do UPS, though, because I have an account with them and I can get the package all ready to ship, pre-paid, here at home. All I have to do is drop it off at Staples, they scan it and give me a receipt. I found the paperwork from when I first signed up for DSL with Net1plus, that lists the equipment I was given, and I’m sending a copy of that to prove that I’m returning everything.

I called Verizon today and disconnected the second phone line, so that’s done.

I’ve gotten the first purchase order from Brodart for Krymsin Nocturnes!

Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus!

Happy Saint David’s Day to all who are Welsh by birth, ancestry, or sympathies! 🙂

As of last night, the tracking number on my certified, Priority Mail letter still came up saying, “Your item was accepted at 4:27 PM on February 23, 2010 in PEPPERELL, MA 01463.” This could mean that the letter never left the Pepperell post office at all (which happened with the Priority Mail ARCs of Mortal Touch in 2007), or that they got hung up in Leominster. I’d have thought it would say “delivery attempted” if the latter was the case, since I paid extra for delivery confirmation, but maybe not.

With my disrupted night and all the clocks being off, I woke up at 11:50 a.m. and decided to get up and call Net1plus and see if I could get through to Ms. Billing Dept “nine-to-noon” before she left for the day and her weekend. Every time I’ve called up to now, I’ve had to leave a voice mail message, but this time, I waited on hold briefly and then Ms. Billing Dept answered.

I was too groggy and gravel-voiced to sound aggressive or feisty. But Ms. Billing Dept knew who I was, because when I said my name and said, “I’ve been trying to get hold of you…” she bristled and said defensively, “I’ve called back and left a message every time you’ve called…”

Well…she didn’t do that after my call on Tuesday when I talked to Rick in Tech Support (which I did in accordance with Ms. Billing Dept’s explicit instructions!). And that doesn’t help with the essential issue, which is my difficulty in calling during the tiny window of time when she’s available. But, please. If you’re a small business and you have an unhappy customer, there are two ways you can react: you can be apologetic and accommodating, or you can get all defensive. Guess which one will keep you in business and which one won’t.

I explained that I wanted to cancel my account, adding that I wanted to make sure that automatic billing to my credit card was also canceled. Ms. Billing Dept said she was doing that, but she asked why I was canceling. I said I was changing my service provider. Then she wanted to know whether I was changing to DSL or cable! It’s none of their fucking business! I hesitated and she hastily mumbled, “it’s for our records.” So I said DSL. I repeated a couple of times that I wanted everything canceled (i.e. not just hosting, or not just high-speed Internet, because I don’t want to be stuck still signed up for the basic account).

I had to ask for the supposedly all-important Cancelation Code, which supposedly I must have in order to verify that I requested cancelation. But the effective cancelation date is March 17, so at least they’re not holding me to (and billing me for) the entire 30-day-notice period.

I asked Ms. Billing Dept if she’d gotten a letter from me. She said she hadn’t. I asked if there was anyone in the office when the mail was delivered, and she said yes, in fact, she’d just gotten today’s mail a few minutes ago.

She said that I had to ship back “the equipment,” meaning the modem. I said I knew that, but I wasn’t sure where to send it, since she hadn’t gotten the Priority Mail letter I’d just sent. Ms. Billing Dept said if I didn’t send back the equipment, “it’s a $125 charge.” Well, excuse me…I didn’t say I wouldn’t send it back, did I? And $125 for this obsolete little piece of shit? That’s at least three times the replacement cost! It’s about four years old at this point. I asked what address to send it to and Ms. Billing Dept said, the same one on their website.

Anyway, I got off the phone with that feeling of mingled humiliation and violation that you feel when you knuckle under to a bully–an experience I enjoyed pretty much on a daily basis in grades 1 through 9 when I was a kid, so I’m very familiar with it. Now I’m trying to decide on the best way to pack up and return the modem to make sure it gets there. Whatever I use, I’m going to insure it for $125, just in case!

I got an appointment for a hair cut, which I haven’t done for six weeks, and went out for that. Then I went to the post office to get the mail and try and find out what happened to the fucking certified Priority Mail letter that I spent $10 to send, for nothing.

The Pepperell postal clerk was confounded. But, she said, what happens when these are delivered is that the mail carrier makes one attempt, and if no one is available to sign for the letter, they leave a notice that the letter is being held at the post office. They don’t make a second attempt, they hold it for five days. After that, I think it’s returned to the sender as refused.

So much for Certified Mail! You think Ms. Billing Dept is going to go all the way out to the post office to pick up a piece of mail?? Not bloody likely! I should have just sent the letter in a plain envelope with a 44 cent stamp, saved myself $9.56! What a joke!

The Pepperell postal clerk said that she’d have the Pepperell Postmistress call over to the Leominster post office and see what happened to my letter. She took my phone number–I gave her my business card, too–and said she’d have the Postmistress call me. “She’ll be back in half an hour, an hour at most,” she promised. Yeah, well, I didn’t really expect that the Postmistress was going to call me, hahahaha. And I was right, she didn’t. But I didn’t make other calls this afternoon because I was hoping she might–and now it’s the weekend and I have to wait until Monday to do more follow-up.

This whole thing is really leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve always gone out of my way (and willingly paid a bit more) to support small local businesses. I’ve never been treated this shabbily in return for my efforts.

Yesterday was almost a total loss–I shouldn’t have bothered to get out of bed!

I almost mean that literally, because physically, I completely crashed yesterday afternoon and I have no idea why. I didn’t get up until 12:30 p.m., ate a little food, and just felt awful: exhausted, slightly queasy, sinus headache, heavy eyes, dizzy and light headed. I didn’t even want to sit up at the computer. After a short time I went and lay down on the couch, and I fell asleep. If you don’t know me really well, you can’t appreciate how weird this is. I have chronic insomnia, partly because I’m naturally nocturnal and can’t sleep well at night. My body wants to sleep during the day, but since I’m also hyper-alert, I rarely can relax enough to take a nap. I just never, ever take a nap, no matter how crappy I feel. But I dozed all afternoon yesterday–enough to have lots of dreams–and I don’t know WTF was going on. Maybe I was fighting off a virus, or my body is reacting to the recent changes in my sleep schedule and workouts, or I was reacting to the weather, or I should get a carbon monoxide detector! 🙁 But I was a vegetable until…

…precisely two minutes before I should have started my fifteen-minute sunset attunement, when my eyes snapped open, I got up, checked the time, set the timer, and did sunset attunement. After that I felt better and settled back at the computer to work. Can we get more cliché vampy than that?? I’m embarrassed, sheesh.

It had been raining all day, but now, in came the raging storm for real. Pepperell didn’t get any snow, but the wind was most impressive and the rain was beating against the house and windows like a scene in a Brontë novel. I haven’t seen the barometer drop so low so fast for quite a while! I got some work done, but just around midnight, the power went out. Since I now have a desktop instead of laptops, there went the computer, poof. I’d been saving all my work, but not to anything I could access with one of the laptops, like a flash drive. *sigh*

Of course, all the flashlights–and there were three I could put my hands on immediately–decided that their batteries were on life support. I lit a couple of candles, found the old analog phone, plugged it in and called in the outage to the power company. It took some fuss and bother to get out the Coleman lantern and fuel because a lot of stuff got piled into the closet on top of them since the ice storm in 2008. But I got them out and fired up the old one. Since the circumstances suggested we wouldn’t be getting power restored any time soon, I unpacked the brand new Coleman lantern I bought after the ice storm, assembled it and prepped the mantels, and got it blazing away, too. Now I had plenty of light! And I had two laptops with about nine hours of battery life between them–but no Internet access.

I did my entire 85-minute workout to a partial audiobook and music mp3s on Pigwidgeon, using my cell phone’s countdown timer to time the warm-up. So I didn’t miss my workout, but after that I was kind of at a loss. The work I’d been doing required Internet access. I called the power company’s outage line again at 3:30 a.m. and they had a recording that said they expected power to be restored by 4:00 a.m. In the past, those predictions have been very accurate, but not last night. I took a lantern to read by and went to bed close to 5:00 a.m. and the power still was off. I think it came back on around 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. The house never felt very cold, I was rather surprised. The Coleman lanterns throw off a lot of heat, though.

So much for Thursday, what a washout, in every sense! Next post: update on the #ISPfail saga.

Some people call Wednesdays “hump days.” To me, they’re more like “sinkhole days.” I do a lot of chores and errands on Monday and Tuesday–a holdover pattern from my former job which is slowly disintegrating–and Wednesday is sort of like my Monday. It’s hard to get focused.

I’m sure people are thoroughly bored with the Account Cancelation Saga by now, so I’ll keep today’s update brief. Nada. If the nice man in Tech Support yesterday did give the message to Billing as he promised, Ms. Billing saw no reason to attempt to contact me today with any follow-up, not even to leave a message. Maybe she didn’t make it to work this morning. Pepperell’s official snow total for today was seven inches, largely washed away by deluging rain, but Fitchburg logged fifteen inches of the stuff, and Leominster is right next to Fitchburg. According to the tracking number, my certified letter was not delivered today. Maybe they tried and no one was there to sign for it.

I called Verizon and after wandering the voice mail menu wilderness for a while and waiting on hold for a while longer, I talked to a live person to see what’s involved in canceling the second phone line, when I’m ready to do that. Fortunately, Verizon does not require 30 days notice or any other such nonsense. I just need to call them and ask for the line to be disconnected.

I haven’t even walked down for the newspaper today. My driveway is a lake on top of ice. We’re getting a respite now, but tomorrow it’s supposed to pour rain all day and evening. Flood watches have been posted.

I’ve been finishing the xhtml and css coding for my author website. I’m using the W3C Markup Validation Service, this absolutely wonderful free online tool. You write your code, upload the file to the server, go to the Validator and enter the URL, and it immediately tells you…how much you suck, basically. But I have long experience in debugging code, so I know that most of the time, “48 errors and 17 warnings” means you left a quotation mark out somewhere and created this cascading domino effect down the whole page. I’ve gotten everything fixed, and three times the file was perfect the very first time. My author website is still pretty small, too.

I’m also reading PHP and MySQL tutorials. Sometimes simple logic is just such a relief. That’s why writing code is a form of relaxation for me! No beating up the muse, no creative blocks, no gut-wrenching emotion (except for throwing things at the monitor because I can’t find the last bug in my code)! All my f-lists seem to be an unending wail of woe this week. 🙁 As norda said, this has been one hellishly long February.

I’m writing this LJ post because I need to break and do cycling, and I don’t wanna. :-p But I’ll have to say a few things about True Blood and my opinions of it. I’ve pedaled through five and half episodes now.

I hate the opening credits–hate the music, hate the visuals, really, seriously hate them. Ptooey!!! I’ve been surprised that the show deals so little with vampires per se. I’m up to the sixth episode and Bill is just starting to evolve as a character; the other vampires so far (the ones at Bill’s house and the Fangtasia club) have all been mind-bogglingly cliched and hokey. I thought the show might push the envelope a little more creatively, but I guess TV vampires are restricted to a very narrow rut, even on HBO. I’m kind of enjoying the human characters, but I feel like I’m watching Southern Exposure more than Angel. I love Lafayette, he’s my favorite character in the show. 🙂 Jason is…come on, no one can be that dumb, he’d forget to keep breathing! True Blood does keep me pedaling, which is all I ask of exercycle videos, but I expected a bit more from it, from all that I’d heard.

I got up today to a message on my machine from the NET1plus Billing Department (although she didn’t identify herself as such, just as “NET1plus”). I said in at least one of my voice mail messages that I needed a call back after noon. She was calling, according to the machine’s time stamp, at 9:46 a.m. She said she was “leaving at noon” but if I needed to call them after noon, to use “Option 1.” That’s Tech Support, but she only said, “Option 1.”

On closer inspection, NET1plus’ website does say that the Billing department is only open until 12:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. I didn’t absorb that fully because I wasn’t even sure, until I finally accessed the FAQ entry, that I had to talk to Billing. Sales should be open until 5:00 p.m. and they don’t answer their phone, either.

So I called and selected Option 1. The recorded message explained that tech support “is on a call-back basis only today” and promised that calls would be returned within a maximum of 60 minutes. I left a message, saying that this was my second day of trying to reach someone. I waited about 50 minutes, then I had to get out to the transfer station while the weather was still holding and before they closed at 3:30 p.m. I did that and went to the post office for the forms to send a certified letter. (According to the post office, “registered mail” is for things that have significant value, like a huge check; certified mail and return receipt will get the job done for an ordinary letter.) When I got home it had been 90 minutes since I left my message and no one had called back.

So, I called a second time and left another message.

About 20 minutes later, I got a call back from the tech support guy (yes, I got his name). He seemed a bit flustered when I explained–and I was very polite–what I needed. He said yes, I have to talk to Billing and they close at 12:00 p.m. But, he promised to “put through the request for cancelation” and tell them I needed a call back after noon.

Then I called my dad, who I haven’t checked in with for a while, and when I mentioned all this frustration, he immediately said to send a “registered mail” letter.

So, I’ve done that. I composed a letter, printed it on BLUM letterhead, printed out a BLUM mailing label for the envelope, and got it all done in time to go back to the post office and mail it today. Priority Mail, certified, return receipt requested, $10.00 for the whole thing, they should get it tomorrow morning.

So, phone calls aside, it’s cost me $10.00 so far just to get NET1plus’ attention (or try to). Here’s a slightly redacted copy of the letter I sent (emphases as in the original), under a cut:

to whom it may concern…

Six phone calls, three voice messages, four and a half hours: nada.

But I did finally access the FAQ item about canceling a Net1plus account. It says:

Q10023 – FAQ: How do I cancel my account?

NET1Plus maintains a very strict cancelation policy that ensures that accounts and associates services are not maliciously or accidently canceled without authorization.

Cancelation Rules:

NET1Plus does not accept cancelation request by email or voice mail.

Customers must provide at least 30 Days Notice of cancelation.

Customers are responsible for all outstanding charges plus any additional charges that would become due and payable within the 30 days following the request for cancelation.

Customers wishing to cancel must call the Billing Department during regular business hours and provide certain account verification information before the cancelation can be processed.

Upon cancelation the NET1Plus representative will provide a cancelation confirmation code. Cancelations are not considered accepted until this cancelation code is produced and provided to the customer.

NET1Plus trys to be very diligent in its efforts to process cancelations accurately and without delay. However, there is always the possibility of an error and because of that we encourage customers to document their cancelation code that is provided by the NET1Plus agent, and also make note of the date and time of your call. By taking these steps you protect your rights in the event of an error. Without this information NET1Plus is unable to substantiate any claims customers make in regards to cancelations not being processed. As such any unsubstantiated claims cannot be considered or acted upon.

So…you can’t do anything, not even review your current TOS, without calling them. They’re only open Mon-Fri business hours. They don’t answer the phone, allow you to stay on hold, or return your calls. They just charged my credit card for the full amount for the coming month on the 16th, so I’m paid up until March 17th. Since I won’t be able to give quite 30 days’ notice, will I get charged for another whole month? I can’t stop the auto-charge on my card without, you guessed it, calling them!

Of course, they can cancel your account without notice any time they want.

I’m really getting pissed off. I’m trying hard not to because it’s just a waste of energy, but it’s so fucking frustrating to have them demand that you contact them by phone and then be unreachable and unresponsive. What kind of an INTERNET COMPANY won’t do business over the INTERNET?????

All departments at Net1plus are still busy or assisting other customers…I left another message and now I have to get to the post office. The weather forecast is for four solid days of crap with two back to back storms starting tonight and running through Friday–we’ll probably get more snow here than other parts of the state. *sigh* I’m going to stop at the grocery store, because there are a few things I may run out of before Saturday, like tea bags.

“Call answered within 1 to 10 minutes, during normal hours.”

That’s what it says on the “Contact Us” page at Net1plus. I left a message an hour ago with Billing, so I tried again. Billing is busy or helping someone else, so I left a message and called again, selecting Sales. Sales is busy or helping someone else, so I guess I have to keep trying.