Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Day 477

I made a new business call this morning. I would do this sort of thing a lot more often if it didn't eat up half my day. I drove for an hour to go make my pitch, made a short presentation, and then drove for an hour to go home again. I still don't know if I got the job. Probably I didn't, because I ended up getting lost on the way to the meeting and was fifteen minutes late. Google Maps let me down. When it came time to take exit 38A off the freeway, I discovered that the exit didn't exist anymore. In it's place was a lot of construction equipment and traffic barriers. By the time I got to exit 39 five miles down the road, my Google directions didn't make sense anymore.

When I got back from this meeting, I has to call customer service to resolve a website problem and got one of those automated phone systems that attempt to solve your problem through a series of prerecorded questions. These things never work. After twenty minutes of listening to speak or type your case number and I don't understand your answer from the automated robot, I finally discovered that the secret word you had to say in order to have your call directed to a real person was "agent." I don't know why so many help desks are going to these automated systems because they never seem to resolve anything.

The rest of the day was spent trying to track down the status of various pending jobs, again with very little success. When we went to training class tonight, Dash wasn't having a lot of success either. It wasn't his fault though. Dash is very good at picking up on my moods. He probably sensed that I wasn't really on top of things tonight and decided he wasn't going to make much of an effort either. At least the sun is still up during most of training class these days. It's much nicer to be able to see what you're doing during the training exercises. All in all, it wasn't the best of days. Luckily, there's always tomorrow to look forward to.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day