Complaint 1: It is April. It is spring. I live in Virginia. Virginia is supposed to be the South. It is not supposed to snow in the south. It is especially not to snow in the South in the spring. Okay, it was just a dusting Friday night and it had all disappeared by noon-ish on Saturday, but it has still been disgustingly cold out. And, yes, I know that I will inevitably be complaining about heat and humidity in mere weeks, but still. We had a few nice spring days and I want to put a hold on them.
Complaint 2: How exactly am I supposed to take a small airline seriously if they use Paypal to process their credit cards?
Complaint 3: I owed taxes to both the feds and the state this year. Usually, I get some money back from the feds and have to pay the state. The real complaint is that Virginia makes you itemize on your state return if you itemize on your federal return, which is a rip-off for those of for whom the biggest chunk of our itemized deductions is our state taxes.
Complaint 4: While I am complaining about taxes, I did my Virginia taxes on-line. I can't complain about their system, which was surprisingly easy and I'm glad they don't charge you to have the payment taken directly from your bank account. But I noticed that if you do the paper form, everything is rounded to whole dollars, including the taxes you owe. If you do it on-line, they decide they want the pennies. It's just 23 cents, but it's still annoying.
Complaint 5: My computer at work is fine, but the cable to the switchbox that lets me use it with the flat-screen display and the decent keyboard (vs. the cramped laptop keyboard) flaked out on Friday. The help desk can't tell me when they will fix this. The truly annoying part is the blank email I got from a help desk person with just a ticket number. Exactly what is the point of sending me a blank email? When I replied to it and asked him when they'd come out, he told me the ticket had been transferred to someone else because they didn't have any cables in stock. I will invoke our secretary (who one of the help desk guys has a crush on) on Monday but I still fear this will be a hassle for a while.
Complaint 6: So I went over to my corporate office and was trying to work on my computer there. They did a server migration a couple of weeks ago but it was just Friday when they had that wipe out all of my settings. So, instead of getting actual work done, I was putting things back on the desktop, restoring where the My Documents should point to, and reconfiguring a program I use frequently so it could find where they moved Excel to and let me plot results.
Complaint 7: My AT&T bill has a box to check to enroll in their Automatic Bill Payment. I have now checked that box on the bill FIVE times and they have still failed to enroll me in this.
Complaint 8: I had to activate a credit card (replacement for one that expired) and the sticker on the front claimed I could do this on-line. Their on-line system only allowed me to register it for on-line bill payment but had no means to activate the new card.
Complaint 9: I have a conference to go to in Moscow this summer. Moscow is not unbearably far from Stockholm. Robert will not, alas, be in Stockholm because he has a conference to go to in Vancouver at the same time.
Complaint 10: The county library in Urbana, Ohio is not open on Sundays and holidays. This has no actual impact on my life, but I just feel like complaining about it.
Copyright 2007 Miriam H. Nadel