Remember last month’s epic Sprint customer service fail when it took me three hours to purchase my Blackberry?

Well, this morning Madre Jansen sent me an email:

Madre Jansen: “What is this $30 equipment charge on the phone bill? Here is the username and password for the account. Figure it out.”

So I call sprint:

Sprint Rep: “Hi [...]]]> I’m furious.

Remember last month’s epic Sprint customer service fail when it took me three hours to purchase my Blackberry?

Well, this morning Madre Jansen sent me an email:

Madre Jansen: “What is this $30 equipment charge on the phone bill? Here is the username and password for the account. Figure it out.”

So I call sprint:

Sprint Rep: “Hi stranger. What’s the 10-digit pin for the account?”
Me: “Erm… I have a password and username.”
Sprint Rep: “Credentials fail. That’s only for online.”

So I hang up, call mom for the pin, and call Sprint again:

Me: “Here is the pin…”
Sprint Rep #2: “Great. Did you call us recently?”
Me: “Yeah, like two minutes ago. I had to get the pin from a parent.”
Sprint Rep: “Okay Shady. So, because you just called I have to have my manager listening in and….”
Me: “Okay. I have a $30 ‘equipment charge’ on my bill, and I would like to know what it is for.”
Sprint Rep: “Yes. You do have an equipment charge. It’s for equipment!”
Me: “…how helpful. But what does that mean? What is the charge for? What equipment?”
Sprint Rep: “I dunno. You bought something at a store. I just have a sku number. It’s a mystery!”
Me: “…well, would the store know?”
Sprint Rep: “Hm. Maybe. Where is the store? What’s your zip? Let me call them. Hold. […] They said you bought a Blackberry and a charger. It might have been for a charger!”
Me: “Hm. I bought a car charger, but I guarantee it wasn’t a flat $30… and I paid for it with a credit card.”
Sprint Rep: “We are only showing one charge on your mastercard.”
Me: “I don’t think I put it on my mastercard. That was just for the blackberry. Hm.”
Sprint Rep: “Check your bank statements. I dunno…”
Me: “I think the Sprint rep was going to give me a $30 credit for it taking three hours to buy my phone.”
Sprint Rep: “Hm maybe. Call us back when you figure that out. Peace!”

I pull up my bank statements online. The car charger was on my Visa. The blackberry was on the mastercard. Sprint was full of crap, and the $30 charge was still a mystery.

I call Sprint back.

Sprint Rep #3: “Yes, we see that you have a $30 charge. Let me look into that. Hold.”
Me: “… ”
Sprint Rep: Yes. It looks like your blackberry was $291.51 and you only paid $261.51 with your mastercard. That’s why your account was charged.”
Me: “I’m pretty sure the $30 was the “pain in the ass/incompetence” credit the store rep. offered me for waiting 3 hours at the store.”
Sprint Rep: “Oh, well let me contact that store. Hold. […] it seems like Hank, the rep that helped you, is not in today. The store will call me back tomorrow and I’ll follow up with you and we’ll get this resolved.”
Me: “We have to wait for him to go into work?”
Sprint Rep: “Yes.”
Me: “This is frustrating. The point of the $30 credit was to compensate me for his bad customer service that caused me to be in the store for 3 hours and now I’ve wasted 30 minutes dealing with this.”
Sprint Rep: “Sorry that you’ve spent thirteen minutes on the phone. I’m going above and beyond here because normally you would have to deal with the store.”
Me: “Oh, I’d love to give them a piece of my mind. And I’ve only been on the phone with you for 13 minutes but you’re the third person I’ve talked to today. I’m taking this pain in the ass in aggregate. I just feel further inconvenienced by the store’s incompetence and I’m frustrated that I have to wait to get this resolved. Whine-bitch-moan, boom-shaka-laka, laka boom.”

I was seething by the end of the call, and then called Madre Jansen:

Mom: “So grasshopper, how’d it go?”
Me: “BAH!! Next time I need something from a Sprint store, I’m going to Wisconsin.”

So you are not taking my advice! You are coming to law school. You are starting blawgs. You have “JD” in your twitter usernames (we will address that later) and you are tweeting and emailing plenty of questions.

Let me point you to a few places for your pre-law reading pleasure:

The “treat” in that picture is a pig ear. They come in sacks of 20 at Wal-Mart and the dogs love them. And yes they are greasy and absolutely disgusting to handle.

Oh, and that mess of wires is the power-strip [...]]]> I always release the dog treats a little before Harley bites down…



Now you know why.

The “treat” in that picture is a pig ear. They come in sacks of 20 at Wal-Mart and the dogs love them. And yes they are greasy and absolutely disgusting to handle.

Oh, and that mess of wires is the power-strip for my laptop and speakers. I’ve decided that the futon is a better study area than my desk, aesthetics be damned.

Although I suspected the Oscars would be a snoozefest, I joined the boyfriend at Jeff’s house to watch the Oscars anyway.

Nothing has changed. We are [...]]]> I have not watched the Oscars since middle school. The show is excruciatingly boring, has no fun musical performances, and there are only 3 or 4 awards anyone cares about.

Although I suspected the Oscars would be a snoozefest, I joined the boyfriend at Jeff’s house to watch the Oscars anyway.

Nothing has changed. We are halfway through the Oscars and everyone is bored and bitchy. Vera Farmiga’s cupcake dress is almost as awful as the unflattering shots of Gabourey Sidibe. There is a random interpretive dance segment, and ample shots of the face-lifts in the audience.

The awards show was awful, but the real purpose of the evening was for me to meet the freshly-minted-boyfriend’s friends.

“Meeting the friends” is like playing minesweeper. If I give too many  beauty pageant answers then the friends will think I’m boring, fake, or stupid. What I am left with is the countless ways to accidentally offend people.

One of the friends asks us how Macbeth was. We saw Macbeth on Friday, I was underwhelmed, so I say “skip it” before learning that the friend is the promoter for the theater.

Woops…. It was lovely, I swear… the pinnacle of theater…

Ugh.

Fail.

Aside from Oscars dullness and minesweeper fail, I blitzed through the rest of the week. I think I’m busy. My week felt like it was already over on Monday.

Monday morning starts with international tax at 8:30am. I spend the next three days studying, getting flat tires fixed, and being dragged throughout the city by the dogs.

There is also Trivia on Tuesday evening with Carson:


Judd came to Trivia and we lost, but we didn’t really care.

I get up early on Wednesday to finish studying, show up for class, and then skip to work for the evening.

On Thursday and Friday mornings I’m in my car by 7:30am to observe bail hearings in Anoka.

Anoka is a town 26 miles north of my house. After the bail hearings and hanging around at the public defender’s office, I commute back down, let the dogs out, and then head 16 miles south to Eagan and work for the rest of the evening.

Friday night is usually date night with the boyfriend, and I work for the bulk of Saturday.

Then on Sunday I hope I’m not too exhausted to finish my tax reading for Monday morning…where the cycle continues again…

… this was supposed to be my light semester…but at least I’m not bored?

I expected an uglier building than this, and I am still not sold on a sleek new building so close to the UMN mall. I guess this is called [...]]]> There’s a new player on the University of Minnesota East Bank skyline:


Fall construction pictures are here and here. The demolition pictures of the prior building are here.

I expected an uglier building than this, and I am still not sold on a sleek new building so close to the UMN mall. I guess this is called progress.

The images link to larger files. RSS/Facebook readers: click here if you cannot see the gallery above.

The pictures were taken on my Blackberry. I’m ambivalent about spring coming. The temperature is warmer but the dogs are muddier, and there’s [...]]]> Things are actually rainy and muddy right now, but a few weeks ago we got some pretty hoar frost.

The images link to larger files.

RSS/Facebook readers: click here if you cannot see the gallery above.

The pictures were taken on my Blackberry.
I’m ambivalent about spring coming. The temperature is warmer but the dogs are muddier, and there’s no dramatic hoar frost.

The worst part of the thaw is that all of the trash, dead animals, and dog shit that has accumulated all winter is now visible. It looks like a big septic tank exploded all over the city. Ick.

See also:

• Westminster Presbyterian Church
• Snow romp with the dogs
• St. Anthony Falls

I plan to let my future kids tag the house for their school art projects so [...]]]> Brilliance.


This is the side of Uptown’s Arise Bookstore. Many of Uptown’s buildings have cool street art, but the Arise flaming fart is right up there with the giant blue baby on the side of Cal Surf store near Lake Calhoun.

I plan to let my future kids tag the house for their school art projects so I can pretend to be a laid-back “cool” parent. We’ll see how that goes.

See also: The Creep Circus.

Other photography posts:

A Spanish announcer rattles over the soccer game on the restaurant’s TV. The announcer’s voice isn’t as loud as the restaurant’s music: Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits. The front part of the restaurant was empty, but snickers came from the pool room.

So it [...]]]> It’s 5pm and I’m sitting in a Mexican-operated Italian restaurant on Lake Street.

A Spanish announcer rattles over the soccer game on the restaurant’s TV. The announcer’s voice isn’t as loud as the restaurant’s music: Tina Turner’s Greatest Hits. The front part of the restaurant was empty, but snickers came from the pool room.

So it was just me, Tina Turner, and the soccer commentator. Perfectly random.

The place was cute enough:

And a diet fail:

The waiter told me the special was the seafood-something-or-other. I figured that the burger wouldn’t make me sick. I was wrong, but it was delicious.

I was at the Mexican-Italian restaurant because I was waiting on TiresPlus to fix my flat tire.

This is the week of waiting. It took my Family Law professor 40 minutes to figure out how to work the VCR to show us a documentary. The school clinic had staffing issues so my 20 minute appointment took 2 hours, and getting a new tire took close to 3 hours.

These unexpected pauses are made much better by the crackberry, and I’m glad to have it. I have never been so caught up on email and tweets. I figure if I can do something mildly productive during my waiting time, even if it’s responding to emails or tweets, then it’s not time lost…or at least I can get a new high score on Brick Breaker.