House of Jorob

Verizon WTF?

I've been paying my bills for a long time now. It keeps people from getting mad at me.
Most times, I use my electronic checking account. My bank is PNC, and their web billpaying service is very good. Has a payment-delivery guarantee that's so good, its scary. They guarantee your payment will be there on time, or they eat your late fees. And they honor it.

But sometimes I use a bill-paying service. Like Checkfree.

I stumbled onto this outfit a loooong time back, thanks to my utility bills.

My electric company is PECO. An Excelon Company. Couple of years ago, they were in the throes of the whole get-your-customers-to-take-their-bills-electronically craze. Wherein they convince you to let them stop mailing you paper bills, thus transferring the cost of printing and postage from them to you. While not letting their customers have any chargeback rights.

Well, okay. They didn't transfer the cost of postage.

Just printing.

Anyway, this was also back in the days when, if PNC couldn't make an electronic transfer to a company  you set up in your checking payment program, they'd have to mail em a paper draft.  For some odd reason, PECO was, at the time, receiving drafts.

So when I get the PECO invitation I think, "Hmmmm." And go check it out.

PECO'd partnered with Checkfree for this. You'd sign up with PECO for the billpaying service, and their website in turn routed you to Checkfree, where you had to sign up for a Checkfree account. Then you'd link the two.

You can see the issue. Why even bother with a PECO signup when a Checkfree account will accomplish the same thing? So I bailed on the PECO aspect, and went right into Checkfree.

Only to find that I still ended up signing away my paper bill when i completed my Checkfree signup.

Ok.

Live and learn.

Like PECO. Because within two months, their electronic billpay signups were no longer sending you to the Checkfree site, but wanted you to redo the whole thing with another billpaying firm.

No thank you. I kept Checkfree. Their structure looked remarkably like the way PNC was paying things, even down to the security confirmation codes at the end of each transaction.

My Verizon bill is $15. Taxes included. And, about a month after I signed up for Checkfree, I put the Verizon account on it, too.

My family lives on cell phones, not land lines. I've completely cut the house phone down, down to the barest essential I could convince Verizon to sell me. No long distance. No intralata. Local calling to exactly one zone. People call us on the land line and talk to an answering machine that I check once a week, or I call 800 numbers, and that's it. Emergency only, basically. For when the cell networks have had a tower meltdown. With a stripped down bill like that, who needed the paper bill?

Verizon and I have gotten along just fine these past couple of years. Each month I Checkfree em $15, and each month they leave me a dial tone.

Until this month.

This month, I log onto Checkfree, and upon choosing to View My Bill, I get a Brick Wall Screen--originating from the Verizon site. Citing regulations that went into effect August 2007, Verizon says I now have to register with and sign in to the Verizon website in order to view the bill that I agreed should be placed into the delivery custody of CheckFree.

Right now,  Checkfree is showing me the amount due, but detail?  Nuh uh. Verizon was not going to let me see my bill, unless I registered with them.

Okay. Let's all look at our calendars together, shall we?

April.

2008.

August.

2007.

Well, okay. They both begin with "A". I can see where that would confuse things a bit.

I should be upset because I can't get at my bill. I either give Verizon my email address so they can send me a temporary password, or I have to wait 5 snaildays to get my password by USPS. That's it. Those are the only two ways I can view the bill I gave them permission to provide me electronically two years ago.

But, in my time as a customer I've grown numb to Verizon behaving this way. I'm more annoyed that they're citing regulations from the middle of last year.

I can't help but feel like there's a twist in here, somewhere. Like I'm looking at a reflection in a funhouse mirror and not seeing the warp.

Bookshelf: Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom

Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom
David Wingrove
C 1990
First of a series.

You know you're in for an epic ride when the first 65 pages of a novel feature characters who are not in the "Major Characters" list that graces the book's title pages. (I'm not kidding. There's a prologue featuring some of the majors--but since their page numbers run xxvii and such, technically they are not part of the novel's main body. The story kicks off with a pair of assassins who have nothing to do with the prologue, and everything to do with the unfolding of events deeper inside the novel.)

577 pages later, I'm ready for volume 2. Which is a good thing, because this series runs to 8 volumes published between 1990 and 1997. (My library copy of The Middle Kingdom was published in 1990--it's a Delacorte Press edition. The original edition of Middle Kingdom came out in 1989. I'm referencing what I have on hand.)

Premise: It is 2196. The Earth's population is 34 billion and climbing. The bulk of humanity lives inside great continent-spanning city-states, constructions built atop the ground reaching hundreds of stories high. It is a Chinese dynasty running things. Everywhere.

The series tells the story of The War of Two Directions--an Eastern belief in stability vs a Western ideology of change--an idealogy the Chinese had eradicated centuries earlier.

Wingrove has crafted a masterful future vision; one that is never static and filled with vivid characters. A sheer pleasure.

Post Uno: Hunting for a Harp

So my wife comes home with a couple bargain lamps the other day. No shades. No harps. No bulbs.
Good price, though. $30 for the pair at Bed Bath and Beyond. Clearanced. Pretty sturdy--the cats won't knock them over all that easily. Which is why we're looking for lamps in the first place.

We have a pair of night tables, one on either side of the bed. The bed sits against a wall, in which are two windows. The windows frame out the bed. There's an air conditioner filling the western window.

The lamps sit on the night tables.

Four cats live with us. And, being cats, on nice sunny days there is an attraction to the windows in our bedroom. As there is on windy days. And rainy days. And snowy days.  Thirty-three inches of window sill. One hundred sixty three inches of cat.

Someone's gonna get pushed.

The view out my window is boring. Plus, it's a lot of work. You have to stand on my night table, with your back paws sliding and your tail whipping around for balance while keeping your front paws on the top of the sill above the air conditioner and your head jammed in between the window shade and the window glass.

If you're a cat. If you're a human, you just have to stand there and move the shade.

But, if you're a cat, you're going to skip this window and choose the other one. The one near my wife's head.

Did I mention we have four cats?

I figure we must have picked up each item from the floor and returned it to my wife's night table four or five (thousand) times. And once in a while the lamp.
Eventually I felt sorry for my wife--lampshade cocked at a permanent 45-degree angle, on/off-switch sparking from too many crash landings--and she swapped my lamp for hers. I rarely used mine, but my wife likes to read in bed. The symmetry between the night stands was shot though, and I retired my new collection of lamp-parts soon after.

Seasons passed. Two of them. Come this spring, we learned that lamps still break when they hit the ground with three cats on top.

Our new, bargain shadeless lamps are sitting on our night tables now, waiting for an influx of harps. The cats will not be able to knock em over, no matter how hard they wrestle for space on the windowsill.

We rearranged the bedroom.