I’m sending prayers/wishes that it goes away. But I’m also wishing you could live with it like I’ve learned to (or HAD to-- loud white noise). I’ve made friends with mine (hey, is that the ocean…?)
sigh
Grandma’s back in the hospital again. She’s under a hundred pounds and unable to eat. Not surprising at 86, after two bouts with cancer, renal failure, etc. Two of her kids are there already, and two more will be tomorrow. Dad asked if I wanted to head home with him tomorrow, but I had to pass, because…
Tomorrow is my dinner/date night with my youngest. She went to Las Vegas on vacation with her mom just after Christmas, so I haven’t seen her in two weeks. She called me last night in a near panic, asking me for the info from her mom’s prescription insurance card—mom was very sick and a neighbor was picking up medicine and needed the info (I carry the card because my daughters are on her plan, if you were wondering). Mom’s boyfriend was there and I almost asked to be handed off to him, because an adult with insurance will immediately understand “prescription BIN” and “prescription group number xxxxxx,” but with the girl I had to spell out “R. X. B. I. N. x. x. x. x. x. x.” and so on for the entirety of the card. But I realized that our daughter can’t be marginalized—she needs to not only feel that she’s contributing in an emergency, but she must learn how to calmly convey and receive information in stressful situations. So I spent five times longer than necessary reading info and having it repeated back to me for check. Youngest called me two hours later to tell me that her mom was feeling much better.
Eldest fell on the ice on Christmas Eve. While on vacation (in Vegas, noted above), her back kept bothering her. Her mom’s boyfriend’s father is a radiologist, so off to the hospital they go. Contused kidney. She about went crazy with the ordered bed rest. So she gets home and of course exerts herself too much (and has an epiphany and breaks up with her boyfriend). I go to see her tonight at her job, and she tells me how she can feel her kidney. She knows she needs to take it easy, but she’s 18, out of the house(s), and works full time—and she can’t afford to miss any work.
So… Dinner with the youngest tomorrow. Whirlwind trip to hometown and back on Thursday to see Grandma (three hours, 230 miles each way). Caring but not overbearing welfare checks on the eldest for the near future.
double sigh
I just want those close to me to be whole, within reason.
[/whine]
More of an annoyance than a minirant.
I was at Target looking at movies. They had a new movie I was interested in on sale. The DVD was sixteen dollars. The Blu Ray was twenty four dollars. But the display only had Blu Rays.
So I went over to the counter in the Entertainment section and asked the clerk if he could check to see if there were any DVDs of the movie in the store. He played around with his computer for a while and then we had this conversation:
“We only have that on CD.”
“Excuse me?”
“We only have it on CD.”
“It’s a movie. It doesn’t come on CD.”
“Oh…well then we must not have it.”
“You do have it. I just saw the Blu Ray of it on your shelf. But I want the DVD.”
“Well, you know what I would do if I were you?”
“No, what?”
“I’d buy the Blu Ray. It has the DVD in with it.”
“But it costs eight dollars more.”
“Huh.”
So I guess I now know what he would do if he was me. But here’s some ideas for things I would do if I was him - not exactly him but a competent version of him.
Go look on the shelf.
Call somebody in the back of the store to check if there’s any back there.
Offer me a raincheck for the sale price.
Call one of the other Targets in the city to see if they have the DVD in stock.
I’ll admit these aren’t my own original ideas. They’re things that have been done in the past by other Target clerks in response to similar questions from me.
Blew a tire and wrecked a wheel on a pothole last week, and it’s taken me nearly a week to locate a replacement wheel and set up a time to grab it, then swing by the tire shop for new tires and a front-end alignment. I’ve been driving on a doughnut the entire time, but it’s been “getting taken care of” since within a few hours of the incident. So it doesn’t help to have my apartment complex put a tow tag on my car everyday as I sleep. Morons, the car’s neither disabled nor sitting in the complex with a flat. It’s a doughnut.
I think I threw away my Avengers 3D Blu-Ray while housecleaning last week.
But neither the tire nor the missing disc compare to coming in to work tonight to have everyone run up to show me how my best friend, a former coworker, managed to make a major screw up in her young life that will probably make her a marked woman for the rest of her life, and make the front page of multiple local news sites for it. I have no idea how to reach out to her right now, or if it’s even right to do so… and I feel like a creep that, despite what she’s been accused of doing, my first concern is to help and comfort her.
Believe me, none of us wants that, and we have a full house…but if necessary, yeah, she’d come here. 
Hold me!
Kitty’s got to go on the back burner for a little while till we get this crisis sorted.
What IS the deal with Target employees these days? My son used to work at Target part time back when he was in high school and wouldn’t even THINK to not do one of the things you say above. Back then, they were all about helping the customer.
These days, however, not so much. Yesterday, husband and I were at Target and he wanted to get me a mini clip on light for my laptop. Where I work at home, it can be somewhat darkish and husband wanted to get me a battery powered clip on light for my laptop to light up the keyboard. We looked in several places at Target, then went to the Electronics department. We asked them if they had any in the store. The two salespeople who were obviously in the midst of a terribly important discussion about a video game with each other said, “No, we don’t have any. We only have them in at Christmas. Try Amazon.com.” So husband and I walk away. We headed over by the automotive stuff (we need windshield wiper blades) and what do we find on the other side of the automotive aisle? The battery aisle. Where we find about twenty battery powered clip on lights totally appropriate for use on a laptop.
They didn’t even ATTEMPT to look it up or ask anyone. If Target wasn’t so damned convenient to where I live, I’d be going to WalMart for everything. Grrrr - I’m still mad about it today.
I’ll bite… how come?
I applied to be a contestant on Jeopardy; my on-line test is tonight. I’ve applied a few times over the years and in the past I’ve always thought I did OK. I never pass though.
I’m not sure why I keep trying. Its a lot like needing to kick a football that you know is going to be pulled away at the last minute. Its not them; Jeopardy is a great show and an awful lot of fun to watch.
Maybe if I really want to see whats wrong and why I’m not getting farther than I have, I should be watching a mirror instead.
Know what? I’m GLAD that Zellers is closing. The store in my city has been a shithole for years, with terrible customer service, unhelpful staff, and a store that looks like a tornado went through it. Messy shelves, crappy selection, and inferior merchandise. So anyway, my husband wanted to check out the “Closing Sale” so even though that store hurts my brain we went there. I found a neat thing on sale - a “Litter Locker” - so I bought it. When I got home it turned out that the cardboard label covered a huge crack in the plastic with pieces broken off. So I took my receipt and returned to the store an hour later, figuring that I could simply swap it for an unbroken one.
Simply? Not freakin’ likely.
I go to the first register at the downstairs doors. The clerk ignores me. The clerk at the second register ignored me too until I walked over and showed her my problem. She got a horrified look on her face and said “I’ll have to call a manager…” So she calls a manager. They say I need to take it upstairs to customer service. I grab a new one on my way up there. Get to Customer Service and it goes like this:
Me: “Hi, I was here an hour ago and bought this, and it turns out it’s broken. I just need to exchange it for an unbroken one.”
Clerk: “No. There’s no refunds or exchanges. You bought it As Is.”
Me: “Are you kidding me? It’s the EXACT SAME PRODUCT. I was here an hour ago. It’s like I just took the wrong one off the shelf.”
Clerk: still arguing that I couldn’t exchange it.
Me: “So if I walk out of here with this unbroken one, with the receipt in my hand saying I paid for it, will the alarm go off?”
Clerk: “No, but **I **would know.”
Me: just looking at her like ‘Oh you know what’s about to happen…’
Clerk: (huffs and calls out to another manager)
Other Manager: “Absolutely! Just take the new one!”
Me: thanks the other manager and runs my ass outta there.
Fuck you, Zellers store in my city. Your employees have been phoning it in for YEARS and it’s about time your useless store got shitcanned.
Now we’ll never get the story…
[STAGE WHISPER] Because a woman bit him… didn’t Emily tell you not to bring it up til he can wear briefs again? [/SW]
Found this out today - pissed me right off - Current law in Indiana prohibits you from directly accessing your physical therapist for evaluation and treatment. In order to access your Physical Therapist you must first undergo unneccesary and costly office visits.
What for? I have to spend my time and money to get a piece of paper “letting me” go to a physical therapist, many of whom are MDs or have MDs on staff? So instead of being able to make an evening appointment for a PT in my town, I will have to take time off work to drive to Winfield to see my GP for a exam, when I just had one less than six months ago, in order to get the necessary exercise and stretching routine for my back thing. Ridiculous. No wonder we have health care issues in this state.
Really?!?!?! You REALLY need to floss your teeth at your desk?!?!? Right next to me??!?!?!! Fucking animal.
My favourite response to that is for the employee to go look on the same shelf that I just looked at, turn to me and say something helpful like, “I guess we don’t have any.” Goddamn, why didn’t I think of looking for a product on a shelf at a department/grocery store? I just go into stores and go straight to a clerk and ask them for every product I’m looking for because I’m that stupid! :rolleyes:
Heh. We got to watch a conversation similar to yours in a Zellers store that was closing out here - some guy bought a defective product, and then had a half hour argument with a manager about how it wasn’t right to sell defective products. The manager kept saying the same thing - “All sales are final because we’re closing this store down. You’ll have to go to the manufacturer of the product.” In all fairness, there are signs everywhere stating that all sales are final, but exchanging an obviously broken one for a whole one still shouldn’t be a problem. If they didn’t have another one, well, that’s a problem, then.
And I agree with you about the Zellers stores - they really were shitholes. And their closing out sales - I went into a local one that had been closing out for months, and their products were something like 15% off - talk to me when you get serious about getting your crap out of the store.
In other news, I have confirmation that the City of Calgary isn’t really enforcing anything these days - the neighbour’s shitty old truck has been parked without moving in the bus zone for three days now without getting ticketed or towed.
I’ve worked in retail. While I’m willing to believe that YOU are not that stupid, believe me, there are plenty of stupid and/or just unobservant customers around. And yes, some of them will just ask a clerk to find a widget without looking for one first.
Yeah, in order to get knee surgery, my insurance company (the real “Death Squads” in America…) made me:
[ul]
[li]Call my clinic.[/li][li]Have the nurse on call “get back to me”.[/li][li]Make an appointment with a Physician’s Asst, who agrees that my knee isn’t working.[/li][li]So now I can make an appointment with my physician.[/li]… who isn’t available until the week after the next Mayan apocalypse.
[li]So make an appointment with a random physician.[/li][li]Convince her that I need an MRI.[/li][li]Nope, insurance will only pay for an X-Ray.[/li][li]Get X-Ray. Which of course is inconclusive. Need an MRI to see torn cartilage.[/li][li]Call insurance company.[/li][li]Call insurance company again, until I find a sympathetic clerk.[/li][li]Who’ll approve an MRI if the doctor calls her.[/li][li]Schedule MRI. Wait another week.[/li][li]Get MRI. Lo and behold! A torn up knee![/li][li]BUT… they won’t let me have surgery until I try Physical Therapy for a month.[/li][li]Then wait to see Sports Medicine docs and convince them.[/li][li]Then schedule another MRI before they’ll schedule surgery[/li][li]Wait another month for surgeon to get back from Fiji or Bali or somewhere…[/li]
[li]Get surgery![/li][/ul]
By the time I got approved for surgery, I’d had two months of intense pain, limping around on a torn meniscus, using our railing like a rope tow to get upstairs.
All fixed in one hour of snipping.
I’m really fucking incensed at stupid shit, dishonest, bullshit quackery right now. One of my acquaintances just told us her cousin died last night. The cousin had Addison’s Disease, which is serious but can be treated with hormone supplementation. But no, she was seeing a “homeopathic doctor.” She had just decided that she wasn’t actually getting better and made an appointment with a real doctor, but it was too late.
She got the flu, and her system couldn’t handle it. She had a heart attack. Her fucking 9 year old had to find his mother collapsed on the floor and get help. Then the hospital couldn’t save her, and she died, leaving kids 11, 9, and 5 without their mother. While it’s not nice to be mad at someone who just died, I am still a little mad at her for not being more responsible, and I want to goddamn kill the “doctor” who REALLY should have known better and directly led to her death.
Maybe they’ve hired new people for the holidays. I’ve never had any problems there in the past so I don’t want to condemn the whole store for one bad employee.
Sometimes it works. I’ll see a new movie on an end aisle display for new releases and it’ll appear to be sold out. But they might still have copies in with the older releases. Or it might be a movie I’m looking for in the wrong section - I’ll be thinking it’s an action movie and they’ll have it in the drama section. I always try to look everywhere before I ask but I figure they stocked the shelf so they might know some place I missed.
I’m surprised to hear there are Zellers that are still open at all. I thought the entire chain had gone under years ago.
Target bought them in Canada so based on this stream of rants I expect shiny new stores with the same old issues 