That is a good idea. The times that my bank has reached out to me have always been by regular mail.
I’m just saying that it doesn’t sound like the scams I have familiarity with, so it might be legitimate.
But check with the official channels If they have no record of this in their database then it was a scammer.
Dear wife, help or get out of the way!
I had 2 minutes to put the child’s lunch and my lunch together before we had to leave for the bus so I was moving fast through the kitchen. My wife chose that moment to stand in front of the garbage can, blocking me off from the pantry and fridge, and comment about the plastic forks I had thrown away. I believe I was a bit short with her.
Happy Valentines Day!
Unfortunately their website says it will never ask for info over the phone that I gave them over the phone. It may be a very sophisticated scam, but I believe I’ve been had.
I issued a fraud alert for all three credit agencies as well as froze them. So at least I’m being smart after the fact.
I can’t kick this norovirus. I was better yesterday, not so much today. I got a marginal amount of work done, enough that I’m not panicked about this week’s deadlines, but damn.
Here’s hoping there are no repercussions from the email/call and that the norovirus is on the way out.
Back to mini - Facebook has decided that I need to see lots of starving and/or abused animals. And the message saying “snooze . . for 30 days” lies.
My crummy digestive system has added another food item to the “do not eat” list: any kind of citrus fruit. Not even one half of a sumo fruit, which I ate yesterday morning and regretted for 12 hours afterwards. I gave up lemonade, limeade, and fresh-squeezed orange juice a couple of years ago, but now it looks like a plain old orange is a trigger, too.
So there goes a nice source of vitamin C and a filling, healthy snack.
(mumble grumble) HP seems to think backlit keyboards are a marvy idea, never mind that it actually makes the keyboard LESS readable if the user isn’t a 20-something gaming junkie. Making it super-difficult for even a capable user to figure out how to turn that OFF, up to and including publishing the wrong info on their own website is basically pouring salt into the user’s sore eyes. No, HP, the six F-keys (three stand-alone, three in combination with the Fn key) that you published were NOT correct. F5 is SOUND on/off, F9 is pause/play, F11 projects to another display. Not sure what if anything the Fn-modified versions accomplish.
Finally did find the correct answer: F4, requiring multiple presses to go from backlight-on through a couple different brightness settings to the OFF condition that is actually usable.
OTOH, it’s very hard (for me) to type in dim light on an unlit keyboard. Which, at least for tablets, is a use case I deal with regularly.
That does nothing to excuse them having craptacular incorrect instructions on how to operate your backlighting.
I’m a touch typist, and was discussing a laptop keyboard (sorry if that wasn’t clear). I was also in a well-lit room at the time, so found the surprise extra light annoying (wouldn’t have done my battery life any good if I hadn’t been plugged in, either) and made the Fx keys harder to read to try to get back to the settings I want.
The invalid instructions on the manufacturer website just added to the aggravation. Yes, I’m aware we’re solidly in “first world problems” territory here. 
Over the weekend, I turned into a rage monster.
The culprit - AT&T Internet.
Thursday morning, we woke up to find our internet was not working. This is a problem but not a huge one as we don’t have too much time between waking up and being off to our various places of daycare or work. That night, though, the problem had not fixed itself. I tried the normal turning the router off and on again to no avail a couple of time and then got online to the chatbot to see if it could help. It could not. A phone number was not immediately available but a chat agent was. She told me that it was a system issue and that they were already working on it. She even told me, and I quote, that it would be fixed at “8:26 exactly.” It was not fixed by then. I gave it an hour. And then I got tired and went to bed. In the morning, it was still not fixed but I didn’t have time to deal with the chat agent so I resolved to try again that night. By the time I got home, the internet was working again. It was weird and slow, but working. I decided not to complain. That was my downfall.
Meanwhile, we bought a new Xbox so that my husband could play the Dead Space remake. It arrived Saturday. Saturday morning, the internet was weird and slow. I was ready to complain. However, when my husband went to connect the Xbox, the internet went down down again so I HAD to complain anyway. This time, the chat agent told me they were pushing updates to my router and to wait 20 minutes. No changes were made and more than 20 minutes went by. Then they told me that it was a system outage again and that they were working on it but no time could be given for when they estimated it would be up again. I waited. And waited. No updates were given. This stretched into Sunday. I got on with the chat agent. We went through troubleshooting steps again. I complained again and again that we have been going back and forth since Thursday. Finally, they agree to send out a technician but they can’t get one out until Monday and that someone has to be home with him and that someone is me obviously. And, also, they might charge us $99 for this visit. I take Monday off work and wait for the tech. He shows up, says Hi, and fixes the problem in 20 minutes. Says it was a loose wire.
RAGE!!!
Did I mention that a technician was out at the box where the loose wire was all fucking weekend???
I’m switching to Xfinity.
I’m on Day 6 of norovirus! JFC. This shit has thrown off my whole week.
There was an old Lily Tomlin joke where she said they should take all the people walking down the street talking to themselves and pair them up so it looks like they’re having a conversation. I would often think of that when I saw someone walking around talking on a Bluetooth headset in public. Of course nowadays the trend seems to be to have every conversation on speakerphone so that everyone in a fifty foot radius can hear!
I think believing the chatbot’s lies was your downfall. I always wonder what the goal is here: they lie, the lies are proved by subsequent events—why lie in the first place?
I think you SHOULD switch, and you should say explicitly that it was because of this series of lies. Of course, no information you communicate to AT&T will reach a decision maker, so maybe don’t waste the time and just let the sound of your dollars’ wings as they fly away do the talking.
Your experience sounds eerily similar to what I experienced with CenturyLink (now called Lumen), except in my case it was months of the internet dropping out and 3 different technicians sent out to fix the issue. Each technician said the old one hadn’t done the job right (forgot to connect something, or a cable was loose, and so on).
I switched to Xfinity, which costs more, but I had none of that nonsense. It just works except when there is a real outage affecting an area, which are rare, don’t last long, and at least my misery is shared with others. I bet you’ll be happier too.
The funny part for me is that Xfinity costs LESS and has advertised HIGHER speeds. I’d be stupid to not switch. My new service will be installed on Saturday.
Oh, man, I’m so sorry. Three days was more than enough for me. Six days is just … ugh.
I’m getting estimates for tree work on my massive willow oak today. The first has come in at $1700. Yikes! I was really hoping I was going to get this done for $1000 or so. Taking care of that tree costs almost as much as taking care of the house. But I wouldn’t want to live without it.
Just saw a “He Gets Us” ad on the Dope.
Maybe if I click on it, the “He” will turn out to be Cecil.
And our first quote for ridding our house of mice just came in… almost $8,000. “That might seem like a lot, but $3800 of it is for the bats that we found evidence of above the ceiling. Don’t worry, we usually set up a payment plan for customers!”
The total of the last THREE cars I’ve bought comes to less than $4500 (yes, for all three. So $8k is a major Yikes! for me).
AT&T update:
Note that their service went out last Tuesday, the 7th.
Every day, we’d check the status, which confirmed that yes indeedy, there is an outage and we’ll be fixing it real soon now, you betcha.
Friday, I filed a complaint with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is where you file such complaints in FL.
Saturday, I actually got a phone call from someone in a service department, saying they’d escalate things and call me back within 2 hours. No callback ensued, as you can imagine.
We continued to check the webpage daily, which confirmed the outage. Finally, late Monday, the web page said things were working. I had MIL reset the router - nada.
Now, at some point on Monday, they DID have internet, just long enough for MIL to place a grocery order (they don’t drive - so no internet means no groceries!!). Then it died. And the phone never did come back. The cell phone also quit working for a couple hours. Nice.
So Tuesday, I got on a chat with AT&T and they said “outage resolved, but yeah, YOUR system is not working, let’s schedule a service call”. That’s in about 6 hours or so (i.e. Thursday morning).
Very interestingly, TODAY (well, yesterday by now; in any case on Wednesday) I got a phone call from someone in the AT&T president’s office - which likely means some low-level person who happens to work at some corporate HQ or other - checking on the status and assuring us that they would follow up after the service call tomorrow.
All I can think of is that the complaint I filed must have gotten some attention - though I don’t know how, since the FDACS just sent an email saying they were mailing the complaint to the complainee. Maybe they got so many that they actually took some action?
Long story short: assuming all is fixed tomorrow, they will have been without phone, internet or TV for 9 days.
On a positive note: they have a home “fall detection” thing where they wear a pendant, and can press a button for emergency help. I had assumed that this was nonfunctional due to the outage - but apparently it must use some kind of cell signal; they did a test the other day and the family got a notification.
Day 6??? Sounds like something worse than noro then - that’s usually pretty well self-limiting.
I caught norovirus about 5 years back - or something similar, but noro fits the known incubation period judging by how quickly household members got sick. Things stopped being horrible after roughly 24 hours - and everyone else who caught it from me found the same thing.
You might want to see a doctor - while a virus is the most likely, it could be something different and potentially treatable. Years ago, I had some kind of “double you over with cramps, and run to the bathroom every 20 minutes” thing, and when it was still happening after a week, I saw a doc. He actually did blood work and, er, I had to leave a sample. It turned up white blood cells or something, though the actual pathogen was not identified. He put me on antibiotics and that basically solved it.