But hows the liquor supply?
Excellent question – that is at risk, too, but less drastically! I can subsist on alcohol alone, but that will soon run out if not replenished, and that will be the end. Still one unopened bottle of rum and vodka each, but the Caesar mix is at emergency low levels!
Mis-capitalized too. 
You can use any RGB color by using #123456 syntax or any of the 140-odd HTML named colors.
My own mini-rant I almost forgot about. Snarl.
Good old @Saint_Cad started his own rant / congrats thread about a problem he was having with a bank and it turned out I had a completely analogous problem last week. I thought my story would be a hijack there in his thread, so I’ll put mine here instead. To wit:
I had a very similar flail late last week.
I have some insurance with MetLife. Which company is really the result of about 30 mergers and acquisitions over decades, so 30 ancient legacy IT systems that are loosely connected together by scotch tape and manual paper processes. All of which predate this new-fangled thing called “the internet”. I wonder if it’ll catch on? The website for that division of MetLife has exactly zero self-serve customer service capability. It is simply a web-based brochure hawking that division’s products. My, how 1990 of them.
Anyhow, they’re supposed to send a coverage verification letter annually. And they bill quarterly. Both by snail mail. When I moved a couple years ago I tried real hard to get telephone customer service to update my address everywhere, not just for billing. It seemed to work; I get some snail mail from them in addition to bills. For sure the bills arrive to the correct address right on time; they’ve got that much nailed.
Anyhow last week I realized that my last verification letter was about 18 months ago, not 6 like it should have been. Call them up: customer service is too swamped to talk to me, so after 30 minutes (!) of music on hold interrupted every 30 seconds to tell me my call is important to them, a human picks up to say she’s just a 3rd party answering service but she can take my callback number and a sentence or two about my problem and have a real C/S worker call me at a random unpredictable time within 2 business days. I say “yes” and give her my callback info.
How many years ago was it common for big corps to have a fully automated callback feature in their inbound call center voice/computer systems? 10? 15? Not this big famous company. My, how 2010 of them.
Sure enough, they call back at a not-very-convenient time 2 days later. At least this c/s worker is American and sounds intelligent / diligent. Hooray for small favors. After some go around about my address which she’s sure is correct everywhere, she starts typing for a minute or so then says, “Wait a minute; say your address one more time real slowly please.”
“123 E Fake Street apartment A-456”
“Oh, I see the problem. That system has your address as 123 E Fake Street apartment A-45” and the post office keeps returning our letters as undeliverable due to no such address. I see our systems have known about this problem ever since you moved and our mail to you has been being returned. But without your correct address we can’t send you a letter to tell you about the bad address, so we were stuck."
“Well, what about my correct address in your billing system for the last 2 years = 8 quarterly bills? Or the other systems that successfully send me snail mail?” “Oh, those systems don’t talk to these systems at all.” What about the fact you have my email address and telephone number. “Oh, customer service has no email capability at all. Not inbound, not outbound. Nor are we allowed to call customers; it’s all gotta be snail mail.”
My, how 1950s of them.
To think this worker almost forgot to go look in whichever obscure corner of their IT wasteland held my problem. Good bet I could have talked to 10 other c/s workers on 10 different tries and gotten no resolution. Lucky me.
And yes, I do now have a tickler task in my Outlook to call them promptly when the new letter she’s requested the relevant department to be special-issued to me doesn’t show up timely either. And another one for annually forever after on the relevant anniversary.
Can’t anybody there play this game?
No, not at MetLife they can’t. I also have some life insurance through them and earlier this year they just stopped mailing a bill. My account there even says the last bill mailed was in June. I have it on auto-pay so the payments are getting made but I can’t find anyone who can tell me why they’re no longer sending a bill. They didn’t set me up on e-statements either even though I wanted them to. They have my correct address and email, and other things they’ve sent me I get just fine. But for some reason they’ve just stopped sending bills.
They’ve also sent dividend checks from my mom’s closed account twice now. They’ve paid out the death claim so they have to know the account is closed but my sister has gotten two checks in the past few months. The checks are small so she hasn’t done anything with them yet… and she also can’t get anyone to tell her why the checks are coming.
Those might be late-paying dividends or interest for holdings in her account. She earned them in teh first few days of the quarter, year, or half before her death. But they won’t be paid out by the issuer until the end of the quarter, half, or year.
I’ve dealt with that several times from other outfits.
But “nice” to hear that MetLife is totally fouling up your life too. I’m genuinely sorry.
The little orange cat I referred to in last month’s mini-rants seems to be trying to claim us, which we unfortunately can’t allow because we already have the maximum number of pets permitted by our lease. Along the way, we’ve found that said kitten is actually female, beating the odds for an orange cat (about 80% of orange cats are male).
For now, we consider her a frequent visitor, not a household member. To my relief, she does understand about the litterbox (I’ve seen her making use thereof). I just hope she’ll soon master burying her deposits! She produces a lot of exhaust for such a small kitty, and the odor is almost as big as she is.
I can’t find an important document that I need to have right now. I know I didn’t throw it away, but I stuck it somewhere and now it’s wherever all important things go when you put them someplace safe and then can’t find them.
I learned my lesson there. I once received a document in the mail early in the year that I knew I would need several months in the future. When the day came that I needed it, of course I didn’t know where it was. The next year when I received the document (again, several months before I would need it), I stuck it in a file cabinet and then added a reminder in my Google calendar that included a note where I put the damn thing.
Of course, this doesn’t help you at all. But it makes me feel better about myself, so there’s that.
I find that phrase applies to most of this board.
That’s why I hang out here: “Hey, look at them. They’ve got it worse than I do, and they’re managing to cope. Not to mention bitching very eloquently about it!”
Why must public places play TV and radio, with different audio content, at the same time?
Other people seem able to tune this out, but I cannot. I don’t know how they do it.
It bothers me to the point that I will often have to leave a place because of it. I hate to shop or eat out with unwanted music blasting in my ears.
I can’t focus and it makes me angry.
I keep ear plugs in my purse for those times it gets too bad.
Heh. I’m sitting in a hotel breakfast area, and fortunately had earplugs in my pockets just in case as I know I am a sensitive bunny. Now I can only hear the TV.
My wife has MSNBC on the TV pretty much all day long and my stepdaughter walks around the house with her anti-Trump podcasts cranked up to 11. It’s nice to be able to mute my hearing aids and block the noise (and maybe stream some music).
OMG. I’d have to move out!
They’d both get headsets / earphones of their choice as gifts. The consequences for not using them would be sufficient to get compliance.
Thanks… they were actually decent when it came to paying out the death claim but trying to get them to recognize my POA for Mom before she passed was a total PITA. And I thought that might have been the case on the first check we got but Mom’s been gone over a year and a half now.
I also can’t seem to get them to update my beneficiary information on my policy. They do have my sister as primary like I want but they’re still showing my mom and dad as secondary and they’re both deceased. I just haven’t had the spoons to deal with them.
I’ve heard that orange cats can be more…fragrant…than other cats. Not sure if that’s actually true or just a myth but my calico girl can peel the paint off the walls with her output.
POAs die with the grantor.
Separately from the above, the fraud potential of POAs is vast. Such that most financial companies are now very reluctant to accept a POA as valid regardless of the facts or your supporting documentation.
Like cashiers’ checks, the vast number of fraudsters have almost, but not quite, rendered them useless. Damned shame.
They do. A “durable” POA will be in effect if the grantor is incapacitated, but all POAs end on death.
I’m currently working on getting the POA for my mom.
I had this experience, and it was a right royal pain, as well as a rather shocking surprise. I had thought that having legal documentation would help, but they just didn’t want to do it, until I escalated and forced the issue. Even then they keep calling my mom whenever I do anything. I sort of appreciate it (I suspect there’s a lot of elder abuse out there, and I’m glad someone is looking out for her), but it’s also really annoying. How many times do we have to prove this to you?