support saga
I spent three and a half hours on the phone with Apple Support yesterday, from the time I got off work at 4:30 to the time just before Shobhit got home from work, at about 8:00.
It might have been less, except that after being on hold for 38 minutes, and as usual being passed on to a senior person for handling my not-simple problem, the guy was just about to initiate screen-sharing on my computer . . . and then the call dropped. And the bastard didn't bother to call me back.
So. I called them back again. Was on hold for a while, yet again—not for another 38 minutes, but probably close to another half hour. I was passed through no fewer than four people on that call session, I think, and that included another call drop, but at least this person called me back. She and the guy before her had accents I guessed were Australian; turns out they were in a call center in Wellington, New Zealand. Of all the places, the country Ivan just returned from spending a year there. (He's currently spending some time with his parents at their home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. If and when he'll actually move back here again seems to be a perpetually open question at this point, even though he said for a few months while in New Zealand that he would be, but he's not finding any desirable job opportunities here at the moment.)
Anyway. In the end, the second Kiwi person passed me on to another guy, this one with a relatively thick South Asian accent. For all I know, he was also at the Wellington call center—and I wonder why the choice of there as an Apple Support call center? and I assumed the people working there were lucky to have presumably good jobs—or he could just as easily have been in some call center in India. I never did ask him.
In the end, he assured me he would "take ownership" of my case, and he wanted to test his next idea on his own before having me try it on my computer (in the hopes that consolidating files will help solve the problem of iTunes duplicating a ton of my music files, randomly, no consistency between any given album). He is scheduled now to call me back on Thursday afternoon, my time—Friday morning, his time.
I then took a quick walk over to Trader Joe's to buy a couple of things Shobhit requested for dinner, and there I was a little more out of it than I should have been, and the cashier had far more patience for me than I would have been in his shoes. First I moved forward to put my groceries on the little plank without thinking, as right now they don't want us doing that until the customer ahead of us has moved on, and we can maintain six feet. I just immediately stepped back when the cashier asked me, politely, to hold on a minute.
And then, as I had brought my own tote bag, he told me I could just set the entire basket on the wooden plank, and as he started scanning the product he said, "You know the drill?" I said yes, but evidently I did not—even though I had already been there several times with the expectation of taking our basket to the bagging stations by the exit before filling up our reusable bags. I moved to start putting the groceries in my tote while standing right there, and the guy yet again had to ask me to hold off, and wait until I could bag my stuff over by the exit. I kind of wish now that I had more expressly apologized to him for being such a dufus, particularly given how patient he was with me, but I was sort of in a daze at the moment for some reason so I didn't think to.
I still got back from there before Shobhit got home from work, but only by a few minutes. We watched Sunday night's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, an excellent deep dive on the pointlessness and divisiveness of President Fuckwit's "border wall," and then I just let Shobhit get to his regular news programs, and I came back to the bedroom, where I was getting ready for bed before long.
Shobhit keeps coming to bed almost as early as I do, even when he doesn't even start work the next day until 11:00, which is odd. When we first got together, we could not have been more different on this front: he stayed up super-late constantly, even on work days when he had to be up early the next morning. Maybe getting older is changing him. It's changing all of us, I suppose. Fairly regularly now I have to remind him to take his pills.
[posted 12:37 pm]