Tattoos and Drool

Customer service is not dead

Let me first set the scene for you. Monday, I needed to go to the bank. I had approximately fourteen checks as well as a stack of cash that needed to be deposited before I gave in to temptation and bought ten Route 44 Diet Dr Peppers from Sonic with it. Anyone who has three or more children knows that leaving the house with them should be an Olympic sport. I thought it was hard when I had one baby. No. NO. That is cake, trust me. With three, there’s the outfit choosing and the diaper wrestling and the cup filling and the potty reminders and the bag packing and three sets of carseat straps and the shoe finding OH MY GOD THE SHOE FINDING. I cannot comprehend why the little people shoes in our house always seem to disappear, but they do, and when I can’t find them I come thisclose to losing my MIND. It’s like I expend enough energy to change, dress and pack three children and the one thing holding me up is the shoes? THE SHOES? Come on now.

So I’m packing a bag, putting on my pants and buckling the baby in her carseat all at the same time and finally, YES! We are ready! Or not. I can’t find two stupid pairs of those ugly as sin Crocs my boys are obsessed with. Sawyer finds a pair, slaps them on the wrong feet (every time! Why is this? Shouldn’t they at least average 50/50 on getting it right?) and runs to the car. But I can’t find another pair, and Beckett is LOSING IT. He has to have Crocs like his brother and he has to have them right then or he will explode and I can’t find them. So he’s screaming and writhing on the floor over the stupid shoes and I’m beyond frustrated because IT’S ALWAYS THE DAMN SHOES and I go to grab my iPhone to stick it in the diaper bag when It Happens.

I grabbed at the phone a little too angrily and vigorously and it slipped from my fingers onto the kitchen floor with a loud smack. I grumbled and grabbed it off the floor, pushing the home button to make sure it was okay. I’ve dropped it plenty of times before and it was always fine, but this time? When I’m already going mental over the shoes? Nothing happened. Black screen staring me in the face. Oh, the battery is just dead I think and plug it into the charger. Still nothing. Attempt a hard restore. Nothing. At this point Beckett is still having Freakout of the Century and I had to tackle him into his carseat, so I stuffed the phone and charger in my bag to deal with when I got back, still thinking it must just be dead or something. Har har har.

So we go to the bank and I send my eleventy one items up the chute, and as I’m waiting I notice the tellers looking through the window a little strangely at me. What, bitches? Never seen a frazzled woman with three kids who has decided to wear her pajamas to the bank? MYOB. I get my receipt and we drive off, and as I turn the corner, Sawyer goes, “Whoa, Mommy! Too fast!” I glance at him in the rear view mirror and smile as he hangs over the seat in front of him and bounces around laughing.

Um, wait. WHAT?

OMG, internet. In my frustration with the shoes (UGH THE SHOES) and the phone and the child who had to flail his arms and legs like octopus tentacles while I was buckling him in, I forgot to go to the other side of the car and strap Sawyer in. All the things that could happen right that second to send him hurtling through the windshield instantly flashed through my mind. And a little of OMG, I might blog this, and the internet will think I’m a horrible mother but I’ll probably just blog it anyway as I pulled the car over to strap him down.

Okay. So there was that whole saga, and that’s how the phone got dropped and why I was already a hot mess by the time I got home to mess with it some more. I thought I’d try syncing it with my computer to at least save the data, thinking maybe the screen was just out. iTunes made me wait and wait and then finally just spit out an error message about not having a SIM card. Except, it DID have a SIM card. I pulled the card out and stuck it back in a few times, but it wasn’t registering. Tried throwing it on the floor again (because maybe it would unbreak it? I don’t friggin’ know) but nothing worked. And at this point, all I can see are dollar signs. Lots and lots of dollar signs and a husband cutting up my credit cards and taking my name off the bank account because this is the third phone I’ve had in the past 18 months.

Hooookay, so now I get to make an appointment at the Apple Store an hour away. Which eventually turns into Shelby having to take the day off work to stay home with the boys, because I have a midwife appointment as well and we can’t get in touch with my brother to come watch them. And you know, the vision of them spinning tornado style through the nice displays of shiny new Macbooks and widescreen monitors? Would pretty much prefer for that not to become a reality.

So (I wonder how many times I can start a paragraph with so?) yesterday after our appointment, the baby and I met with a Genius who, after attempting to “fix” the phone with a can of compressed air and a bristly brush (which I could have jut done myself at home), basically told me I had killed my phone. Bye bye iPhone, rest in peace, OH but we can replace it with the exact same model for the bargain price of $199! Yeah, probably not. No Apple Care plan to save me since I’d bought the phone used from a friend, so my next option was to beg and plead with AT&T to have a little mercy on me for just this once and let me upgrade early.

As it turns out, no begging OR pleading was necessary. In fact, the good folks at AT&T were – dare I say – helpful. That’s definitely a first. I went into the store, told the girl who greeted me my predicament and she escorted me straight to a manager to see what he could do for me. This guy, George, was a lifesaver. He pulled up my account, saw that one of the lines on our account (Shelby’s) was up for upgrade in October, and with a “That’s close enough!” he had another employee at his side who he gave instructions to override the date and “make sure the customer was 100% satisfied today, wink wink.” As it turned out, satisfying me included selling me a brand new iPhone 3G for half the price the Apple Store offered. In less than 20 minutes, I was leaving the store with my new phone nestled into a pink and purple case with the Apple Care angels watching over it. This one has to last me awhile.

So, big love to AT&T for now. Until they screw up my bill again.

An hour of my life I’ll never get back

I’ve been neglecting you, bloggy friends! I apologize. DH and I have both been making a conscious effort to spend less time on the computer and more time together. We’ve had a relapse already. Shocking, right? So while it’s been nice to take a break, I’ve been missing the blog world. My Bloglines is lit up with hundreds of unread posts that I’ll probably never catch up on, but someone gave me a nudge to update so here I am.

Yesterday, a friend from high school that I hadn’t seen in about two years stopped by for a visit. Yes, that’s right, contact with the outside world! Go me. Anyway, it was nice. We got caught up on the latest happenings and then decided to take the boys to lunch at Bob Evans. Had I known in advance the idiocy that would ensue, we would have just stuck with the Mickey D’s drive-thru.

We got there and were seated and the waitress came by to take our drink order. I put Sawyer’s food in right away because he raises hell if he has to sit still for too long without stuffing his face. Chicken strips and smiley face potatoes. Easy enough, right? A few minutes later she came back by and took our orders, which we had to repeat three times while she stared at us and slowly nodded her head, looking completely confused. Ohhhh boy.

Fast forward about twenty minutes. Sawyer’s food finally came, just in the nick of time as he’d been rolling around under the table and trying to dump out the salt and pepper. Chicken strips and fries. Yes, fries, not smiley face potatoes. I told her it was wrong and she again stared at me dumbfoundedly. I pointed to the picture in the kid’s menu of the potatoes and she acted like she’d never seen them before in her life. You know, these things? Right here on the menu? Yeah, that’s what I ordered.

So back to the kitchen she went, and at this point we had been there over half an hour and I’d still not received a single refill. We waited another good fifteen minutes and then she finally brought the potatoes (which at this point he had no interest in eating since he’d already devoured the fries). Still no sign of the rest of our food. By this time, Beckett was pretty much over the whole experience and no amount of Puffs was keeping him quiet. I paced with him and tried to keep Sawyer from tearing across the restaurant while my friend asked her for the check and to just box up our meals and we’d take it home.

MORE awkward staring, stuttering, and flipping through her order pad. Then back to the kitchen again, where we watched her tap away at the computer trying to get together our check for ANOTHER ten minutes. She finally brought it to us, along with one box.

“We will need more than one box.”

“More than one?”

“Um.. yes? We each had a meal, plus his that he didn’t finish? Did they already box ours up?”

Frantic flipping through the order book again. And then she said, “Umm, be right back, something isn’t right here.”

GEE, ya think?!

We watched her bustle back behind the counter and scramble with some boxes, shouting at the cooks that she needed our orders. We waited some more. And waited. And waited. And watched the manager walk around apologizing to other tables, but never stopping by ours. Finally, I was sick of it and we packed the now screaming kids up and went to the register, where the manager checked us out. I told him we only ever received the kids meal, and got an annoyed “Sorry about that” and nothing else.

So I paid a whole $3.20 for the chicken meal, plus a dollar tip, which I’m not even sure why I left. See, I’m not a sympathetic tipper. You have to earn your tip from me. The husband has worked as a server before and always leaves a tip, no matter what. Not I. Your tip starts at 20% and goes downhill from there the crappier your service gets. I never got a refill, Sawyer’s order was wrong, and we never even got our food after being there for an hour. So she’s lucky I even gave her that dollar. I think I only wrote it in because the manager was breathing down my neck watching me sign the receipt, and I had a twinge of guilt as I signed.

And yes, you can bet on it that I’ll be emailing corporate with a copy of this blog post. I wouldn’t go back there and pay, but I’ll try again on their dime. Not that I even needed to be eating the caramel banana pecan pancakes I ordered, not in the slightest, so maybe the pancake gods were trying to tell me something?