Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Heather's Cool!

I'm trying to be high tech. Really I am. It is the 21st Century. If you don't want to read this whole post, and I know Mark will think it's too fucking long, or if you don't want to read about kinky shit, skip over the next five or six paragraphs.

Perhaps, if I would have continued on that Physics/Chemistry/Auto-Mechanics course of study I was on in high school instead of opting for the Social-Science/Psychology/Thrill-of-victory, agony-of-defeat, human-drama-of-athletic-competition path, things would might have been different, and there would be flying cars today.

But I have a laptop with a broken "7" key (Can you hear the weeping steel guitar with that country song lyric?). And I have a Samsung ABCDEFG I-700 Pocket PC, which is a combo of everything one might need in the early 21st Century, a telephone, calendar, address book, camera, digital recorder, internet explorer, GPS locator, calculator, word processor, poop scoop, computer thingy, and, as my better half said to the Verizon Wireless tech support guy on the phone, "his life blood." I wanted to be able to access my e-mail accounts and send e-mail from this fucking "device;" so, I downloaded the Verizon Wireless "Wireless Sync" software at a Verizon Wireless guy's suggestion for my laptop and bought the upgrade for the MS O/S on my Pocket PC to allow me to use the software from Verizon to do the whole e-mail thing. I installed the programs and did all the stuff I was instructed to do. I mean, hey, I hung in there and did not take shortcuts ... I even called for help. That was Wednesday afternoon.

I thought that I was doing pretty good on the technical thing, but the e-mail program didn't work. I did not have the patience to stay on the phone for ten minutes Thursday night with Verizon Wireless technical support, let alone the 5 hours Stacey worked through the problems with five different people at Verizon Wireless Technical Support. She was done at ("We never stop working for you.") about 12:30 Friday morning ... I did buy her something Friday morning, by the way.

And I ran the sync program that I always ran. And in the morning, I checked my schedule on my Pocket PC and every appointment I had on there for every day was fucking gone. But this is the new Billy-boy ... I did not get upset. I figured something weird happened, and I'd sync up and restore all the data on my calendar from my laptop. Modern technology ... isn't it wonderful? After court and after my excursion through the jewelers' place, I sat down at the laptop and clicked on the calendar in Outlook and found that I didn't have any appointments ever again, no deadlines, no end-of-the-month tasks set up by my organizational guru, nothing. And my billing stuff -- gone into a black hole. Thank you very much, Verizon Wireless we-never-stop-working-for-you and Physics.

Friday night, while Stacey was getting more vociferous with the Verizon Wireless techiesnumbskulls phone answering people, I decided to call Samsung, since I had talked to one of the tech support people there earlier, to answer a question. I got hooked up to Heather.

She answered my question, even though I wouldn't answer some of hers and was somewhat rude. And she also pointed out some problems that had cropped up with the wireless sync program with other customers. Stacey was on hold with Verizon Wireless, so I let her talk with Heather, since, I admit this candidly, I'm not as good with computers as I am with electrical repairs and cutting implements, and I waited on hold on the other phone. I eventually was connected to Robert (Bob, probably the same Bob that sits in his basement in his underwear and sends spam comments to blogs all over the world, but he calls himself "Robert" in this application), who thought that he could do no wrong and that Heather didn't know about that which she spoke. And that I was a blithering idiot ... who needed Prozac, Lipitor, casino-gambling, debt-relief, Protactinium, and ... which is not something to say to someone who is just somewhat more stable than Richard Cheney.

Heather, it turns out, wanted Robert's phone number to discuss the deleterious effect that "Wireless Sync" had on Microsoft Outlook and how to undo the result. She called Robert on a three-way conference, Stacey participating, but got some poor dude named John, who represented all that was Robert about Verizon Wireless. Heather pummeled John into submission, turning him into the cowering, whimpering mama's boy, as soon as he answered, so that he lay there with his legs up in the air begging to have his belly scratched and wanting to lend any type of assistance he could, just to keep from being severely traumatized by not one, but two wild women (I thought I heard Stacey say at one point, "Yo, John, make me a sandwich, bitch!). He did. And he finally decided that maybe there might be something to what Heather was saying .... apologizing profusely for all of the problems Verizon software caused from the Dark Ages to the present time ... acting with civility.

Then, together, Heather and Stacey worked through the deleting of programs, re-loading of other programs, and re-configuring to get things in order. While stuff was loading and deleting, during the pauses in the action, so to speak, Stace and Heather talked about work, family, Starbucks, and some personal stuff.

Heather got the e-mail flowing and helped try to recover lost data, much of which I did find on account of her.

Heather at Samsung somewhere down there in Austin, Texas, rocks!

She didn't want flowers, but here they are anyway.

P.S. -- And by the way, Verizon came through, too, with some nice toys, due to some complaining by my IT Department (Stacey), so that now if you send me an e-mail, I can get it anywhere in the world!

Thanks again, Heather!

Posted by Bill at October 25, 2004 11:02 PM