A year and a few months ago, we discover we have to get a new system to process credit cards. Great! The old system sucked beyond belief.
So, I get the information for the new system. Learn the API, program our site with the test credentials, get everything good to go…. HALT! Some kind of drama between the fiscal office and this new company holds us up for 6 months.
Fast forward to around August. They’re ready to get moving again, they just need us to run a security scan on our web server and that is it. We’ll be ready to go after that!
Fast forward to January. They finally tell us we’re certified. They just have to get us a production user name and password.
Fast forward to today. They send us our user name and instruct us to call customer service to get a temporary password since it’s not secure to send a password via email. Okay. Call customer service, wait on hold for what seems like an eternity. Get temporary password. Try to log in so I can set our actual password. What happens?
If you expected me to say it worked great and we’re finally set on this new system, you’d be wrong. Instead I get this message:
“Your account is inactive. Please call your reseller to activate it.”
WOW. Amazing. So now I’m waiting for our person to do that / hear back. Do you think they’ll get it fixed today? Or perhaps sometime this spring? 2010? Before I die of old age?
Turns out they got back within an hour. Saying, oh oops, it’s fixed now, but if you have more problems call tech support again. Guess what? Didn’t work, had to call tech support again.
This guy was a piece of work. The first thing they ask for is your merchant account number, which I have from them directly in an email. Well, they actually gave us our account number wrong in the email. They left out the first two numbers. Seriously.
Anyway, this guy takes some time to figure out that it’s not our user name that was inactive like he thought, it was actually our entire merchant account. Brilliant! He couldn’t find any reason for it to be inactive though, so he just turned it back on, gave me a new temporary password, and what do you know, it finally worked.
While I was on the phone with him, I figured it would be a good time to go ahead and confirm this production URL they sent us for the web service we use to connect to their system. They sent us this in an email, with this phone number I was on the phone with at that time listed as who to call if we had questions/problems. Well this guy had absolutely no idea what I was talking about with the web service. I read the URL to him. NOTHING. Not a damn clue. I said “API” to him, and he thought I was talking about another company.
UNBELIEVABLE.
So who knows if this will work. I’m extremely skeptical.
So Andy and I are planning on buying a house in the next few months, hoping to take advantage of that nice $8000 tax credit. All we’ve done so far is look around at various open houses around town and browse the internet…and think about our finances.
We’re planning to meet with someone to talk about mortgages and all that fantastically scary stuff soon. I’m so utterly clueless. And of course, we want to put as much money down on a house as possible, but to me this is the frightening part. We can’t deplete our disposable savings because we’ll still need a lot for other expenses–washer/dryer, possibly fridge if we buy a new house, and god knows what else (like I said, clueless).
I have excellent credit, and Andy at least has very good credit, though he hasn’t checked his score in a while. Combine that with our incomes and we could afford more than we need as far as monthly payments go—the limiting factor in the whole thing being the down payment. We have a decent amount we could put down, but I don’t know if we could come up with 20% of the house cost. Parents may be able to help and maybe there’s other options available I don’t know about, but the whole thing makes me antsy and I want to just get it figured out already.
I’m also ready to look at more than just open houses–i.e., I’m ready for a realtor to show us some stuff. Since we’ve only been browsing around by ourselves, we’ve only looked at new homes. Which is entirely too much fun. I like new stuff. I have a feeling it might be hard to convince Andy or I to get a used home at this point. Then again, we’re pretty clueless right now still.
I’ve spent entirely too much time browsing listings online, and I seriously question the decorative choices of the people who live around me. Fuchsia paint? Insane wall paper? Taking pictures of your amazingly ugly furniture instead of the house…UGH. I even saw one house where the pictures showed trash and empty hangers all over the place. Too distracting for looking at pictures. So to even consider these houses, I’d need to see them in person.
Also, the idea of painting and dealing with wallpaper (unacceptable that I would live with any wallpaper!) does not thrill me. But then again as my dad pointed out, you can often get a better price on the home by willing to look past other people’s hideous choices and paint yourself.
If we do end up going with a new home, we could have it built. Maybe. I’m not sure how the timing would work out with that and the tax credit. I think Andy is more for this than I am at this point. But we’ll see.
I will say this about the experience so far: I am the more practical/cautious one of our relationship. 
Blarf!
It’s almost Monday again. Damn it all.
With jury duty and MLK day last week, I barely had to work at all. It was pretty fucking sweet. I go through this every year after Christmas break: I cannot get back on the ball for the life of me. It stays this way definitely through spring, partially recovering in the summer and fall. Sometimes I think I never get over the burnout, and just get suckier at being an adult the more time passes.
Anyway, jury duty? I highly recommend it. Why are people so negative about getting out of work and sitting around doing nothing for a few days? I got to read–a LOT. It was awesome! I hope I get picked next time, so long as it isn’t a murder trial or something scary like that. Haha. Of course, now that I know I like it, I’ll probably never be called again. Can I volunteer?
I’ve been a big pile of poop about eating and doing well at boot camp the past two weeks. Partly monthly hormones making me insane as usual, and also part burnout from EXTREME boot camp the first week in January, I think. I don’t know, but I really need to stop eating like shit. Why will I never have control over this? They say anorexia is about control: the person feels she can’t control anything in her life, so she controls food/her body.
I’m the exact opposite. My entire life is well controlled–particularly diabetes. Diabetes makes my world revolve around constant complete and utter control. Therefore my ability to control my hunger (or false sense there of) goes down the toilet. And it’s interesting really, because control of my diabetes revolves around carbs–which is the food I love most. So even when I’m going out of control with binging on food, I’m still in this sick twisted sense of control because of diabetes and my unwillingness to let that go to hell. It’s so absurd and mental, and I’m completely self-aware of it and still can’t make myself stop.
Kind of like picking out my eyebrows, my other lack of control issue. Same situation really. I think I have some kind of warped OCD tendencies.
If I could ever fix those two problems with myself, I feel like my life would be completely settled. Like the end of a novel. How ridiculous does that sound? And I’ve felt like that with food since I hit puberty.
Who’s crazy? ME.
Hmmm mmmm mmmm.
So I sat through a jury selection process this afternoon, and guess what? I got selected.
Hahaha. I’m not surprised at all. But, I don’t really mind either. It seems like it might be interesting. For a few minutes anyway. We’ll see how long it takes me before I get over my initial amusement.
At least I get out of work for a few more days.
That’s about all there is to say about that.
So we’ve been watching Weeds on DVD lately; currently in the middle of season 2. This was the greatest thing ever by the way. How many times did he have to practice that?
The premise of this show interested me from the beginning because the Botwins experienced something very similar to what I went through growing up… except my mother didn’t take up selling pot to keep our lives from being uprooted. Like the Botwins, my dad died suddenly from a heart attack when I was 12, right in front of my brother (then 8 years old) and I. And similarly, my mom didn’t have a job, or a college degree. Of course, we didn’t live in a community anything like Agrestic, nor did we have some crazy uncle move in with us. It sure has made me think more about how in the world my mom did manage to keep everything together though.
Anyway, I can’t get Little Boxes out my head for the life of me. We watched about a million episodes so far this weekend, so I’m pretty sure it’s stuck there for an eternity at least. It amuses me how they’ve started having a different artist perform the song every episode. It doesn’t matter how many other versions I hear, the original with Malvina’s lovely voice, is what is engraved in my brain.
Ugh.
