Post #143 -Alive and well despite my suffocation…

No, I was not nor have I ever been in danger of suffocating. T’was a joke, you know. However, the corporate prison I’ve been living in for the last five weeks does make me feel somewhat claustrophobic.

For those who weren’t aware, after a couple part-time gigs doing customer service, I took a job as a fraud specialist for a mega-huge retailer, my first full-time job in nine long years. Unfortunately, due to the monumental credit card debt we accumulated while Nana was living with us has necessitated this drastic change in employment status.

Oh, how I miss the days when I was freelancing full-time, and I could get up at 8 a.m., eat breakfast, exercise, then park before the alter of my laptop and spend the next 5 or 6 hours writing…insert big, BIG sigh.

For the purposes of this blog, I shall refer to said new employer as Jeans, Inc. While I like the job itself, I’ve begun to loathe banks all the more due to the nightmare of trying to disentangle one’s self from various phone trees and speak to a PERSON while trying to confirm someone’s credit card info in order to prove or disprove whether an order is fraudulent.

And, ironically, the most difficult cyber wall/phone maze to crack are often the small banks, the credit unions and the like. You practically have to break your index finger punching nonsensical numbers before the damned things will finally allow you to segue into the wonderful world of being on hold.

I got so frustrated yesterday, I suddenly had the urge to stand up and throw my chair across the room. However, I’d rather not join the ranks of the unemployed because some really stupid people at Wells Fargo kept transferring me to the wrong department.

Meanwhile, the poor customer who lives in Argentina that I was trying to assist was racking up gigantic long-distance charges thanks to the morons who kept kicking my call into yet another mechanized black hole that led to the system where one could verify whether a customer had a checking account or not–so helpful when one is trying to verify a someone’s MASTERCARD, which was an actual MasterCard, not a debit card.

However, funny thing, one of the largest banks I’ve dealt with frequently is Chase Bank, and you’d think given the fact that they’re like the 3rd largest bank in the world that their phone network would be a guarded by some sort of cyber bear who wouldn’t let you speak to a person unless you had an oozy AND did the hokey pokey via Skype… :).

Instead, their electronic telephone menagerie is the most user friendly, believer it or not. If you press # and 0 two or three times, hiss – bang – boom, you’re on hold for a voice that actually has a pulse!

And that’s all I have to say about that..cuz – I must dash. I’m due at work in less than an hour. As a parting gift, I’d like to share the hilarious card that I gave my beloved Charlie (my husband) last week for his birthday…