09-09-03 @ 9:47 am EDT

This was written offline so I would not spend an hour typing it up online when I want to be doing other things.

Yes, I've still been wanting to write in Skew. And this stupid phobia is still keeping me away from it. What is this, my second entry all month, and already it's the 9th? :/ It's weird that it was a September that held the most entries in Skew (2001), and now it might be a September that holds the fewest, also.

And I hate this; I always have nice topics to write about, yet when I sit down to write them they're all gone! *sigh*

I had one thing I was going to mention, but I'm afraid of jinxing it so I won't talk about it.

We MAY go to Tahquamenon Falls sometime soon. When I complained to Dad a while back about Ma's car falling apart and me having wanted to go to the Hiawatha National Forest, he said he would take us to Tahquamenon Falls. (Say that ten times fast. Come on. Tahquamenon Tahquamenon Tahquamenon Tahquamenon...!) That was one thing I've wanted to see, so I suppose it can do. I don't think I'll ever get to see the Hiawatha National Forest. :( It's just so big and scattered; when I looked at park information at Yahoo! I got the feeling it's not so much a big forested area as just forested spots you happen upon and visit if you wish. The trails are all in different locations and I would not know which one I would want to go down, as I don't know what parts of the forest I would want to see. I came across information about "hemlock cathedrals," which sound pretty, but most of the good stuff seems to be a bit out of our range, near Manistique. And the trails pointed out at Yahoo! were pretty much two miles (a bit too short) or forty miles (rather too long!!). One was about 7.5, about the length of the shorewalk on Mackinac Island (a place I suppose I'm not visiting this year), and thus tolerable, but like I said I have no clue where in the UP all these trails are and it sounds hard to get to them anyway. Not like we could be driving all over the place. I would still like to visit Pictured Rocks though. Ma groused that it would take ALL DAY to get there: "You'd have to spend the night there! You'd never have a chance to SEE anything!" But I plugged the distances in at Yahoo! from here to Paradise (closest city to Tahquamenon Falls State Park) and to Munising (closest city to Pictured Rocks); the former drive is about 2.5 hours, and the latter is about 3.5. Not ALL DAY! Only about an hour longer! This doesn't figure in rest stops but it still doesn't take all day, if one leaves early enough and doesn't mind driving at night...

I don't see how we could do both on the same day though, and I really don't think Dad would take us to both this year, so maybe I can see Pictured Rocks next year. I would also like to visit the UAW where my dad works...hm...did I mention this at all in my last entry? I'm getting deja vu but I can't tell if I talked about it here or in TUOJOT. Oh well. The UAW center is a gorgeous place that I haven't visited in absolutely years. I loved going there when I was little. It's full of trails and picturesque spots...there's a Japanese bridge, an Eternal Flame, some springs, lots of windowed hallways, a room with a huge cool fireplace going up to the ceiling, and this AWESOME room called the Hub. (If any of you managed to read the unfinished text of True Believers when it was once posted here, yes, that Hub was based on the UAW Hub.) It's this little round room with stone walls and a padded bench going around it...and there's this big metal ring around the top, with the signs of the zodiac and glass ball planets which light up when you flick a switch...really cool. It reminds me of the home of Aughra the prophetess in The Dark Crystal, except the planets don't move. And aren't as cool. But still. I've never taken pictures of the place, and Dad says they started to put in new nature trails (they had to put those on hold though), so I really would like to see that too. It would be nice to go in fall when the leaves are changing, but that's only a narrow window of opportunity because first they change, then bam, they're gone. I hate it. So much for "color tours." >:/

If the weather completely craps out in the next week or so though, I doubt I will see Tahquamenon this year. Which is highly possible.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm. What else to talk about...

I saw some cute footage on TV the other day. Some video shot in Britain, I think. They must have set up cameras in different parts of the house to capture it as it happened repeatedly. What it was was this FOX would come wandering into these people's home at night! It would just stroll into the kitchen looking for food, and walk all over the house like it owned the place! And it would always go up to their son's room and check him out as he slept! They showed footage of it jumping up on his bed and sticking its face right in his to look at him. Incredible! The son said, "I'd feel something in the bed with me, but by the time I'd open my eyes there would be nothing there because it always jumped down then." I thought for sure that fox was going to curl up and lie down right beside him! So cute! ^_^

Foxes are cool. They're like half dog, half cat! They have such cute little faces.

Speaking of foxes, the other day I tied together another loose end in Kristeva's story which has been bugging me. He has two tattoos, see. He hates being touched, so I knew that when he got these tattoos they must have held some sort of great importance for him to sit through that (even though he wasn't consciously aware of why he was getting them). One, a mandala on his right shoulderblade, has already been explained (at least in my head); when he was eleven he was nearly drowned (in what he and I used to think was a bathtub, but which turns out to have been a watering trough), but an undercover cop who had infiltrated the cult which was abusing him saved him at the last minute; one of the first things Kristeva saw as he was being pulled out of the water was the mandala necklace dangling from the detective's neck. To him (even though he didn't really know it) it became rather a symbol of his own salvation and survival, thus he was compelled to keep it nearby.

Later on he learned this person was a police detective only when his cover was blown by the other cultists and he (the cop) was murdered right in front of him (Kristeva). This helped silence him but it was also probably the catalyst that made him decide to become a police detective himself later on--not only to spite his father (who wanted him to become a doctor, like himself), but to also sort of take the place of the one who saved him and continue what he'd been doing.

I thought I'd given this cop a name a while back but I forgot it...typical me. >_< So I went looking for names in the phone book. I gave him ANOTHER name which again I can't remember!! I'm sure I have it written down somewhere, but that's not the point...the point was that Kristeva had a SECOND tattoo, on his left forearm...one of a little fox's head. I gave him this back when I was thinking about totem/spirit animals a lot and foxes and coyotes are both "survivor" animals, clever and somewhat shady, like Kristeva himself. Back then, that was the only reason I gave him that tattoo. But thinking about how he hates being touched and would not have even gotten the things unless there was something driving him to do so, I figured there had to be another symbolism behind it. I just didn't know what.

The meaning of it popped into my head the other day when I imagined a conversation between him and a young woman who was a relative of the undercover cop who had "gone missing" (the one who had been murdered; his skeleton had shown up buried under a washed-out road years later, and only recently was identified as the same cop who had saved Kristeva...are any of you by any chance confused yet? ^_^ ). During the conversation there's an exchange that goes somewhat like this:

Woman: "We were always bugging Uncle Fox to tell us police stories..."

Kristeva: "What...? What was that you called him?"

Woman: "Oh...it's kind of silly. His middle name was _____ (name starting with F, to be determined later)...my little brother couldn't pronounce it so he'd just say 'Fox'...so we all started calling him that and it sort of stuck after a while. I forgot about that, until now."

So you see there it was again, why he got the fox head tattoo...for the same reason he got the mandala, a symbol of the person who saved him and of his own determination to carry on in place of him...

I know, I've bored all of you to death with all that blather, so I'll back off of it for now...*sigh* Dunno why I felt like bringing it up anyway. :/

Crapola, what else did I have? I can always think of tons of things when I'm not here, but never when I am...

OH. NMO. NMO, the crapheads! Let me give you a rundown of what has happened since my LAST bitch about them. (See "Maybe I Can Talk Now (Big-A** Violet Entry)" or some such for the details...but beware, it's a longie.)

WELL...remember I got worried when we had to create a second user account to keep accessing NMO after 200 monthly hours were up. I was certain we would start being billed double, which we can't afford. We got the invoice, however, and it was one regular bill. The second account appeared to be exactly what it had been presented to us as: a way around the new software's monthly limit of 200 hours (NMO promised "unlimited hours" when we signed up).

Well, not long ago, it appears NMO somehow went under and was "acquired" by "North Net Michigan." Same URL, even some of the same people working for them, but a different name and billing address. The guy who sent the e-mail informing us of this (the same guy, BTW, who had sent the e-mail I bitched about before, describing the dialup number-changing procedure) seemed to really make a point of stressing how CRAPPY NMO had been--"We will meet your needs in a way that NMO was never able to. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!" (Okay, I added the evil laugh...but you get the picture.) I was not very surprised, but not very hopeful, either. I've heard THAT line before. Customer satisfaction just does not seem to be a very high priority anymore...remind me to tell you of yesterday's power outage in a moment.

Anyway, so NMO was now really North Net Michigan. Big whoop. The e-mail stressed the point that "NOTHING will change aside from billing and snail-mail address, and our level of commitment to you," bla bla bla. So okay, who gives a damn. NMO, NNM, it's all the same to me.

That was fine and dandy until a few days ago when...we got TWO BILLS!!

>:(((((

I got SO f**king mad...I just KNEW they'd pull this stunt. Ma told me I'd best "gather up my passwords" in case we had to switch providers, though she was a little mistaken; what she meant was, try to figure out which sites I signed up at with our old NMO e-mail addresses in case we had to change. Hell, I can't even remember half of them by now! It was the Yahoo! ones that had me most concerned though since Yahoo! makes it virtually impossible to do things like change your password...you have to remember the SECRET QUESTION you signed up with, and that was so long ago and I have more than one account, so how will I know! Why don't they just e-mail you the frigging thing, already? Stupid Yahoo! Anyway, Ma agreed to visit NM...um...whatever, and clear it up on Saturday.

Of course, we both forgot their address had changed. She came home to let me know the old NMO building had been locked up. She'd gone to the new address, but nobody had been in; it was closed. Nice! So we had to wait until Monday.

I wrote up a sheet outlining our experience and why I felt, if we were going to be billed double, we should rip NNM's representatives a new one because that would mean we had been SO screwed over from the start. To sum it up, it went like this:

In June, we went through the procedure to change our dialup number. (Some crap ensued, but I left that part out for the sake of conciseness.)

One morning when I tried to log on, it told me the password was incorrect when in fact it was not. I called NMO and was informed by "Caleb" (someone who is now an employee of NNM) that it was "an issue with the username"--"Just add a 1 to it for now, and it should be fine." Understanding this to be a temporary fix (as indicated by the "for now"), I did so, and could log on. This in fact created a second account. We were NOT informed we would be billed extra for a new account--it was presented as a way to log on due to username problems with our old account. What this problem was, exactly, was not explained at the time; I thought it was just us.

A while later we got the e-mail which made me freak out, informing us we were "power users"--people who are online more than 200 hours a month, since the "national average" is something like 30 hours (yah RIGHT!--who'd they survey to get those results??). It turned out that the new software they'd installed when changing the dialup number and "improving services" had a monthly limit of 200 hours, and we had gone over that. Again, it said to just create the new account with a "1" on the end. Again, we were NOT informed we would be billed for two accounts; it was still presented as a way to get around the new software's 200-hour limitation. NMO was still offering pretty much unlimited hours. I wasn't certain of this at the time though, and anxiously awaited the next bill to see if it was so.

Not long after we got the monthly invoice, which was for one account only. I settled down.

In late August, we got the e-mail informing us of NNM's acquisition of NMO (in reality I think it just changed its frigging name!). The e-mail said that "NOTHING" would change except billing and mailing addresses. Meaning, still no limitation on monthly hours.

In early September, we got an invoice charging us for TWO separate accounts--twice as much as we regularly pay. I hit the roof. F**KERS!

I then wrote up the summary and told Ma to take it to them and bitch them out if they tried to sell us this line about the two accounts. In the meantime hoping it was just a billing messup and someone had assumed that our second account, which is just an extension of the first, was actually a secondary account in use on another computer, by another user. We have just this one Net-capable computer, with two users who share the same account. We even have the same damn inbox, for God's sake. We just happen to be online a lot!

Ma came back last night and said she was told to "just ignore it"--they're still sorting things out and apparently it was a mistake. Well, it had BETTER be. Because I am keeping these e-mails where they said there would be NO billing changes, Caleb himself never mentioned extra charges, yadda yadda yadda, apparently it was just as I had hoped it would be but one little part of me is still steaming and thinking they were trying to screw us over and hoping we would not notice. For their sake this had better not happen again. Improved service, my ASS!

Okay. *steam* Now on to the power outage before I burst a vein. Yesterday I had gone online around ten to look at a few things and planned on proofing Part 11 of the Chronicles, which I just finished...16,000 words. CRAAAAP. *sigh* Wouldn't you know it though, but...the power browned out. Just the tiniest bit of light from the lamp, and a tiny red dot on the clock, but nothing else. The battery backup began beeping at me so I had to log off and shut down the computer. I was SO FRIGGING PISSED OFF! If this is how upset I got over this outage, then I'm very glad we weren't knocked out back in August else I probably would have had a heart attack. I was maddest because I had just planned on proofreading my story and now I couldn't!

I waited a moment to see if it would come back on. Nope. Turned off the lamp so it wouldn't fritz and went outside. Clear as anything. Bright and sunny and cool. No rain, no fallen branches, no workers in the area, nothing. No downed lines. No notices on the door. Pissed, I went back inside. Called Ma to ask her if a bill was due--probably is, but there was no notice. Told her I was going to call Consumers. Did so and got their automated phone system. Can you BELIEVE it? This is a summary of what I heard first--only a summary, as it went on MUCH longer than this:

"You have reached Consumers Energy. If you wish to report an emergency, downed lines, or a fire, press one. If you wish to report a power outage in your household, press two. If you wish to check the status of a power outage you have already reported, press three." *presses two* "Our phone lines are extremely busy at the moment." *oh really* "If you would prefer not to use the telephone, you may fax us, or you may contact us at our website. Go to www.blablabla.com and click on Blablabla to report a power outage; click on Blablablabla to receive a report of any known power outages in your area. Yadda yadda yadda, bla bla bla bla..." *gee it would be so nice to go online and report a power outage if THE FRIGGING POWER WAS ON!!* "...bla bla bla bla bla. If the power in your house is COMPLETELY OFF..." *yah, rather looks that way* "...press one. If you wish to check the status of an outage you have already reported, press two." *presses one* "Our records indicate that you are COMPLETELY WITHOUT POWER." *oh really?* "Your circuit breakers are turned ON." *hell lady, I do not know what that even means* "It may require a $59 service fee for us if we must reset your power." *what the HELL??* *hangs up the phone in confusion*

FIFTY-NINE-DOLLAR FEE?? What the hell FOR? Like I was messing around with some wires and fritzed it out MYSELF?? I was just diddling on the computer one morning and bam, there goes the power! (It had progressed from a brownout to a blackout sometime while I was checking around outside.) I was SO mad by now, and upset, too. What to do? Call them back and say yes, come out and fix it, and probably have to pay some stupid-ass fee for something that wasn't our fault? (Remember the BRANCH incident? We called to report a branch that was dangling precariously over some powerlines--and Consumers said it "wasn't their problem" until it fell! (Like we have a frigging cherrypicker in our yard to pull down stray branches when we feel like it??) Well guess what, it DID fall--yanked the lines right out of our house, fritzed out one of our printers, knocked out half the electricity, filled the house with smoke, and everything!--yah, it was "their problem" THEN!--and no, we were never reimbursed for ANY damages!) What if I didn't have $59? (Turns out I think I have $90 in my room, but I didn't know that at the time.) What if they didn't take cash? What if, what if? What if I paid the fee myself and then Ma or Dad threw a fit because I'd done so? That money is for use for the next phone bill and for my upgrade, if possible. Stupid f**king power company!

Well, I called Ma again to ask what to do. She said she was busy with a customer but would call them and try to settle it. I hung up and went to work on my puzzle, which the cat generously BROKE twice while jumping on my bed. A half hour passed. Nothing. I was crying and INCREDIBLY pissed by now. Call Ma again. Anything? Turns out SHE HADN'T EVEN CALLED THEM YET! "I'm really busy!"

"Well Ma, I'm sitting here at home in the dark, the ice cream is probably melting in the freezer, and I'd REALLY like the power back on!" For the love of God, all I had wanted to do was proofread my damn story which you will never even know about since it's X rated...*cries*

I again outlined what they'd told me about the circuit breaker and the fee and whatever--it was all Greek to me, if you asked me to find our circuit breaker and turn it off all I would be able to do is stare at you in confusion--all I can do is boil water. This time she said she'd "come out and look at it myself." I didn't know what THAT meant, but I told her this time to call me if she got results, and hung up. Went to wait again.

Phone rings. I run to pick it up! "Hello?"

A woman's voice answers, "Hello?"

Pause. "Hello?" She didn't hear me.

"Yeah?" I say.

Pause. "Hello, I'm calling for the Yadda Yadda Phone Company, and I'd like to know if you're interested in..."

*Note to any telemarketers who may be reading this: This woman was EXTREMELY lucky I was so beyond pissed by now that I didn't have the sense of mind to rip her a new one. I realize you are just doing your jobs, but I swear to God some of you have the FRIGGING WORST timing.*

I don't know if she heard the gusty sigh of INCREDIBLE pissed-offedness I let out, but she certainly heard the phone slam back into the cradle. I didn't even punch the pound button to piss her off (I dunno, I heard that messes up automated calls, but it never seems to stop the automated credit card guy from calling), or yell that I wasn't interested. I just hung up and went back to my room to wait. While trying to work on my puzzle I had a very interesting mental conversation with the faceless telemarketer...a whole scenario about how it would have gone if, instead of hanging up on her, I'd burst into tears and asked her why I was even alive, pretended I was suicidal, and let her know that we were WITHOUT POWER and I was WAITING FOR A CALL. Would she have hung up on me, thoroughly freaked out? Would she have kept me on the line and tried to calm me down? Would she have silently dialed 911 and called out some people in white coats to get me...? Would I have gone with them? Would I have gotten to meet my old psychiatrist again? Would I have gotten free therapy? Who knows, it didn't even happen. I was so mad. I couldn't even work on my puzzle anymore.

Then, bam, there the lights were again.

I pondered what to do. Call Ma AGAIN and let her know they were back? I could tell she too was very peeved by now, but I hated the thought of her coming out to the house or bitching at Consumers, only to have them tell her we were now COMPLETELY WITH POWER. So I dawdled. I checked outside just to make sure there were no notices. I turned on the VCR, temporarily freaked out when I discovered it had been completely deprogrammed, somehow accidentally reprogrammed it, then reset my two erased timed recordings. I dawdled a bit more, waiting to see if the power would go out again. It didn't. So I reluctantly called Ma.

"It came back on. I don't know what's going on."

"I'm really busy right now!!" (Yes, by now about an hour had passed and she STILL had not called them.)

"I KNOW, I just didn't want you to call them only to find out it's on again!"

"They must have just been messing with it somewhere."

"I'm sorry I bothered you so much! I would have taken care of it on my own if it hadn't been for that dumb fee thing!"

"I know."

"I just wanted to make sure it wouldn't go out again...I'm sorry I bothered you so much. Bye."

*big sigh* "Bye."

*hangs up* I was SO convinced that the power would go out again right at that moment...just to make me look stupid. A moment later the phone rang again and I picked it up.

"Hello?"

"I LOVE YOU!"

-_- "I know...I'm really sorry I kept bothering you, and I really wanted to take care of it on my own, I just didn't know what to do about that fee...!"

"Well the next time, say yes!"

...There was a bit more I forgot, but at least neither one of us was so pissed off anymore. I hung up and immediately burst into tears. I WAS still pissed off with MYSELF, though. RRRGGGGGHHHH I hate how whenever there's an "emergency" I have no idea what to do! The last time the toilet backed up, and I had to call Ma to solve THAT, too. A TOILET overflow! I freaked out like the house was on fire! (Though the toilet overflowing when I have no one to help me is an actual nightmare of mine, honest.) I hated how I had to keep bugging HER to take care of it...why can't I ever fix something on my own? I WAS fully willing to pay the stupid $59 if need be, if only I had been CERTAIN I had the money, and if I'd known Ma and Dad wouldn't get angry, and if I'd known they took cash...even if I felt it would have been a ripoff. I just hadn't been sure, so I hadn't been able to decide. I just...FROZE. Like I do whenever I panic. I hate that. I get completely useless in a crisis, no matter how trivial it is! I have to have somebody to tell me exactly what to do every step of the way, or nothing gets done.

That, you see, is the reason why I have done nothing with my life. Nobody is patient enough to sit and hold my hand through every single step of something! Go watch an episode of Monk and multiply that a few times and you should see what I mean. I piss off even MYSELF. The thing is I have no Sharona to see me along. I just realized this is another good reason for me to never have a baby, because heaven forbid I should go into labor when on my own; I'd probably press my legs together and hope for it to stay in until somebody would come to rescue me. ALL I CAN DO IS BOIL WATER! >_<

When this was all over, the Little Guy promptly appeared and bit me on the leg. Oh...he always knows when I'm upset. Sweet Little Guy.

There were three things out of that which just pissed me off beyond end.

1. The fact that I felt Consumers KNEW we were "COMPLETELY WITHOUT POWER," as they announced (they gave our address over the phone so they must have traced our call), yet didn't seem to be willing to do anything about it unless somebody launched a complaint! I guess I was wrong, as SOMEBODY fixed the power, but it still really irritated me to think they knew this and were twiddling their thumbs until somebody bothered to call them and point it out...the last time we had a big outage, it was doing nothing but lightly RAINING, and it took them THREE HOURS to fix it! If it went out during a storm, yeah, I'd expect that, but...when it's lightly raining?--and when the SUN is shining?? WTF??

2. The fact that they tried to shuttle me to their WEBSITE--report your power outage on our WEBSITE! HELLO, IDIOTS! Would I be CALLING you if I could access your stupid WEBSITE??

and 3. The whole $59 fee thing "if we have to reset your power"! I understand completely if it had been my fault that the power had gone out. But it wasn't. I don't even know what happened. Meaning, not my fault, hence, not my fee to pay. Stupid companies always trying to rip off their customers! We are still owed a printer, IMO, because they refused to take care of that branch before it became a real problem. What would have taken a few minutes to come out and cut down for free instead took several HOURS, and who knows how much money, to carry off and replace the torn and shorted-out lines. Haven't they ever heard of preventative measures? Dumbasses!


*huff pant huff* Wow...didn't know I still had so much rage in me. O_o I know I had more I could talk about but all the above really has me tired and instead of spending an hour ONLINE typing this up, I've spent over an hour OFFLINE...and I do not wish to proofread it by now. So enjoy the bitchiness (which only in retrospect I realize should have been violet in color, sorry) and tar until the next time...

(Oh my Gawd I did a spellcheck and this thing is like 5000 words long...*cries* No wonder people hate my journal.)