|
|
|
maddening phone experiences
Wednesday, October 2 2024
Today after work, Gretchen would be driving down to Westchester County and attending a show featuring Michæ Kiwanuka and Brittany Howard and then spending the night at Lynne & Greg's Westchester house. That left me at home all by myself, and you know the trouble I get up to when that happens. I took a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning, which started kicking in around the time someone sent me am email about a job that looked perfect for me (involved ESRI and PHP). So I replied with my resume, and soon had a call from someone in a recuitment call center in India. His English was so terrible that I had no idea what he was asking me when he said something about my LinkedIn profile. I kept asking him to repeat the question, but I never could tell what the fuck he saying. He ended up just hanging up on me. (You can always tell the seriousness of recruiter interest by the level of English skills assigned to communicate with you. But if I can't understand these first screeners, how will I ever get to the ones whose English I can comprehend?)
A similarly-maddening situation happened regarding my application for unemployment benefits. Gretchen had said that perhaps after a year of joblessness, I might be eligible for benefits again. I hadn't thought this was the case, but figured it was worth applying again to see. So yesterday I went through the form and re-applied for benefits. Nothing in the forms suggested that my application was folly, so I thought there was a chance that my benefits would resume. But then today I got an email saying that I needed to call the NY Unemployment office due to something about my form. So I made the call and the automated system said that "due to high call volume" (do these lines ever not have high call volume?) there was nobody to take my call and that I should call back later. And then it hung up. Huh? It couldn't even put me in queue? So I called back again and got the same message. I did a Google search and found that this problem is very common with state unemployment hotlines, and that all one can do is just keep calling and calling. It seemed absurd, but if I could get my benefits flowing again, it would definitely be worth it. So I called and called and called until at some point the message was a little different, saying that for training purposes I might be recorded. And then I was put in a queue, evidently one that I should feel lucky to have made it to. I was told that my wait would be about 39 minutes. It ended up being something like that. It turned out that the whole problem was just that somehow my name had gotten entered as "Gus" at some point, probably by Chrome's auto-fill. Once that was fixed, my form could be submitted. The woman I talked to didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with applying for benefits, though I don't know if it was clear to her that this was the second time I was doing it for the same period of not having a job.
I took the dogs for another walk up the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, and they both came. But they were a little slow in getting back, something they needed to do before my plan to drive with them into town just so I could do some shopping errands. (As I've mentioned, I like to go shopping in brick & mortar stores while on pseudoephedrine.) In this case, Neville was the slow poke, and the moment he got back, I loaded the dogs into the Forester and drove into town. I went to Home Depot and finally got that third bottom attachment bracket for a six-by-six pole I'd tried to get last weekend. I also bought a roll of chicken wire for possible use in a dog urine detector I might need to build if we can't get Charlotte to stop pissing on our carpets. I also stopped at the Hannaford out on 9W to get a few provisions: tofu, tempeh, organge juice, Chobani oat milk, and diphenhydramine (initially I was confused, because the generic store brand is now in different packaging).
Back at the house, I eventually dove into a problem specific to the Local Remote. I saw that in some cases, when the list of device_features on its LCD display had been scrolled down and then up, changes made to one device_feature ended up affecting a different one. I eventually found the source of the bug, and hopefully now that menuing system is bug-free. That would be nice, since it has a lot of potential applications, sine it can act like a scrollable labled list of checkboxes that produce real-world consequences.
After I'd drank a fair amount of booze, I just wanted to passively consume content, so I lay in the beanbag and rewatched the low-budget time travel masterpiece from 2004 entitled Primer.
A downy woodpecker along the Stick Trail this afternoon.
Click to enlarge.
The stone wall just south of where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile this afternoon.
Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?241002 feedback
previous | next |
