Finally...a worthy opponent (and 700 lbs of paper)

The last few days have been a little crazy both at work and in my personal life. First of all, the company that I work for has a division that is opening a new venue here in Boston. Because the venue isn't built yet we're housing some of their employees in our office and taking deliveries for them. Unfortunately, even though I am the Office Manager, no one bothers to tell me anything. Yesterday I had 705 lbs of stationary delivered for them with a COD order and had no idea what to do with it (and no check to pay the COD bill). Luckily I was able to figure something out and found a place to stash 700+ of letter head and envelopes but it wasn't easy. Today they sprung 4 employees on me looking for desks, computers, and phones but hey....all in a day's work, right?

In addition to that I was trying to book our trip out to Needles, CA to see Mom and Dad in February. Mom and Dad have c0-rented a house in Needles with Mom's brother and sister-in-law for three months. Art and Karen have the first 6 weeks and Mom and Dad have the second 6 weeks. They're practicing being "snowbirds". Our original plan was to go out and visit them during Hannah's February break. I had (or so I thought) two free tickets on JetBlue which meant we'd only need to buy two tickets to get the four of us out there. On JetBlue you need 100 points for a free ticket. I already had one free ticket and then I had 97 points towards another one. It appears that my points post on the 13th of every month so I was waiting until Tuesday to book our trip. I could have purchased the additional 3 points for $70 and would have been happy with that since it's still a cheap ticket but since it was almost the 13th I decided to wait. All day on Tuesday I kept checking my account to see if they had posted. By the 14th they still hadn't posted so I called AmEx and was told I had points in my account and they'd be released but I had to call back in an hour because their system was down. I called back an hour later and he said I had points in the system and he would release them immediately. He said they usually take 24-48 hours to post to my account but he would expedite them and they'd post that day. By afternoon there still wasn't anything in my account so I decided to call AmEx back and see what was happening. At that point the lady told me that in fact there weren't any points in my account but that I had credits in my account that would eventually lead to more points. Basically the two people I had spoken to in the morning were either dumb as rocks or completely full of shit. Well at that point I lost it. I had already waited an additional week to book my ticket (and the price of the tickets we were paying for had gone up by about $40 each) and I had wasted 48 hours updating my computer screen every hour on the 13th and 14th waiting for the points to be released. I laid into the customer service lady. She was actually kind of a snot so I didn't feel too bad about it. At one point when I was ranting about something and she kept trying to interrupt me so I finally said "No, no. I am the customer and therefore I get to be the one that talks." I finally asked to speak to her supervisor. I went a couple of rounds with her before she finally said "Ma'am, how many points do you need for your free ticket?" I told her I only needed three and she put me on hold. When she came back she said "Mrs. Snow, I've put four points in your account. The extra one is just to make sure you don't have any more trouble. You're all set. Have a nice day." Like I said in a previous post, I've been spoiling for a fight and I have to say she was a worthy opponent. It was a victory well earned.

Of course then I went in to book the flights and there was no award travel available for the dates that we wanted to fly out there. At that point we decided to scrap the dates around Hannah's February vacation and look at going either later in the month or in March. Mom had told me that Deb and Mark were coming out over Deb's birthday on March 1st but I also knew that their house in Needles wouldn't hold all of us. I called Debbie and asked her when her exact dates were so that we wouldn't be there at the same time and she actually suggested that we DO come at the same time and they would be willing to get a hotel room in Needles. Of course that required working out all the details and making sure everyone was on board before booking the tickets. That involved a three-way conference call between Debbie, myself, and Mom (who was the airport in Las Vegas flying back from being down at the house in Needles) and an IM conversation between Dad and me while I was on the phone with Debbie and Mom. Add in Debbie calling Mark on her cell phone while talking to me and Mom and me texting Lincoln to make sure he was game with changing the plans and it was an exhausting round of technology abuse. In the end we worked out all the details and I booked our flight out there. As exhausting as all that was I really need a vacation now.

Add in my PTO meeting last night and you can see why I've been so busy the past two days. Thank God I have a three day weekend coming up!