We have spent a LOT of time on hold in the last few weeks. Like enough minutes to add up to a week in Mexico. *Sigh* We’ve been waiting to talk to banks and government offices and the DMV and an airline rewards booking system and school boards and doctor’s offices and more.  After compiling many hours of data (read: wasting hours of my life with a phone glued to my ear) I have started to identify certain annoying features common to most electronic holding pens that, if remedied, could dramatically improve the waiting experience of the customer.

Let me ‘esplain:

1. The Menu System - Let’s not kid ourselves…all customers are getting herded into the same queue. Pretending otherwise just irritates your customers. Start off the call with a short message like “Hello customer! We all know you’re going to wait a long time so let’s cut the bullshit and get you straight into line so you can get off the phone as soon as possible! You’re welcome!”.  The customer will thank you. Trust me.

2. Honesty is the Best Policy - If you are going to estimate a wait time for your callers, please, for the love of everything holy, be conservative in your estimate! Don’t tell me it’s going to be five minutes and then proceed to make me wait thirty minutes. I’m just watching the clock so that I can start getting worked up the first second you exceed your projected wait time. Really? Don’t tell me at all. It’s just depressing. I’d rather not know.

3. Musak - Another area where it’s good to be honest about your wait times is when it comes to selecting music for your caller to listen to when on hold. Nobody likes that crappy Musak or the top ten list of three years ago one time, let alone 57 times in a row. Telling yourself that a ten song loop is enough because NO ONE will EVER wait more than 20 minutes in a row in your queue is more than a little naieve, don’t you think?Why not play news clips? Or short stories in audio format? Or TED Talks? Something that will actually pique my interest, rather than make me want to stab myself in the eardrum. Then at least I might have been genuinely entertained or at least feel slightly more informed on current events when I finally reach an operator and therefore slightly less cranky about my long wait. And if you must make Musak loops PLEASE make them 24 hours long so your callers will (hopefully) not have to hear a repeat while they wait.

4. Recorded Voices - Why do the recorded voices always sound so bored and boring? Why can’t you use men and women with exotic foreign accents to tell me to press 5 to speak to a customer representative? I’d much rather hear a sexy Italian man say “Fodr de Engalish, pdress one! To speaka de Italiano with me, Antonio, pdress de two! We weel make da sweet love alla night!”  More people might choose to spend time with Antonio, rather than trying to sort out social security numbers or set up bank accounts, and you may find you have less calls than you originally thought!

5. Messages while you are waiting - Almost every queue recording has a pre-recorded message which replays every minute or so that goes something like this: “We are currently experiencing higher than normal call volume. Please stay on the line and one of our customer service representatives will be happy to help you as soon as they are available.”  This message is unnecessary and it gets increasingly annoying as time drags on.  The first time it sounds like: “We are just so dog-gone glad that you called! We want to assure you that your business is important to us by letting you know that our people are just standing by to help you!” But after a couple more repeats it comes across more like: “We’d be negligent in our duty if we didn’t let you know that you ARE actually still in the queue and we’d like to condescendingly remind you to stay on the line until we are good and ready to talk to you.” After several hours (yes, we’ve had to wait this long a number of times recently) all I hear is “BWAAAHAAHAHA!!! It’s too late for you to hang up now, SUCKER!!! You may want to hang up but we both know you won’t because you don’t want the last twenty minutes ninety minutes 4.5 hours to be a waste! All you can do is sit there and take because you, my friend, are the telephone’s bitch! Enjooo-oooy!” Just scrap the recording altogether. Or replace it with

6. Interruptions to Waiting Process by Real Live People - This is one of the cardinal sins of the queue. Having someone interrupt your wait to ask a small, unimportant question, or to transfer you to another queue is BEYOND FRUSTRATING. After waiting so long you think you’re FINALLY going to get down to business just to be told that no, you will have to wait longer. Please don’t interrupt my wait if you’re not prepared to serve me yet! It just makes me hostile when I finally do get through to the actual customer rep. Just let me wait in peace.

7. Dropped Calls - This is The Big Cardinal Sin. Dropping a call with a customer who has waited for a long time in a queue is just unforgivable. If a call is dropped the company should be the ones coming crawling to the customer, begging for forgiveness. And they should come with gifts in hand to make up for the mistake.  Under no circumstances should the customer have to wait in the queue again. The customer rep should call back IMMEDIATELY so as to catch the desperate and homicidal caller before they dial the number again. Last night my husband waited two hours only to speak briefly with a rep before the rep accidentally dropped the phone and hung up on him. He had to wait over two more hours to finally finish the business he originally called to complete.  After he hung up it took me another three hours to get him to stop weeping.

The truth is, most companies know that we have very little choice but to sit there, listening to their musak and just take it up the hooha. They have no real motivation to change their systems.  Bottom line? I need to start brushing up on my voodoo. Because that’s all that’s going to help me now!

Against my wagging fingers and grunts of disapproval, the hubby grabbed a couple of tear-off phone numbers from some bulletin boards when we were touring the Harvard campus not too long ago. The flyers were recruiting people to take part in Sleep Studies and since sleeping and studying are two of the hubby’s favourite things to do, he just couldn’t resist. Also, the papers advertised a fairly generous payment for full participation in the study, which sparked his curiosity. Most people would take the generous payment as a hint that the study would involve something more demanding and rigorous than simply resting peacefully. But my husband is nothing if not optimistic.

After contacting the people in charge of the study he received an email with the detailed requirements for eligibility in the study.  There were several key items that would have rendered the hubby ineligible (he wouldn’t have been allowed to take his asthma medications or any kind of caffeine and he would have had to be available for several weeks to stay in some kind of fallout shelter sleep lab).  But the clincher was this: ”On 2 occasions, you are asked to remain awake for up to 40 hours each, while lying in bed the entire time.”  

I laughed out loud when I read this, knowing that there is NO WAY my husband could stay awake for 40 hours straight. He has amazing willpower and determination. He is stubborn. He is persistent. But he could be lying in bed while watching a trio of pole dancers perform the hottest stip-tease, or a pack of rabid hyenas threatening his physical safety and he would drift off to dreamland.  When he is sleepy there is NO keeping him awake. The apocalypse itself would not keep this man from his slumber. So the very idea that a comfortable bed, dim lighting and a lab assistant! to play games! or talk! would be enough to keep my husband awake for forty straight hours is laughable.

He was truly disappointed that he wasn’t going to be able to make big bucks while sleeping, and I can’t blame him. But I don’t think there is enough money in the world to make me willingly forego several nights’ sleep!

Dear Goddamn Bank of America and TD Banknorth,

Canada is not some kind of alien planet or even a third world country. It is the country with whom your fair nation is most closely connected physically, politically and financially. There is NO REASON that we should have so much trouble transferring funds from our Canadian bank accounts to our new American accounts. Especially when there is a branch manager in Canada who is more than ready and willing to speak with you on the phone or fax you a GODDAMN GUARANTEE that the funds are legitimate.  What the hell else do you need to verify???  Do you know how long eight weeks are? The whole gestation period of a cat.  Fifty-six rotations of the earth on it’s axis. Also?Enough time to plot the downfall of two American banks.  

Another thing.  Telling a customer that his social security number is invalid DESPITE his clear documentation proving that you are mistaken is great way to ensure NO CUSTOMER LOYALTY WHATSOEVER. If the RMV was able to verify it without any problem,  what the hell is wrong with your system?

With no love and much animosity,
A new and livid customer

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Dear Blue Cross,

Requiring a new member to have a prescription for medical supplies without providing the means for him or her to AQUIRE said prescription is messed up. The fact that you are willing to pay for me to visit the emergency room in order to obtain said prescription is only proof of your extreme messed-upness.  And I have to say that the fact that you are sending me to abuse the emergency room to obtain an unnecessary prescription while toting my two small children along is not winning you any favours in my book.

The fact that you don’t give a damn about winning my favour is making me even more pissed off.

Yours in frustrated and angry tears,
Member #AKA***151*** 

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Dear Loyal Blog Readers,

I apologize for the copious amounts of whining and bitching lately. Please hang in there. I hope the situation will improve soon.  I appreciate you coming by and reading what I write, despite it’s very gloomy and Eeyore-esque negativity.

With love and adoration,
Shannon

You know what would suck? If your two year old locked your bathroom door from the inside and then closed the door.  And if he had locked himself INSIDE the bathroom you might have felt sorry for him, but since he’s outside the bathroom safe and sound, having locked up your shower, your deoderant, toothpaste, hairbrush and makeup, you mostly want to tear his limbs off. 

And then if you went down to the building concierge in your unwashed state, to ask for assistance for said problem, and received a little metal post for just such situations and you went back up to your apartment to try to pick the lock and were completely incapable of picking the lock? That would suck.

And what if you called your husband at work to tell him of the harrowing situation and begged him to come home and help you (because he’s only a two minute walk away) and he was not really THRILLED AND ALL TOO EAGER to hurry home to help you? That would suck.  

And then, if you went in search of the naughty toddler to yell at discipline him when you realized that he had been busy pulling cords off the wall that someone had painstakingly nailed down with special little clips? Then you might feel like going back to bed and pretending that you never had children.

Not that these things have happened to me. I’m just sayin’. It would suck.

Hi folks! Let’s catch up, ok?

Last week I was stressed to the max about getting our Canadian driver’s licenses switched over to Massachusetts licenses.  We managed to get that done without too much trouble. If you don’t count the two hours spent waiting in the RMV with two small kids as trouble, which I do. Eh hem.  

They were initially reluctant to accept the documentation we produced as proof of our residence in this state.  But I must have looked like I was ready to do something desperate because after a few minutes an hour of conferring with her supervisor, the woman instructed me to stand in front of the blue screen for my picture.  At this point she hadn’t officially told me that they were going to accept my documentation and I was completely frazzled from wrangling my kids for so long and trying to keep them close to me while I stood in front of the counter. (The hubby had to go back to work so I was on my own for the majority of the wait. And I cleverly brought along some lollipops to entertain the kids. Entertainment? Check. Sticky children? Double check.) 

So I threw myself in position for my license photo while trying to keep Kieran from running away and annoying people and touching things with his sticky fingers and the (not surprising) result is that I look crazed and harried and my hair is a mess and I wasn’t allowed to wear my glasses so my eyes are all funky, too.  The picture showed up on the screen and the teller raised a single eyebrow at me and asked if that was ok or would I like to take another one? The kids were trying to out-shriek each other and I looked at her with that stressed-out-mom-face that many of us make.  Lady? Bottom line? I don’t have the luxury of posing multiple times to take a glamorous license photo. Aren’t these things supposed to look shitty anyway? If so? Score!

So I am the happy owner of a new driver’s license.  The hubby wondered why they don’t hire more staff when people will certainly have to wait for so long EVERY. TIME. THEY. COME. I believe I have discerned the reason. It is so that they will come to the RMV AS INFREQUENTLY AS POSSIBLE. I’m telling you that I will NEVER go back there again, if I can help it.  Their strategy? It’s working!

We enjoyed a weekend of sightseeing including The Children’s Museum of Boston…

  
It’s a kid-trap! Remarkably reliable. I don’t think a single kid who climbed in was able to get out without help.

…as well as a lovely walk along Fan Pier…

 
This is all that’s left of the Boston Tea Party Museum that burned down.

…and our first attempt at eating actual seafood in Boston.  Also?

It was a fun weekend.

And one more thing! I discovered meetup.com which I am really excited about! If you haven’t heard of it before, Meetup is a place to find other people who are interested in the same kinds of things you are and to organize events with these people.  I did some quick searching and found a number of parent/mom groups in my area and within 24 hours I was at my first event! It doesn’t cost anything and there are groups in every kind of hobby and interest you can think of from nudists to religious groups to sports to board games to motherless daughters or singles in their 30’s and much more. I was really impressed with the diversity of groups and I highly recommend this site to people who are looking for ways to connect with people who share the shame interests or just to make new friends.  

The drawback with Meetup is that there are many more groups available in bigger centres. It appears to me much more popular in the United States. My home town of Saskatoon, SK has only two groups for a city of over 200 000 people. So for my Canadian friends, there may not be as much available in smaller cities. But the good news is, you can start up your own group, if you are willing to do the work of organization!  

Wow. That read like a paid advertisement. But I was just so happy to discover a way to meet people where I didn’t feel like a giant loser. We’ll see where it leads. At the very least, I’m getting out and seeing and trying new things and I’m hoping that it will lead to a friend or two, as well!

Umm…that would be me, not my 2 year old. I was fully expecting to get at least six more months before I had to start seriously considering the reality of potty training again. After all, EVERYONE says boys take longer to learn to use the toilet than girls. And my girl was perilously close to 3 before she was trained (not that I think that it’s bad that it took that long or that there’s anything seriously wrong if a child isn’t trained by 3, but you know how “those people” are). 

So there I was, just minding my own business, when my barely 2 year old started asking to go “PODDY”??  The first couple of times I thought it was just a curiousity thing and once he’d tried it he’d be content to leave it alone for a good long while. Turns out, it’s not a passing phase. He wants to sit on the potty multiple times a day and he has been successfully making “deposits” anywhere from 1-3 times a day. Without any prompting.  

Would I be the world’s most annoying person if I said I really wasn’t that happy about this situation? Because really, I KNOW that most parents would be THRILLED that their kids were taking an active interest in toilet training and would jump on this bandwagon with all the hysterical enthusiasm of the “Breast is Best” fanatics. (Don’t send hate mail - I breastfed my kids, I support breastfeeding. I’m just not an evangelist.). 

The truth is, potty training means more work LONG BEFORE it means less work.  It means being hyper-aware of your child’s habits, asking frequently if they have to use the toilet, helping them remove clothes and sitting with them while they “contemplate the deeper meaning of life”. It means copious candy rewards and praise. Not that these things are all bad. They are mostly necessary and really, I’m proud that my son is ready to take this next step in his development.  I’m just fundamentally lazy not excited about the work involved.

I’m not prepared for full blown potty training boot camp with the underwear and the staying at home and the sitting on (or beside) the potty all the live-long day.  We are in a small apartment which I try to leave daily, lest I lose my ever-loving mind get stir-crazy. My toilet-training potty is in a storage container in Ontario and I’m too cheap to buy another one for the one month until we get our stuff back.  And mostly I’m just not ready to take on the boot camp method I used on my first child which involved no more diapers and staying close to home with plenty of changes of clothes.  We don’t even have that many changes of clothes right now (and not because I haven’t been doing laundry!).

So we’re calling it “Half-Assed Potty Training” “Child-led Potty Training” and just letting Kieran tell us when he wants to sit on the potty.  I won’t say no to him if he wants to do it. Just don’t expect me to bring up the subject!  Until we get tired of this in-between stage and buckle down and do this thing, you can just call me The Reluctant Potty-Trainer.

A la Shamelessly Sassy:

I am perhaps the only person in the world, living in temporary quarters with only a duffel bag’s worth of clothing, who happens to also have managed to pack a full spice rack along, too. The isolation in this new city is starting to get to me. I paid more money than I care to admit in order to have conversation hearts and mini candy canes shipped to me in the middle of July so that I can construct the Taj Mahal of birthday cakes for my daughter. This morning my car was nearly washed off the highway by the mere remnants of some hurricane (Hello East Coast? I am afraid of your weather!).

Best: Going out on a date with my hubby because an angel of a co-worker of the hubby’s offered to babysit! Woohoo!  Also? Weather that is less than 30 degrees celsius! Yesssss!!! Oh and a gift basket with about 15 different kinds of cheese from some friends who know my nerdy love of dairy products.

Worst: 2.5 hours spent in the Social Security Office waiting to receive A REJECTION LETTER. With two kids. And a hubby who was climbing the walls because he was so anxious to get back to work. And an obnoxious woman with a “service dog” (which was so old he could barely walk and certainly couldn’t hear and MOST CERTAINLY was not able to be of any meaningful help to himself, let alone a person) dressed in a T-shirt. This woman spent the whole time bitching about the system and how they are corrupt and always trying to screw her and bragging about how she had trouble learning to read and shrieking at our daughter about how now that she is starting school her life was going to be SO HARD AND NO FUN AT ALL. Thanks. Yes, that’s exactly the message I want to send to my kids. Learning = BORING. Also? She told us all about how she made a birthday cake for her dog’s 14th birthday. Newsflash? Your dog is not a child and maybe the reason he’s walking into walls and can’t keep his eye’s open is that all-cookie diet you’re boasting about feeding him.

Is, you have conversations like this with your four-year-old:

Me: SHOULD YOU BE TOUCHING ANYTHING WITH YOUR HANDS ALL COVERED IN FUDGESICLE???

Avery: Yes? Er…no? Yes. Yes! I think the answer is yes!

Um, yeah. I’ve got a bad habit of phrasing what is meant to be a scolding correctional statement as a question. I think I probably started doing this as a means to encourage my kids to process their decisions or circumstances on their own, rather than having to spell it out for them. In reality it’s just a passive-aggressive way of adding emphasis to what I’m yelling explaining. Instead of “Do not colour on the furniture!” it is “DO YOU THINK YOU SHOULD BE DRAWING ON THE COUCH? NO! NO YOU SHOULD NOT BE COLOURING ON ANYTHING EXCEPT PAPER, DOYOUUNDERSTANDME?!!” 

Moving on…Avery’s birthday is in just 2 weeks here.  She is absolutely as wired with anticipation as an almost five year old can be.  The problem is that we have only been here a short time and really have no friends here for her to invite to a traditional birthday bash.  But this girl has been dreaming about a particular birthday cake since shortly after last year’s birthday and I’ve been feeling so guilty for the instability and chaos in their lives over the past 2 months that I’m totally caving and I’m going to attempt to make the great Candyland Birthday Cake.  Which probably serves 100 people. For just our family.

It’s not really the Taj Mahal of cakes or anything, but it requires a lot of different candy including candy canes and conversation hearts which aren’t exactly in season in the middle of summer. If anyone has any ideas of where I could purchase such a thing in the middle of summer I’d definitely appreciate suggestions. At this point I’m planning to order them online. However you can’t just order 10 mini candy canes. You have to order 100. I don’t even LIKE candy canes so I’m not going to be able to reward myself for my hard work by eating candy canes by the dozen.  

Also, the cake has a number mountains created with ice cream cones and icing.  I’m at a loss here. I’m not in my own kitchen and I don’t have any of my own bakeware and I have never been an artist with the icing like some people. I purchased some Betty Crocker icing tubes that come with several different tips and I was hoping they’d work.  I haven’t experimented with them yet. The tube says it won’t get hard (like if you put it on cookies you wouldn’t want to stack them) and I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

So anyway, I’m busy stockpiling the different kinds of candy I need for this work of art and praying that it will work out and look something like the picture. I know I could just dump it all on there and Avery would be thrilled, but the perfectionist in me wants to get it right. I’ve already had to replace the peanut butter cups with peppermint patties because the hubby is allergic and Kieran’s peanut status is yet to be determined.  Unless I can find some kind of peanut butter cup shaped chocolate that has something else in the middle. There was nothing of that kind at the grocery store today and let me tell you I was sorely tempted to just buy the damn peanut butter cups and eat the whole giant cake without the two men in our family.

All the bureaucracy has not lessened one bit. The next task on my list has been to switch my driver’s license over to a Massachusetts license. Turns out you need about 49 forms of identification in order to do this. One of the documents I need is a Social Security Number. Or, if I don’t qualify for an SSN (which I don’t) then a REJECTION LETTER from the SSN Office.  Yes, that’s right, I have to go all the way to the SSN Office, find parking (which pretty much takes an act of God), wait in line, with all my many documents AND MY TWO SMALL CHILDREN to apply for a card which I already KNOW I am not eligible to receive.  This rejection letter, issued by the SSN Office is REQUIRED by the Motor Vehicle Registry in order to verify that I am legally in the country and a resident of Massachusetts. How does this letter prove the aforementioned items? Hell if I know!  Why isn’t my I-94 documents which confirms my status as a resident alien (tee hee) and is attached to my passport enough to verify that I am legally living here? I DON’T FREAKING KNOW.

This is added to the fact that we are required to bring a driving record issued by our home province which cannot be more than 30 days old.  That gives us until Saturday.  *Hyperventilates* We also need something which verifies our Massachusetts address.  We have not received any official mail yet at our current address because it is temporary. So we need to breathe down the neck of our new bank to mail us something IMMEDIATELY.  *Throws up*

I know that there are reasons for most of the stuff that they ask for but some of it is simply not done in a logical fashion. To ask for a driving record that was issued not more than 30 days ago gives a person exactly one month from the date of their entry into the United States to secure a permanent dwelling and receive mail of some kind at that dwelling to confirm their residence.  What do they fear is going to happen if my driving record is a few months old when they get it?  If my record is clean up until recently, it is unlikely that I was terrorizing my last city of residence with my unsafe driving. 

I know it will all be over soon, but I have to say that all the paperwork is really getting me down.  The good news is that we’ve found a place to rent for the fall and as soon as the papers are all signed I will tell you all about it. Because Internets? It is A SWEET SWEET DEAL!

The silver lining of the day is that we found out that the hubby’s SSN application has gone through and as of tomorrow he will have his number, although not the actual card!  Baby steps! Woohoo!