10.04.2005

The Runaround

It's been a day of said theme.

Item One: UNT's Extreme Parking Fiasco, aka Football Game Parking. Because UNT has the (mis?)fortune of having this game televised on ESPN 2, all commuter parking--meaning all of the hundreds of us that normally can only park at the stadium lot--is being moved (or else you get towed). That means that every level of parking gets shuffled around--commuters, residents, premium, fac/staff. Which means, in essence, that you have hundreds more cars trying to park in lots where, already, I have routinely seen cars circle for 10-30 minutes to wait for a space. I tried seven lots, passed four more, and half an hour later found a spot--on the opposite end of campus from my meeting in five minutes. Riiiiight.

Item Two: Cell Phone Fiasco. My beloved camera phone's keypad is annoyingly finicky and routinely locks up, so I called Cingular's Phone Exchange program. Normally, they send you a lender phone, then you send them your phone, and they return your phone when it's done (or they let you keep the lender, if it's the same model). Cingular told me that Nokia is recalling my phone, so they a) won't fix it, and b) have no other phones of that model to offer me. I just called Nokia, and they said a) what? there's no recall, and b) we can fix your phone, but we can't offer a lender phone for the week that it will take to fix, so you should c) call Cingular again.

Can I scream now? Oh, wait, I'm in a library--I'll choose Quiet Seething instead.
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3 comments:

Tihleigh said...

I think you should call Cingular and demand proof of the recall.

I think you should good cop/bad cop it with them.

I think you should make them cry.

That's what I think.

4:48 PM
Kodiak said...

Hey! I have a run-around story too!

At work, we have a Dell PC running a program called "Infocaster", which is almost like a news program, playing live video(CNN) while it displays JCP stock info, current Penney events, and a Yahoo! news crawl on the bottom. That's all it does, yet it can't seem to work properly, so we decided to send the PC to Inscriber(the company that makes Infocaster) to see if they can determine the problem, be it our PC's setup or their software program. In return, they are sending a loaner PC in its place.

Well, to make a long story short(too late!), the loaner system traveled from their headquarters in Canada via UPS to the distribution center here in Mesquite, Texas, then magically ended up in New Jersey the next day! How that happened, we'll never know.

Now comes the fun part! We contacted Inscriber to alert them of this new development, and we basically told them that since they initiated the shipment, they should trace it and see what they can do about it. They contacted UPS, who told them that it's JCPenney's responsibility to check on the package, since we hold the account for the transaction. We asked our own US mail branch at our facility, who told us that it's the sender who should check the package, not the account holder. What bliss.

So now we sit here, waiting for our road-trippin' loaner PC to get here so we can hook it up.

What can Brown do for you? Apparently send your package to New Jersey.

4:25 AM
Starrlett said...

Oh my gosh, that's so ridiculous it's sad. And funny. :-)

4:03 PM

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