2022-02-22 — Lots of 2’s

Happy lots-of-twos day. 🙃

So… what do you do when you have a pile of receipts from purchases and returns you’ve made that… aren’t reflected in your credit card statements? Like… not there… at all. Nada. Zip. Zilch. And… not just a couple either. Many. Many many. It’s like my credit card company has no idea I bought and returned stuff. It’s… messed up. A lot.

Weird.

And… I’m on customer support chat right now trying to figure it out. And of course the rep isn’t paying attention to what I’m actually writing, or her English isn’t good enough to understand because she’s answering me as though I were talking about purchases I just made that haven’t shown up yet, telling me they’ll show up on my next bill. And then when I finally get her to focus in enough to understand that I keep saying September, she starts explaining my purchases from August.

Ugh…

No, September purchases aren’t going to show up on my next bill. No August purchases aren’t going to answer my questions about missing September questions.🙃

(sigh)

Wish they’d just read closely at what I wrote. Missing records from my statements from last, September 29th and 30th, like I spelled out clearly in the chat, along with the specific charge amounts I gave them.

🙃

Took 30 minutes for her to finally pay attention to what I was writing and to finally write something to the affect of, we don’t show those transactions for those days. And I’m like, yep, that’s why I’m on this chat, to figure out what’s going on.

Working with customer service peeps can be so frustrating sometimes. I work hard to make it as easy as possible for the people I need help from. I lay everything out for them, piece by piece, step by step, and it’s just mystifying how so many people just ignore the essential information that I painstakingly lay out for them, and head on down some unrelated road before finally winding back to what I gave them to begin with.

Here are the dates. Here are the charges and charge amounts. I have the receipts in my hands that show I used x card, but none of my purchases or returns from those days are showing up in my statements.

(sigh)

Sorry… sometimes I just don’t understand…

Anyway, I guess in comparison to the financial history I’ve had to mess with from 2019 and 2020, I’ve lucked out so far. This is the first big roadblock of my 2021 taxes.

I love that I get 2% cash back from all my purchases with the PayPal credit card; but they really drop the ball in a lot of ways (Synchrony is the company that PayPal uses to provide the card). So… if I may, don’t get a PayPal credit card. Other than the great rewards, it’s been awful. I’ve never really thought twice about my credit card providers, as they just run smoothly. This is the first one I’ve ever had that hasn’t run smoothly, and not only has it not run smoothly it’s been extremely aggravating at times.

Chase… 1.5% cash back. Not quite as good, but… never a single, tiny, itty bitty problem. It just does what it’s supposed to, when it’s supposed to, and it’s intuitive and simple.

Anyway, sorry for the tangent. It’s almost 2:15 a.m., and I had hopes of getting through this huge stack of receipts before bed, but that… didn’t happen. Hopefully, I’ll be able to figure it out quickly tomorrow and get moving again. This could be a pretty huge obstacle, and it leaves in doubt a whole ton. Like… Do I need to go back through all my purchases from the last… three-plus years to compare what AutoZone said I did vs what actually made it to my credit card? I don’t think so. I think I was thorough enough, and my being thorough is what found all this. I go back through because I know I’ve made mistakes, and I know I’ll catch them (hopefully, all of them) when I go back through stuff.

Well… that’s been my evening. The morning and the rest of the day prior to the evening was spent working the fixing cars part of the business, and it was cold today. The temperatures were cold, and the wind was absolutely frigid.

Did four cars today. First was a Chevy Impala that just needed a battery. I was grateful that the car was in a garage because the wind was enough to turn me into a popsicle in just about no time flat. The second car was a crank, no start. Had to give her the bad news that her car was toast. Bad compression. Guessing her timing chain jumped. It had a lot of miles, and it’s a Nissan, and they can’t seem to make decent… well, Nissan struggles to make decent vehicles in general, but they have lots of timing chain issues, in my experience–add that to the tranny issues they have with their CVT transmissions (do NOT buy a Nissan with a CVT transmission, unless you plan to replace the transmission after 120k miles or so).

Third car was a no start, and he said he thought it was the ignition switch again (I went out to his car last year, and I found his starting problems were with the ignition switch, even though the problem he was having was much more commonly caused by the starter going bad. He said it was making the same symptoms as last year, and he thought it was the ignition switch again, so I started looking there to start, and after doing a good bit of testing, I found that, nope, not this time. This time it actually was the common starter issue that the 4 cylinder Hondas have (not that it’s a huge problem. The starters last 10-20 years before dying. It’s just that… they used to last longer? So it seems like a problem because it’s one of the more common jobs I do. If I had to pick a job I have to do that’s a common repair, starters in 4 cyl Honda Accords and in Honda Civics is one of the most common, from years 2003 to 2015ish for Accords and 2006-2012? for Civics.

More than you probably wanted to know. 🙃

Last car was a pain in my little butt. It was supposed to be simple. Like… really simply. No start, drained battery, broken battery quick disconnect. Fix it. That’s it. Charge or replace the battery, fix quick disconnect, and put a quick disconnect in another one of their cars (company cars that are often left sitting for weeks at a time, so they want quick disconnects to keep the batteries healthier and conserve their charges). So… The battery in the van was really low, a battery I’d replaced just last year–the last time I was out there. So I tried to charge it up and it tested good, but the charge kept dropping really quickly. So… I didn’t trust it. I spent a long time charging it up before finally giving up and driving to the parts supplier to get another one.

Anyway, in the meantime, I tried to figure out the battery connection quick disconnect thing. The old quick disconnect that was wired in was broken, made out of plastic and not doing its job. But I was… blocked in my efforts to redo the quick disconnect because modern batters have all these proprietary cable ends, sometimes very complicated ones.

Anyway, the short of it is that I spent 3 1/2 hours over there between my wasted efforts trying to charge a battery that I thought was good, to trying to come up with a creative way to solve the quick disconnect problem on battery systems that have sensors and proprietary cable weirdness going on. I think I managed to succeed with the Honda Odyssey van, but there was nothing I could figure out that I was comfortable with on the Suburban, so I gave up. I’ll look up more quick disconnect connector options and see if something else that’s available will work with this stuff.

Well… time for bed. Tomorrow I’ll get up, call my credit card company, and pound the recliner again.

Good night, folks. Hope y’all enjoyed your Tuesday. 🙂

Lift the World.

~ stephen