(written on the 30th from notes taken previously)
I was up early this morning doing my morning dailies… still having trouble sleeping in, even if I want to.
Saw Heather off to work and then began churning through my to-do list–going through old emails to clean them out, organizing and cleaning up my van a little bit, doing some online banking errands, canceling my injection appointment in Arkansas… (good golly, that was going to be expensive 😅. I think it was something like $1700 just for the doctor fee 😶).
One of the things that I realized today was that I’ve been paying for my Planet Fitness membership since January and didn’t realize it.
I knew that the pause was only good for 2 months when I paused it was back in November, and that I’d have to try either to pause it again or cancel it, but I didn’t see any payments going through, so I thought they had just left the pause on.
Why would I think that? Well, I’m used to getting a text notification every single time my credit card is charged, and I hadn’t gotten any for Planet Fitness since I put my membership on pause.
What I forgot is the particular branch of Planet Fitness where I got my membership required me to set up my automated payments through my debit card. 😒 They wouldn’t let me use my credit card, and I didn’t have text notifications letting me know every time my bank account was debited.
I do now.
I’ve never had a recurring payment find from a bank account, so I completely spaced it, obliviously going about my life without realizing I’d had about $200 debited from my account since it started up again.
😠
I know it’s my fault, but at the same time, it just feels so slimy of Planet Fitness to require debit cards. They know full well credit cards will expire, and they won’t get to keep getting the recurring payments that people forget about.
With a bank account, it just keeps going and going.
Needless to say, I wasn’t happy, and I reached out to see if I could get a refund. Unfortunately, no dice.
I made some phone calls to help in the build efforts, calling a window place in Wyoming called Parker’s Glass to get some estimates. I also chatted with the window peeps in Rapid City and the materials peeps up there as well.
Remember the curtain that got covered in chocolate? I forgot to mention that it came out of the washer squeaky clean. 🙏
I also forgot to mention that I missed getting all of the melted chocolate cleaned up, so when my curtain flapped in the wind driving from Arkansas back to South Dakota, I managed to get chocolate all over it yet again. 😕
So again I let the chocolate dry out and harden. I scraped it off, and then I spent a good long while cleaning both the curtain and the rest of the chocolate off my bed platform.
I texted back and forth with the realtor for that triplex in Lusk, and I spent a little bit of time working for JustAnswer, and I don’t remember if it was today or a different day, but I had also gotten chocolate from that same chocolate bar all over my computer, including inside some of the ports. 😒
And now my headphone jack doesn’t work. 😕
Ugh.
So easy to turn to the old adage, “no good deed goes unpunished.” I tried to get a chocolate bar for my mom, and that turned into a whole lot of wasted time and energy and now a damaged computer.
[sigh]
Good golly.
I spent some time doing measurements on the house to try to prepare for stair building, and then when Heather and Hans got home, I talked house with them for a good while.
I didn’t fully read one of the work calls that I took, so I didn’t realize that I wasn’t experienced enough to answer their entire question. I saw that they were asking for wiring information, but I missed the part where they said they were trying to wire in an aftermarket alarm system.
So I got him the wiring information, but when he wanted help wiring up the actual alarm system, I was completely unprepared.
And JustAnswer doesn’t allow you to opt out a phone calls. You can opt out of chat conversations if you realize you’re in over your head, but you can’t opt out of phone calls.
I’m pretty much positive the reason you can’t is that they didn’t program in the option and don’t want to pay programmers to add the option.
Pretty stupid policy if you ask me, as it means the customer doesn’t get the assistance they need.
Certainly, I should have read the full question before I answered it, instead of just skimming it as I had, but there are also plenty of times when what the customer wrote is not actually what they wanted, and you don’t find that out until you’re already on the phone call with them, and then you’re stuck. The only thing you can do is tell them to start a new question if you can’t get them to help that they actually need and deserve.
Not wanting to send them away to start a new question, I decided to try and help anyway, taking the instructional image that came with the alarm kit and feeding it into AI to see if AI might be able to help me direct this gentleman how to wire up his system.
Gratefully, AI came back with step-by-step instructions, which I then passed along to the customer, crossing my fingers that they were actually correct instructions.
To be honest, it would be pretty remarkable for AI to be able to look at an image and give written step-by-step instructions for what to do, but here’s hoping. 😅
After finishing up working and chatting with Heather and Hans, I veged out for a bit and headed for bed.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 