Wednesdays are the days Court of Appeals opinions are released (the Oregon Supreme Court opinions come out Thursdays, but the court warns everyone an opinion will be coming out on Wednesday, ever since some litigant almost drove off the road when he heard on the radio that he'd won his case).
Every Wednesday morning for the last four weeks, I've been anxious because I have a case pending there. (The first two weeks were silly, I grant you. But AWOPs come out really fast. I would really like my case to be AWOPed so that it's settled before I have the baby -- if the other side doesn't petition for review, anyway.)
**
In other news, my war with Saturn/my extended warranty people ended before the first shots were fired. I have a 2004 VUE that I took in last year for a/c service (ran out of freon). This was back before the first warranty expired, and while they couldn't find the leak, they did the service and told me that if I brought it back after its expiration, that service would still be covered. I wasn't all that worried, because I bought an extended warranty on the vehicle, anyway. For three additional years of coverage and discounts on services (all my oil changes, for example, are free, and other services are reduced significantly), I paid about $1700. (I know this because I dug up all those records on Monday.)
Well...we took it in last week and got a call saying it would be a 9 hour service, so bring it back in Sunday night and they'd work on it Monday. Monday comes around, and we get a call saying that the warranty company wants to send an inspector to look at the condensor or evaporator or something (it hardly mattered to me) before they'd OK service. They would only chip in $25/day for a rental car in the meantime.
I was SO fired up Monday. Livid. Where I'd ordinarily say, "What a pain in the ass" and wait to see what happened, I fumed. Someone was going to pay for the service. I dug up the policies and read them - no a/c related exclusions. I was not precisely polite to the guy at Saturn of Beaverton (who is probably the nicest service guy at Saturn of Beaverton that we've deal with since we moved here in 1999 -- they have generally been nothing but trouble). Too late to do anything about that now, and Matthew sheparded me out of there to get the rental.
[By the way, $25/day gets you a Toyota Corolla through the Beaverton Toyota rental place. I was annoyed at this, but I find it's a surprisingly zippy little car with a nice turn radius and good control. It's loud on the freeway and not exactly luxurious, but still, not bad.]
All that adrenaline -- and for nothing. Tuesday morning I called, apologized to the nice guy at Saturn for my hormones and bad mood the day before, and found out the warranty people were going to pay for the service, after all. We'd be on the hook for our $100 deductible, a bit of freon (some discrepancy I'm not sure about) and some foam, but our total cost was around $160, while the insurer's was well over $1000. I haven't picked up the VUE yet, so there may yet be another Saturn post later on today, but I'll keep my fingers crossed.
Well, I've typed all this and I still have 15 minutes before I can hope to see any COA decisions online.
**
I'm still working part time for Super Cool Attorney (SCA), but in the last week or so, I've been developing a new website look and a blog for him. It's been a nice change of pace, to trot out the graphics and the HTML programs and to work with them again.
Many, many years ago (try almost 10), I went from being a newly minted grad with a BA in history/minor in chemistry to doing website work, because what the hell else do you do with a BA in history? I worked for a telecommunications company that has been purchased so many times subsequently I'm not sure who owns them now, and I had a boss who was nothing but a glorified salesman. An ad salesman, at that. He didn't understand that you actually have to have content on the site that people want to go to before you could sell ads on the site, and he didn't want to give me people to generate content, or give me time to do it on my own. The closest he came to providing assistance was a university journalism student intern for ten hours a week. No, he didn't pay her. Are you shocked?
At some point, this boss determined the office needed a tech support person on site, as opposed to the company-wide tech support people who were in a different state. That's how I ended up administering a Windows NT server and a bastardized Windows 95/Mac network (the computers were mercifully upgraded while I was there to all Windows machines -- not that I like Windows machines, but they did make my life easier). Did I mention the OS/2 network running in the back office? It was a mess.
Oh...and I still had to do the website.
He ranks as one of my worst employers ever, though not as bad as the boss I had at the Deathstar. This boss did have the worst tupee I'd ever seen in my life, and in the year I worked there, he also had an eyelid tuck. He bought a huge new house and -- in an office where most of the AAs and clerk-types weren't making more than $10/hour -- showed everyone the flier from the house and talked incessantly about it. To say the AAs hated him would be vastly understating things. He also was so technologically clueless that he'd call me into his office to show him how to log into his investment account websites, and, occasionally, to show him how to copy and paste text.
He made me go to a sales seminar because I might have to accompany ad sales people on call. I will never, ever forgive him for this. This would be the same sales seminar -- held at the Peppermill in Reno -- where a very drunk Japanese tourist mistook me for a prostitute (I was in my LL Bean phase and looked revoltingly wholesome, even!) during a break. Again - no forgiveness, and I did everything I possibly could to avoid going on sales calls after that. It served him right.
Needless to say, not my finest employment situation, but it was a decent resume padder for me. But I acquired the following skills/knowledge:
- how to supervise an assistant (an AA, not the intern)
- how to avoid junk meetings
- how to take apart computers and fix them -- there were a lot of calls to Matthew in the beginning, before I gained in confidence.
- how to navigate office politics
- how to get what you want out of people whom you hold in utter contempt without letting them know you hold them in utter contempt
- exercising patience to get what you want
- the power of bureaucratic tactics ("I'd love to help you with your computer. But I can't get over there RIGHT NOW. So reboot first, then if that doesn't fix your problem, then please fill out this form letting me know what the problem is. I'll be with you as soon as I can.")
- it's pointless to dress in a suit if you spend any part of your day crawling under desks chasing cables
- how to smile even when you know people are lying to you
When that company was bought by the Deathstar (announced when I was still there, but implemented after we moved up here), he was summarily dismissed, while I went on to a better paying but more aggravating job with the Deathstar. For a few years, I viciously hoped he'd lost the big new house and the trophy wife along with the job, but now I just feel sorry for him. What a pathetic man - the eyelid tuck, the toupee, the showing off of investment accounts that now I realize are piddly, retirement-wise. Plus, he probably lost all that retirement money when Deathstar stock tanked.
**
No AWOP today. Ah, well.
Recent Comments