I was having another one of those days yesterday, the kind where you wish there was an easy button like on those Staples commercials or some way to just Control-Alt-Delete the entire day. I woke up to Citibank calling me. As it turns out, even though I abided by all the terms of my payment plan with them, the guy who originally set up the payments didn't set them at an amount that would take care of the entire part that was past due at the time. Consequently, I now have to pay the past due amount plus my minimum payment by the 19th if I want Citibank to reopen my card.Then I logged into my bank account online to see if my PayPal transfer had posted so that I could go grocery shopping. I found that, not only had the transfer posted, but a $500 check had been returned so my balance was -$450. My mom deposited the check in my account last week. Although she had enough money in her account to cover the check three or four times over, her bank decided to send it back anyway. She called and asked them why; they couldn't tell her. They admitted she had sufficient funds to cover it and then basically said "our bad." Of course, they didn't bother to cover my overdraft fees so my mother had to go to her bank; get the cash that had been sitting there, earmarked for that very check, plus additional cash to cover my overdrawn fees; and put it in my account.
Even that wasn't simple. My local branch couldn't tell me whether the debits and one check that had posted that night would be paid or returned; they just told me to call the 1-800 number. I called the 1-800 number, and the guy who I spoke to was able to answer that question (yes, they would be paid), but he wasn't sure how much the overdraft fee would be. He said that it all depended on my account history, and neither one of us would know for sure until late that afternoon. As a result, he had to give me a worst case scenario amount and a best case scenario amount. My mom, to be safe, went with the worst case.
After I got off the phone with the bank, I logged into SocialSpark to see if my RealRank problem had worked itself out. It hadn't. My stats still said my RealRank was zero. For those of you unfamiliar with RealRank, zero is not a good number. In fact, it pretty much means that you're not ranked at all. No rank, in turn, means little to no opportunities available in the SocialSpark Marketplace and little to no money in 30 days. I then checked PayPerPost and IzeaRanks to see if they were saying the same thing. They weren't. I had RealRank with them, just not the same RealRank. Thus, I had to submit a ticket to Customer Love.
After lunch, I tried to check my bank account again to see if, by any chance, the bank had charged the fees early, tried being the operative word. When I clicked on Firefox, I found that my Internet was down. I picked up my phone and found that my VoIP service was out as well. I then went to get my cell phone so I could call Charter and found out that the battery was dead. I had to charge the battery just to call Charter, at which point I found out that there was an area outage. Whenever there is an area outage, Charter won't schedule service appointments, even if your particular outage isn't related to the area one, so all I could do at that point was wait and see what was causing mine.
I finally got my phone and Internet service back around 6 p.m. I then logged into my account and found out that the bank had charged the best case scenario amount--one of the few things that was in my favor yesterday. At that point, I thought that I could finally relax. I couldn't.
Around 7 p.m. I tried to make dinner. I was going to boil some chicken and rice because I thought it would be gentler on Bella's stomach than dog food. I defrosted the chicken in the microwave without incident, but when I put the pot of water on the stove to boil, plumes of smoke started snaking up from the burner. I switched burners, and the second burner started smoking. Thinking that the pot was to blame, I poured the water into another pot and put it on the third burner. It, too, started to smoke. Finally, I tried the fourth burner. Can you guess what happened? Yep, more smoke.
At that point, I gave up on cooking supper. I took the smoke as a sign that I would burn the house down if I tried to go any further. I put the chicken in the fridge, left the pot of water on the stove, and ordered pizza. The ordering went without incident, but its delivery did not. My 30 to 40 minute estimated wait time turned into an hour, and my porch light blew when I went to turn it on. Thus, I had to meet the pizza guy on the porch in the pitch black dark. Thankfully, he didn't make me sign the receipt in the dark.
I pulled the blinds up while we waited so Bailey wouldn't eat them when the pizza guy arrived, and I left them up after we ate. At 11 p.m. I went downstairs to lower them and, of course, they wouldn't lower. I spent 15 minutes trying to get them unstuck. At one point, I even pulled out the love seat, placed a chair behind it, and tried to jimmy the blinds with a butter knife. It didn't work. Finally, I thought to close the blinds before pulling on the strings and, voila, they shut.
After I let the dogs out, I realized that I didn't have any clean clothes to wear to the grocery store today so I had to put a load of clothes in the wash before I could even go to bed. Once in bed, I was too wound up to go to sleep. I flipped through the channels and, despite the fact that tomorrow is Halloween, found that there weren't any decent horror movies on. On top of that, I had seen the Without a Trace reruns that started at midnight. I finally ended up watching some movie with Elisha Cuthbert that was touted as a thriller but wasn't thrilling at all; it was just weird.
Right before I finally drifted off to sleep, I was contemplating changing not my blog title this time but my own name to Murphy in honor of Murphy's Law. Granted, the name Murphy is not very feminine, but I figured that I could spell it with an "i" or an "ee" at the end, or, I could make it my last name and change my first and middle names to something like "Calamity Jane." Calamity Jane Murphy--it's odd, but it could work.
Thank God today is going better than yesterday. Of course, the day's not over yet.
