More Flies with Honey

Why do I have to be a bulldog when it doesn't suit me? In the last year and a half I have had to go head to head with everybody from the HP computer people, to Vonage, to the Wildblue satellite internet people, to the phone company and so on. What happens is when you are setting up services, you can be as informed and intelligent as you want, but when your bill comes it seems that all bets are off.
Right now, with my husband having been off work so much, I am not about to play with these people. Thankfully for them, I have worked in customer service enough to know that it is never the person who has to talk with the angry customer who is to blame, nor should they have to take the brunt of your frustration.
I also believe that I have a testimony to share in how I deal with others, but that is another story for another blog.
Long story short - last month, after my husband had gone back to work from our first layoff we decided on our way to his mom's house for the family Christmas shin-dig, to call Sprint, and pay the extra $5 to up Kendra's text message limit. She has some new friends at co-op and text messaging seems the way they all want to communicate. Our current plan was not providing much in the way of this medium. I repeatedly asked the woman, knowing that we were in the middle of our billing cycle, if the change would take place immediately and allow her more text messages for the current month that we were in. Yes. I asked again further into the conversation, and the answer was again affirmative. I got the bill today and almost croaked. It turns out that she had gone over her allotted amount of text messages by 477 - at 20 cents each - you do the math and it is $95.40.
I was courteous. I reminded myself to be kind to the person I was speaking with. I reminded myself to breathe in and out when I told them calmly that I was NOT paying it. She informed me that those changes never take place in the current billing cycle - that you have to wait for the next one to come around. Sweet Marie - she was patient with me as well as I explained to her that we were misinformed, and since I had been so diligent to ask more than once if the changes would be effective immediately, I was not going to be paying this. She put me on hold and came back offering me a $40 credit. No thanks Marie. I asked to speak to a supervisor. She asked if she could work on it and call me back. Do you know what? They dropped all the charges.
You do get more flies with honey - it's true. Ask Marie.

Electricity - EEEE lec-tricity

There is a lot of hoopla here in Texas about de-regulating energy bills, and what I understand that to mean is basically giving consumers a choice, although I found out they do not do that in the area I live yet. The "light bills" (as they call them around here) are ridiculous. We are paying almost $300 a month for our electric bill on a budget plan. My mother in law who lives alone and runs her AC only modestly - and other than her television, computer and a few lamps - runs hardly anything at all and pays almost as much as we do - more sometimes. Our house is quite a bit bigger than our house in WV was - but this doesn't account for an almost double electric bill. Fortunately we're in the shade in the summer - mostly surrounded by big beautiful trees that create a canopy over our house - and in the winter we have a fireplace to help with heating costs, but I have heard more than once others say their bills run as much as $600!!!! Where I come from that is a house payment (or used to be when we bought our house in '98) but not an electric bill. How do people afford this??
So I am curious - where do you live and how much is your electric bill? Please don't give me your address, just a general location. I am doing research! Lurkers come out - I need to hear from you!

Way to go Texas!

This may not be the absolute best way to support "life" - but at least they are doing something! Texas is going to be voting on a bill to pay pregnant women $500 to choose adoption over abortion. There's more information in this article. I am too tired to coherently think it through - one thing that does immediately come to mind is that women will initiate unwanted pregnancies just for the money. I have heard of worse absurdities than this!

Scrap Happy - My Thoughts of You

I made this scrapbook page in memory of my father-in-law who went to be with Jesus in July of last year. I woke up this morning thinking of him, and had these exact thoughts on my mind. The hutch is because he loved woodworking and in the last year of his life he refinished a hutch just like this one that was his mother's, the cross because he was a Christian - and the son of a Congregational Methodist minister, and the quote because he was an avid gardener and loved to nurture and grow plants and trees of all kinds. BTW - just in case you didn't know - you can click on the image to make it larger so you can actually read the journaling.