Conspiring against me...

[susandennis]

I timed my trip to the pool to coincide with when my friend, Barrie, said she would be there. She wasn't but the timing meant I sat in the worst bridge traffic. On the last half block before my garage, I had to stop and wait for a worker to finish his 'chat' with a truck driver so that driver could move his fucking truck so I could get by. One of the elevators was broken. I shucked one shoe like always but the second one wouldn't come off. The snow turned out to be more drops than flakes and more clear than white.

But all that is behind me. I'll consider it the pre-day. Now the real day starts and it will be just excellent. Thank you. I have a lot of little financial details I am tracking. Refunds, payments, invoices. I do love that doing this is just checking a series of websites. In the olden days, one would wait until a month later when the information came in the snail mail and the first you learned of a problem could be six weeks after it happened and then you had to write a letter or, if they were a modern company, you could call an 800 number and get a clueless operator who said she had fixed it only to find out six weeks later when the next statement arrived that she had not. This way is way better.

Nothing on the agenda today beyond the regular stuff. Just now I think I hear doll bits calling to be put together...

Comments

[mixter11nm.livejournal.com]

I often think back to the "good old days" of old-fashioned typewriters and real carbon copies. I'll take technology any day!

Happy sewing.

[susandennis]

The one that always gets me when I think back was ordering from a catalog.

You got the thing in the mail and made your selection and then you either filled out the order form OR called an 800 number and gave them your credit card number and then waited 4-6 weeks for delivery.

No clue who was going to deliver it when or when your would be charged.

I spent a ton of money that way. Now I totally freak out if I don't have a tracking number. And I would never in a million years give my credit card number to some stranger on the phone.

But, yeah, carbon paper. It makes my fingers dirty just thinking about it.

[roasted-beets.livejournal.com]

I still sometimes phone LL Bean to order something I'm looking at online. They don't ask for my CC# because it's in their computer.

But *mailing in* and order and having no clue when it might show up? Oy vey. Tracking numbers are the best thing ever invented.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Which also reminds me of what making international hotel reservations used to be like: Send a request by mail, including an International Reply Coupon (anyone here remember those?) so they could write back without having to pay international postage rates, and then wait weeks or months to find out if they had space.

Going to a website, or even just sending email, is a whole lot better.

[susandennis]

Doing anything internationally now seems so impossible. Like operating in the blind. Amazing it ever worked at all.