Living The Dream: Who Hires These People?

So the IT saga continued as my work Blackberry would not connect to the internet, therefore hindering me from accessing my e-mail, therefore defeating the purpose of me having a Blackberry. After 10 days of trying different things, most of which included taking the battery out and putting it back in (SERIOUSLY! Is that all they teach you at IT school??), Bill* gave up and told me I was on my own. Apparently, this is acceptable behavior at my place of work. Days earlier, I sent a grant application to my GRANTS MANAGER to complete and submit, and she e-mailed me back flatly saying,"I'm not doing this." I was unaware that not doing our job was an option. They should add that to the handbook.

Back to Bill from IT deciding that he didn't want to work on my IT problem anymore, he told me 'you'll have to go to Sprint and see if they can fix it.' Fine. I'll deal with it myself. After getting to the Sprint store and waiting in line for twenty minutes, I'm told that the 'blackberry guy' is at another store across town, but is heading to the store I am at and will be here in about fifteen minutes. I can go wait in the blackberry line behind 6 other customers. If I were running a business that saw customers needing help with a specific product on a daily basis, I might think of hiring more than 1 person per city who knows how to fix said product, but that's just me.

An hour and a half later, as it is finally my turn with the nice Sprint Blackberry technician, I explain the problem and hand him my phone. He looks at the phone, then back to me, then back to the phone. "Great", I think, another idiot for me to deal with today. And then in a surprising turn of events, he said to me, "Ma'am, you don't have an account with Sprint. Your service is through U.S. Cellular. You'll have to ask them for help."

Another hour at U.S. Cellular, it turns out that Bill never ACTIVATED MY ACCOUNT and that is why I have no service. I drive back to work, login to my desktop, and find an e-mail from Bill saying "Actually our service is through U.S. Cellular, not Sprint. My bad. Hope you get this in time." Yeah Bill, I figured that out, and no I didn't get it in time. Know why? Because my Blackberry that you've been working on for a week and a half wasn't freaking activated!!! Can we maybe move that to the top of our troubleshooting handbook??

So technology slowly working itself out, I headed home for a nice relaxing weekend at my sweet new apartment on the water. As I started my day cleaning and doing some laundry, I noticed that it was getting very, very dark inside. So I stepped onto my porch and saw this progression of weather:

10:05am - clouds rolling in