Due to a new employer I have new eye insurance, and my preferred chain is not an option. I book an exam with a chain nearby.

After the exam I start looking at glasses. When the girl calls me I start over and she says go ahead and keep looking while she does the paperwork. I ask her to come over when she is done and she says just come back to her desk when I am ready. I find a couple of contenders and go sit where my chart is. Wait awhile, take some snaps of me in the glasses, look at them and go back and find two more choices. I wait at her desk filming myself trying on glasses. Finally she comes back and asks if I found a pair. I say I am so blind I need an outside opinion. By this I mean I want her help like they always did at favorite store. I want to try on the frames and her to tell me if they look good and then I want to discuss which of the ones we both agree look good will work best as bifocals. She says, ok why don’t you just pay for the exam and you can come back later with your friends to pick out a pair of glasses. She tells me it’s $50. I ask if she applied my insurance. She tries to tell me you can only use your insurance once a year, she thinks if you don’t buy your glasses at the same time you get the exam you can’t apply it to both. I tell her she is mistaken. She is insistent and seems to think I am not understanding her. I say it once per service and as I am annoyed I mention I have been buying glasses for 35+ years and I am pretty familiar with the process. She asks someone and they tell her of course you can use part today and part later, that’s why they have separate insurance codes. BTW she is training someone while this is going on.

So she asks me which insurance company and I say new co. She tells the trainee that she thinks it will come up under old co. I tell her it won’t, i used to have old co and it’s a different company. She takes all my info and tries to bring me up in the system. She says my old co insurance expired. I say I used to have old co and now I have new co. She tells the trainee she hates insurance sales and there is no way to figure out how to find it, you just have to know. I Google it and tell new eye insurance is managed by vision insurance services or vis. She says that doesn’t help.

So after she finds it in her computer under vis she asks me if I have ever been there before. I say no but she says I have. She is looking in the computer so I think maybe she is right so I say maybe but not in the trainees lifetime. He says he is 37 so I concede maybe it was, but say, it wasn’t this location, this was still a vacant lot then, but I think I visited a different location in maybe 1987. He says I was only about 3 then, and I add everything wasn’t computerized back then so it’s probably not in there. She is obviously a mix of embarrassed and annoyed because she is probably 22 and I have (intentionally) hit a few under 25 year old buttons by implying she is older than trainee and talking about things that happened before her parents hit puberty. She says, I will just put new customer

She then realizes my insurance is through my employer and ask who I work for. I tell her insurance co. She then defrosts a little and includes me in her conversation with trainee saying, oh if she works in insurance she knows insurance is complicated. Honestly I knew that decades before I worked my current job. She tells him again you just have to know what the code is for each company. He says, there’s no list we can check? she says no, that’s why I told you I need a full day to train you on insurance. I suggest to trainee that he make a list and distribute it. he says he plans to. Her eye kind of twitches. By this point I am over trying to act like I think she knows what she is doing and I am feeling sorry for trainee . When she asks for a $20 co-pay I make her wait while I check the insurance web site to see if it’s the correct amount. I hand her a wadded up 20 I found under my nightstand, so it’s kind of dusty, thank trainee, verify she gave me my prescription and go.

In this story, I was a customer, and a mere witness to the strange goings on. It was the year of Occupy Wall Street. My family was feeling the financial squeeze like many others, so my mother and I decided to pay a visit to the local bread outlet store to pay $1.99 for a loaf that cost $4.99 elsewhere.

As we pulled in, we were concerned and a little alarmed by half a dozen people outside shaking picket signs that screamed about how the government was murdering the lower and middle class Americans with its greed.

The weird thing was, they were standing outside an outlet store, which was just located on the edge of a neighborhood and nowhere near any place where attention would really be paid. No malls, no heavy traffic. Keep note that we were on the OPPOSITE side of the country from where the whole Occupy Wall Street thing was going on.

They shook their signs at our car as it passed, but they (thankfully) made no aggressive moves toward us as we pulled into the driveway and took a parking spot. We entered the store to find an anxious retail worker ringing up another customer and glancing warily outside. Apparently the people just suddenly appeared outside with no rhyme, reason or warning, and the retail worker was the only employee on the premises. (That sounds illegal. Is that illegal?)

The retail worker was looking rather freaked out and I didn’t blame her. With stories of police, riot gear and pepper spray (even then) standing hot and fresh in the news, you didn’t need to be a telepath to know she was mentally screaming; “They don’t pay me enough for this!”

She finished with her current customer right as we arrived at her register with the bread we wanted. She apologized to us, asked us to hold on, and grabbed the phone.

We set our bread down and waited, nodding in an understanding fashion. We reassured her that we didn’t mind waiting, and that it was probably better for all of us to know what as going on.

She dials the non-emergency police line and talks into the phone, reporting the scene that’s happening outside.

Then she utters this phrase in a voice of extreme confusion of disbelief:
“THEY’RE PRACTICING?!”

Yes. Practice picketers.

Through unknown channels, these people had some sort of permission to… practice waving signs around? This was news to all of us.

So now we know: if you want to picket or protest, it is apparently in fashion to practice for it on street corners far from any and all official and professional picketing and demonstrations in order to gain experience points holding up those signs and causing a ruckus. After all, we don’t want you to pull a muscle by picketing to long, too hard, or too enthusiastically. I presume that Olympic Picketers must train for years in order to enter the Professional Picketing Leagues. No picketer may join the Picket Parade without a certain number of hours experience in a non-professional picketing setting. And here I thought any old newbie picketer could pick up a picketing sign and join.

My husband has just gotten home from picking up our seven-month old daughter from daycare. Once I finish my work for the evening, I check on them.

Me: “How are we doing in here? According to the daycare app, looks like she hasn’t had a diaper change in a bit?”

Husband: “Looks like it. Mind taking care of that? I’ve gotta start dinner prep.”

Me: “Sure – all right, kiddo, let’s go check the damage.”

She and I have gotten maybe ten steps when she projectile-vomits over herself, me, and the floor. I yell for [Husband]’s help, and over the next thirty minutes, we get her changed and bathed, I get a shower, and [Husband] cleans off the floor. After we’re all settled, [Husband] and I both agree that neither of us feel like cooking now, and we order dinner from a local place that does Nashville Hot Chicken sandwiches.

When [Husband] comes back from picking up the order, he pulls out a cake slice from the bag and says:

Husband: “It’s for you – consider it a “I’m sorry you got puked on” present.”

I know this man loves me, but extra gestures like this make it even more obvious.

I am the type of person who believes that dreams have a meaning, especially recurring dreams. Lately, one of my dreams is similar, but not quite the same: I keep dreaming I’m married, but they are all different men. I am telling my dad about these recurring dreams, and this happens:

Dad: You’re married to different men? Not at the same time, I hope!

I burst out laughing and assured him that no, I am not married to more than one man in each dream.

This is a story about how a fellow co-worker cost the company we worked at $40K and he got to keep his job. This happened around 2010.

My manager approaches me with an urgent issue to look into, I’m to drop everything I’m doing and figure it out; since I’m the senior Tier 2 tech and I get the hard problems or ones that need immediate attention. The handful of tickets I can’t resolve or need specialty work are moved to the Tier 3 technician and they handle the off-the-wall odd stuff that takes a long time to pinpoint the problem and devise a resolution and if he can’t fix the issue it gets handed off to programming to look into things.

Anyway, I pull up the ticket and read through the initial notes left by the my manager. Apparently a new store location has not been getting credit card sales data reporting to the credit card company for end of day batches and this has been a problem since they opened 3 days ago. The customer here is missing almost $50K from their bank account and need to know why this is happening. The twist is, credit cards are online and functional and approval codes from the credit card company are being supplied. I can connect to the store and do a few “dummy” CC transactions and I get approval codes from the CC company that are legit – I called and confirmed from the CC company that the approval codes provided are tied to the charges I made.

What this means is that credit cards are getting the initial approval from the CC companies that cards are legit and can be charged for payments the customer is requesting – so an approval code is provided to hold the money. Once an end of day is ran, those approval codes are batched out to the credit card companies, matched up to the cards that were used and money is withdrawn from whatever account the cards are tied to. Then that money from the batch process is transferred to the vendor.

However, the batch out process is not completing correctly – it is running, but something is getting lost in the process. In the end, all those approval codes are not getting batched at the end of the day and no money is being pulled from customer accounts to make payment to the vendor. People that have been making purchases from the vendor will see a “pending” charge on their account if they were to check, but after a few days the approval codes expire and the funds are released back to the customer.

I start digging through configuration settings and confirming the CC software is configured correctly and pointing to our customer’s bank account correctly. I had to confirm with the bank if the end of day I ran for the dummy transactions have shown up – they have not. The several dollars of dummy sales I ran are not batching correctly…..huh.

I go back into all the log info and there are no logs. No data is posting to the logs. I test a couple more dummy CC charges and nothing is generating a log. If no logs are being generated, no batch file is actually being generated.

I pull up the work ticket for the store installation job and I see another Tier 2 from second shift name on it. I read through his notes and nothing looks out of the ordinary. So I end up waiting for the Tier 2 tech from second shift and I have him show me exactly how he want through and installed the software.

I found out that he wasn’t installing the software correctly – he needed to follow the instructions on the installation guide. He was installing the software in the wrong folder in Windows and when everything for the CC software generated folders and data in the registry was created, it wasn’t lining up with the folder locations for data to be stored and logs to be generated.

I found how he did this on 4 other stores that he installed a few nights ago, but thankfully those other stores hadn’t officially opened doors yet so we could fix the issue before it became a problem.

I had to go back through and uninstall the CC software on those 5 stores, but with the install being done in the wrong place on the system I also found I had to scrub the registry by hand to get the software to correctly install and function as it should with generating logs and batch files

Our customer ended up being out just shy of $50k, but after working with ownership at my work, they agreed to settling the issue with us paying them $40K to cover lost credit card sales.

Even after mucking up the installation process of the CC software and costing the company $40K, the Tier 2 tech got to keep his job without any kind of repercussions. The only process that changed was myself, one other senior Tier 2 and Tier 3 techs were only allowed to install and configure credit card software.