Castle Magus

"Hi. Here's an episode about some easy(ish) solutions to America's problems."

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I'm trying to recall the last time I held actual, physical money in my hands, and I'm drawing a blank. So yeah, to hell with the penny at the very least, if absolutely nothing else.

And yeah, spending a little more money to prevent fires instead of spending a lot more money to unsuccessfully combat fires that will rage uncontrollably seems like a pretty good idea.

And yeah, again, if I had proper bus service where I live here in NC, which I do not, not even a little bit, I'd probably use that instead of driving everywhere now. I mean, it's what I did for the entirety of the 2004-2013 period that I lived in WA. I drove a vehicle in WA all of one (1) time, and that was a Dodge Grand Caravan that I rented from Hertz for a day to haul crap to the recycling center/dump in Kirkland and to haul a load of old books to sell to Half-Price Books, just before leaving WA forever and moving back to NC.

This is copy/pasted from an email I sent to work a half hour ago:

"Had one of the stupidest dreams I've had in a while last night, which is directly responsible for why I am late. Dreamed I was back in NC in my room at my parents' home, except the bed, nightstand, and clock were the ones from here in WA. People kept waking me up to tell me the most asinine stuff, like hey we're going to such-and-such for lunch or hey there's a TV show coming on in a few hours you might want to see and crap like that. At one point in the dream, I said something like "Well, I'm already awake now, so there's no point to keeping the alarm on" which is apparently when I turned it off irl as well as in the dream. In any case, my alarm didn't come on this morning and I just woke up a few minutes ago. Should be there in 20-30 minutes or so, if the bus is relatively on time."

There wasn't much more to it than that, at least that I can recall. I just remember that I kept looking at the clock and seeing it was around 6-7am and people kept waking me up to tell me the most idiotic, pointless, mundane crap, most of which I don't even remember now. I'm fairly sure that when I was looking at the clock, that was actually me partially awake looking at the clock irl, but which was incorporated into the dream somehow. I know the part with me turning the clock off was part of the dream, but apparently had to have happened irl as well. I was so pissed off when I woke up for real and saw what time it was. I ended up being an hour late for work because of this crap. -_-

In related news, I actually had to run to catch the damn bus, even though I had left early enough that I would have arrived at the stop on time, just because the bus decided to be a minute or two early today. It never fails. If I'm running early, the bus is invariably several minutes late. If I'm running merely on time or a bit late myself, that's when the bus decides to show up early. Ugh.

Needless to say, I have not been left in the best of moods this morning. Oh well, at least it's raining, so I guess it's not all bad.

So, because my credit card had to be cancelled due to fraud on Tuesday, this means that the ORCA card autoload bullshit on Monday apparently failed. Goddammit. Why it didn't actually go through on the day when I actually used the ORCA card, I don't know. Now I have to fucking call them now as well, according to the email I got from them about 30 minutes ago. Just great. -_-

Back in February, my original ORCA card snapped in half length-wise somehow while in my pocket, rendering it unusable, so I ordered a new card. On my old card was still about $20 worth of value on it, so I called them after getting the new card and asked them to transfer the money from the old card to the new one. The guy on the phone said it would take about 10 days (for some reason) to do this.

Fast forward to the first week or so of April. I checked my online account and noticed the money was still on the old card. So I sent them an email about it. Got a response back saying to give them 3 to 5 days.

Fast forward to 3 weeks later. I checked my online account and noticed the money was still on the old card. So I sent them another email about it. Got a response back saying they were "reviewing [my] inquiry and will respond to [me] shortly."

Fast forward to today, yet another full week later. I checked my online account and noticed the money was still on the old card, and also that they'd never responded to me at all, let alone anything resembling "shortly." So, I've sent them yet another email. If I don't get an adequate response this time, I will be calling them again and raising some serious hell about this. It's been over two months now since I've gotten my new ORCA card, and almost $20 has been pointlessly sitting on the old card all this time.

This isn't the first time or even the second time that I've had problems with ORCA, and it's incredibly annoying.

(UPDATE 05-04-2012)

I got a call on my voice mail early this morning from someone at Sound Transit saying that they were looking into this and that they would try to call me back between 11am and 1pm today. It's now almost 4:30pm and nobody has called me back yet (and I couldn't just call the number that called me since it shows up as "Unknown" on my phone). I'm going to give it until next week Monday, and then call them myself.

(/UPDATE)

There are four reasons why I should probably stop trying to catch the 248 in the mornings.

( Behind cut for rantiness )


Note also that I don't normally ride the bus anyway, since I usually just walk to work, given that it's just a mile and a quarter or so. This means that the "past three or four times" is spaced out over a few weeks. Typically, I only try to take the bus when I'm running somewhat late or if it's raining harder than normal or some combination of the two. The fact that the bus is itself rather late most of the time doesn't really help matters at all.

Please, please, please don't just drop your charge off at the bus stop and then leave them to their own devices and, you know, hope they make it to where they need to go, especially when the bus stop at which you leave them is for the bus going in the wrong direction.

As I expected I eventually would, I accidentally overpaid (by 50¢) for a 2-zone bus fare this morning on the way to work when I only needed to pay for the 1-zone. It was mostly because there was a different driver on the 266*, and I was used to the usual driver simply recognizing me as she pulled out of the Transit Center and already having it set to 1-zone when I got on the bus (after only having to tell her the one time when I first started using the ORCA card). Oh well, I'll just consider this as a partial repayment of the several times that I got a free ride due to a coin taker being jammed or broken.

* - And he was a couple of minutes late leaving the Transit Center, to boot. However, since he drove at a normal speed, as opposed to the relatively glacial pace that my usual driver goes, we actually got to my end point stop about a minute or so earlier than usual.

Saw a sign on the bus, and just doubled checked it with the Metro website.

1) They're raising the fare yet again. *sigh*

2) They're doing away with the PugetPasses, meaning I now have to get an ORCA card. *double sigh*

I didn't want to have to get an ORCA card. With that, I now have to worry about making sure the bus driver has the fare set to one-zone every time I get on/off the bus, so that I don't get overcharged for a two-zone fare (which is a very real possibility since the 266 going into Seattle in the morning and coming out of Seattle in the evening is a two-zone fare if you ride the whole trip, but I only ride it from Redmond to Bellevue in the morning and back again in the evening, which is just one-zone). Very annoying. But if I'm going to get an ORCA card, I'd better do it now while it's free, because as of Feb 1, 2010, they're going to start charging $5 for them (apparently in addition to whatever value you put on the card itself). Also, another reason I need to go ahead and do it now is because they won't be selling any more PugetPasses after Dec. 14 at all. The only bright side, I guess, is that I won't have to buy a new PugetPass every month anymore, for what it's worth. I just have to keep this ORCA thing charged up with credit or whatever. *weary sigh*

So, yeah, they're once again charging even more for inversely proportionally crappier service.

Oh, and while I'm ranting about the buses and crappy service... they put up a new time table on the pole at the stop where I get on the bus on the way home from work. They've never had a time table there before recently. And, of course, the times on this time table are completely different than the times that the Trip Planner gives for that same stop and those same buses. The times on the new time table on the pole are far more inconvenient for me than the previous Trip Planner times (which I'm guessing are now out of date). Actually, I got to looking at the time table on the sign again, and it just says "Bus So and So departs from Blah stop at these times", not that it was to arrive at that particular stop at those times, so it's not as bad as I thought. (But I had made a point to look explicitly for something like that before and didn't see it, or at least just didn't notice it. Oh well.) Not, of course, that this really matters, given that the buses never show up at the correct time for either of those time tablesthe Trip Planner schedule, at least in the evening. *deep inhale* *huge sigh*

It stopped snowing an hour or two before work ended, so that was no problem.

The bus being 10 minute early, just as before, was a problem, however. I thought that they'd straightened up their act, since for a while there, the bus had been coming relatively on time. But twice now in just the past week or so, the bus has been 10 minutes earlier than it was supposed to be (according to the Trip Planner), and had been coming 5 or more minutes earlier beyond that. I've sent in yet another complaint about it. There's not much else I can do, aside from rant about it here.

Also, on the student loans front, I think I was viciously attacked one final time from beyond the grave by AES. My sister (co-signer on my Wells Fargo consolidation loan) got a call from them today. She told me about it and I called them back at the number they'd given her. Why they hadn't tried to contact me first, rather than her is unknown to me (even though I asked the dude exactly that on the phone, and he just said that they were going to try me next but that I'd gotten to them first, which didn't actually answer my question, but whatever). Just before I called them, I opened my online account and took a look at it. Turns out my latest payment, due on Feb 27, was overdue, as it was never paid. Why that is, I have no idea, since I set it up to auto-draft way back in November, and until now that had been working fine. Guy on the phone had no idea why it stopped either, except for one thing: an overpayment that had been made to AES by Wells Fargo months ago had FINALLY been repaid to them on February 11, and was showing up as an additional payment on my account. Even though it should not have done so, this payment, for whatever reason, apparently caused my auto-draft setup to be canceled.

I'm being facetious when I say this is the fault of AES, of course, but... yeah. Given all of the other boondoggles to come out of AES, it morbidly amuses me to pretend that this was an intentional attack by them. At any rate, I'm glad to finally see the last of them. Assuming, that is, nothing gets screwed up with my Fed payments, though those seem to be fine now as well, as far as I can tell. There is, however, an overpayment from the Fed to AES which has been cleared from my AES account, but which has not yet shown up on my Fed account, so... I dunno. We'll see, I guess?

You know that bus I'm always complaining about being early? Well, today, it was about 6 minutes late. For me, it was like glory hallelujah I got there in plenty of time to catch it. Well, as we were pulling into Redmond Transit Center, my stop and the last stop for this bus, the only other dude on the bus besides me and the driver goes up to the front and starts complaining.

Dude: "Are you always this late?"
Driver: "No, it depends on traffic."
Dude: "I realize that, but I just want to know if this is a trend because yadda yadda yadda"

I had to get off the bus as quickly as I could to keep from straight out laughing in the dude's face or saying something like "Dude, I wish it would always be late like this, so STFU you dumbass."

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( Student loan rantage within )