Procrastination, Blogging software, Dodo idiots, Savvytel

Procrastination is a funny thing. Last night, once I finally got caught up with all the things I was behind on from being out with a cold last week, I decided I'd do a blog update. I was looking forward to it. I put a couple of albums into my music player and had just the right mood going... and then decided to find a 'blog utility' for my computer so I wouldn't have to use the web browser just to add a blog entry. This led to a long series of installing 'dev' packages so I could install the latest version of 'kicker-kblogger' - a KDE based blog utility for the panel. In the end it took all evening and I still wasn't finished so it had to wait until today. Once it was all installed, it didn't work. Oh, it'd run, but the 'update' button to send any text I'd written was greyed out. I looked on the web, made sure it had all the right info, and still no go. So I ditched that and tried a couple of other applications. I've finally settled on one named 'Drivel'. Great name! It's not to fancy but does the job and I can even edit previous posts.

What annoys me though is that Blogger.com / Blogspot.com made a switch about the time I started the Random Experiments blog to a new 'Api' (way of working) and that was AGES ago, and yet there doesn't seem to be any Linux/Ubuntu blogging applications that use the new api. For me, this means that if I use Drivel to upload a blog entry, I still have to go edit the entry with my web browser if I want it to have a title. It's just a little thing, really, but that's the annoyance. It IS a little thing. It shouldn't need me to go and fix it. Ah well.

I last wrote on Tuesday, and I complained about the cold that I had. It got much worse on Wednesday, and I spent most of the day in bed. Well, not really in bed, but certainly not doing much. My whole day pretty much centred around finding interesting games to add to my mobile phone and then installing them. The plan being that I'd top up my phone with fun things to play with, then go lie down and play games. Aside from the fact it took me all afternoon to find, download to my computer and then install the games, my plan worked. I didn't get to the 'playing' stage until around 6pm or so.

Wednesday's are Rod's long day at school so he didn't get home with until around 8pm. By that time I was feeling especially crook. All day I'd been quite dizzy whenever I got up, but by this stage, my head was spinning even though I was lying down in bed. We normally get KFC's hot wings for tea on Wednesdays, and I only managed to eat two of them and a handful of chips. Eventually the head spins got so bad, I lost my cookies... quite a rare thing for me. However from that point on I felt a bit better.

Both the RDNS nurse who'd been in early in the morning and Rod urged me to make a doctor appointment, so first thing Thursday morning I rang and got an appt for 5:40pm the same day. I definitely felt better, but I really felt that my ears should be checked considering how dizzy I'd been feeling.

One of my little 'projects' for Thursday was dealing with Dodo. Dodo was my mobile phone company, and are actually rated the worst when it comes to customer service and satisfaction. I had a pre-paid phone account, and the only problem I've had with them until recently was when I wanted International Roaming put on my phone for when I went to the USA last year. I got to the states and didn't have roaming turned on as I'd requested so I had to buy a different sim card to use over there for my phone. I've stayed with them because they had the cheapest call rates. This changed recently to a stupid plan where the rates went up to about the same as what most other places charge and the 'special' they offered was free hours when you talked to other Dodo users. I ended up with 11 free hours I'd never use, and certainly wasn't getting value for money with the newer rates. I'd shopped around and decided to go with their post-paid, $9.90 a month cap plan where I'd have $50 in credit to use each month.

One of the most annoying things about Dodo is that they outsource their customer support to people in India. There's something just so off-putting when your call (finally) gets answered and the person on the other end says in a really thick Indian accent 'Hello, my name is Glen. How can I help you today'. Nothing wrong with that, aside from the accent being so thick you have to think hard to understand what was said, and 'my name is Glen' is obviously a moniker. It's more likely to be something 20 syllables long that'd be unpronounceable. This of course after being on hold for several minutes while a recording interrupts painful sounding 'music' to remind you that your call is important to them. Which is after having had the call drop out about 4 times before finally getting far enough to be on hold.

On the 24th of August, I rang Dodo to get a post-paid account. I was told that there was about a 15 minute wait to speak with a sales person, but that I could leave my name and number and someone would ring me back. Nope, they never rang me back. So I called again the next day and ordered the post-paid account. Because this is a completely different plan, I'd need a new SIM card for my phone, and was told it should arrive in 5-7 days. Time passed, and when I had only received a 'terms of service' letter from them instead of the new SIM, I rang them again on the 5th of September. I was told that the reason I hadn't received the SIM yet was because there was some confusion about my date of birth, in particular the year. For some reason they had '51' instead of '61'. Now they had the correct info from me, I should have the SIM within 5-7 days. More time passed, and Thursday I decided I'd had enough. Dodo had charged our credit card for the first month's use, but I still didn't have the new SIM. Meanwhile, I only had about $4 left in my pre-paid account so from the end of August I'd had to be especially careful not to use up my phone credits. I'd found a company that offered the same rates I had been paying in the past, and decided I'd go with them. But first I had to get the idiots at Dodo to cancel the post-paid account order and refund our card. So Thursday, still not feeling that great, I rang them to cancel the account and was told the reason I hadn't received the SIM this time was because they had a problem porting my phone number to it. Right. In every previous conversation with them, I'd told them I was already a pre-paid customer. So they needed to port it from Dodo Pre-Paid to Dodo Post-Paid. I reckon this was a load of bunk anyway as you don't port a phone number before sending out the SIM. This is always done after the new account is set up and working... ie with the new SIM in the phone. I told 'Glen' this was rather irrelevant as I wanted to cancel the processing of the post-paid account and have my card refunded. It took several tries before he understood this (or so I thought) and he passed me off to someone else who was supposed to do the cancellation. This guy had an even thicker accent and was very hard for me to understand. I had to have him repeat a sentence about 3 times before I finally understood that he wasn't talking about the cancellation of my account, but instead was trying to tell me that he'd make it so I'd receive the SIM card 'quicker'. I blew my top. I had to use poor English, short syllables and repeat myself several times, loudly: "Cancel Account! Bad Service!". Hey, he finally got the point. I was then left on hold for several more minutes and when he came back he told me my credit card had been reversed and that the post-paid account process was can canceled. Phew!

So my next call was to the new company I'd found, named Savvytel. I wasn't planning to order a new SIM to be mailed to me, I just wanted to know if they had outlets where I could buy a starter pack which would include SIM card and a bit of credit. My first impression was one of glee - the person on the other end was Australian, and she spoke english. Amen! She was able to direct me to a local shop that had the starter kits without any problems. What a breath of fresh air.

As I'm telling Rod about the whole saga, my phone beeped a reminder that my Dodo pre-paid account was going to need a recharge by Friday if I didn't want to loose the credits I had in there. Well the plan was to use up my $4 in credit and then switch over to the new Savvytel account. So that meant we had to get the starter pack as soon as possible. We did that, and the man at the counter gave me good solid advice - he told me once I had the SIM and working to delete a couple of the 'support' phone numbers as those are where the 'catch' is with this company. It's better to call them on a landline for support. That's OK, because that's what I normally do anyway. I was impressed with him for offering the information though.

Later in the evening, it was time for me to use up my $4 in credits with Dodo pre-paid so I could make the switch to Savvytel. The reason for the wait was so my sister Diane was awake in Atlanta so I could talk with her. It took 15 minutes to use up the $4, though, which I was pretty impressed with. It should be even cheaper to ring the USA with my new account. This is good, because I'll be a granny soon and will need to be able to ring the USA without going broke.

The Savvytel website said it would take 24-48 hours for my old phone number to be ported to the new account, and it hadn't happened by the end of Friday so I sent Email on Saturday to ask if this would take place on the weekend or if it'd be Monday. Having never had a reply back from a telecoms company Email query to date, I didn't really expect an answer, but a couple hours later I had a reply from 'David' letting me know they'd received the port request and that it would take place on Monday. Really. A reply to my query... on the SAME DAY! I'm amazed!

Well I have a lot more to write about but I really feel like this is probably enough for now as it's getting near bedtime. Tomorrow I'll write about my doctor appointment and a few other things I have jotted down.