Self.Newsletter - Issue #21

I can see the wire from here

I haven’t relocated my residence in just about 8 years now, so it’s been fun and informative to discover what works and what does not (so easily) nowadays. In a tech-centric world one might think that some of these things can be handled online with some ease. Maybe not.

Here are some fun times thus far:

I got a free space not so far from either the current or new spots, to store a chunk of my belongings locally in the move-in timing gap. I made the reservation weeks ago, 4 days prior I received a call that there are no spaces available. As this is an integral part of my move plan, the fire drill had thus begun.

Luckily, I got patched through to U-Haul Corporate when I called a closer U-Haul location, and had a very helpful chat with a person who, as he put it, “has only one job, to make sure this gets fixed.” I have to say, that is not a bad way to interact with a customer mid-fire-drill.

I attempted to do this online using a Firefox browser (my main browser now, disclaimer I worked at Netscape) but after entering all of the transfer (turn-off, turn-on dates and new service location, other minor details), there is a 2-factor auth modal dialog which halted all progress. It appears the Continue element was not completely functional using Firefox. Since the Move Service work order is not saved, I lost it all.

I contacted support via the onsite chat feature, and “Jesse” suggested that I use Explorer.

I mentioned this on Twitter, and NV Energy tweeted at me to DM them the details. They suggested that they could turn off the 2-factor step, then asked me for my SSN. On Twitter.

I ended up using Chromium and that worked, it’s unfortunate that that is the world we live in, but what can we do but demand better at every turn…

This was not a great experience until I happened upon a customer retention person who was actually tech savvy and leaned in to my own technical background and discussion. Kind of a last-minute save there, Cox. I rarely have great experience with the front line tech support people at Cox, but I can say that I do stumble upon helpful people there often enough so that I sort of count on it.

Technically, the normal mail hold is 30 days, at which point the USPS website suggests forwarding for periods longer than that. This is where knowing my postal carrier for a few years comes in handy. Belinda is going to hold my mail until I move in to the new spot, which is more than 40 days of mail hold. This is the same carrier who brought me any oversized packages during the pandemic since she knows I don’t own a car (so picking them up at the post office would have been a minor pain).

Possibly the worst part of the move is that she does not handle the new spot. She is retiring in 2 years though…

The leasing office folks here where I live at present are quick to turn over, so I have no idea who has been working there for, say, 2021, but in general they are not great at communicating within their organization. They are not on top of what their Entrata portal does, they don’t respond usefully to messages submitted via Entrata, they prefer to send emails about sock drives and then post notices like “Our office will be closed on the day you are moving out, Dan” on the door of the office, as if they are inspired by Martin Luther perhaps.

They had no idea, apparently, that their leasing manager had presented me with the 60-day no-cause non-renewal notice nearly 60 days ago, so because I had not submitted a termination notice, the payment portal listed a full month plus a rent increase plus a month-to-month fee, and then the person who presented me with the corrected partial amount did not know that Entrata enables partial payments (because they are not going to update the amount due in the resident portal).

I did not ask if anyone in the office here had worked for NV Energy previously.

Perhaps there is someone somewhere who has not felt the impact of the pandemic, hurricanes, fires, and other disasters (I’m looking at you, Afghanistan), but yipes, the next thing has to be monsters attacking, or maybe alien monsters. When there’s nothing one can do about the chaos which surrounds, what better to do than duck and blog (and take some selfies, which is where my social media skillz break down severely).

Just when you would think that global communication pathways would help, they do not. I’m not saying anything new here, I just wanted to put a pin in that, as an ongoing concern shared by less than half of the population. In lieu of monsters, maybe its the TSA Instagram account we should fear…

I would insert an opengraph-friendly link here, but Instagram continues to suck, like a monster or an alien or maybe a monster alien, when it comes to being a good participant on the internets.

I’ll write more about this after my next Quoggling Sand podcast, which I’m sure will contain some references to the disappointing state of affairs when it comes to Revue tech support, online documentation, and general goodness. It’s still more featurefull than Substack, but both are, at the end of the day, disappointing.

You are one of the few subscribers so if and when I do migrate to self-hosted, there won’t be a huge throng of disgruntled readers to placate. I really want to have a capable engagement platform for some other projects though, and I’m finding more and more of the experience as I described above with, say, NV Energy than with U-Haul.

Moving is not so fun, but somebody has to do it. Back to work.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash