Remember [1] my doubtfulness about the replacement for my lost ATM card ever making it to St. Vincent? Well, it turns out that the people in the Customer Service department at my bank didn't believe me when I said that no one in SVG has a physical street mailing address, just a P.O. box, so they mailed my replacement card home instead. Thanks guys, that does me a lot of good there. Their big reason why they couldn't mail it to my P.O. Box? "No one will be there to sign for it." Well, guess what? There was no one home at the time my replacement card was delivered, and a lack of a signature didn't prevent them from leaving it unattended on a porch. Funny thing is, if they had sent it to my P.O. Box here in St. Vincent, they would have gotten a signature from one of the secretaries at the school to whom all express packages for students are delivered. Oh well, I guess that is what happens when you let someone with a G.E.D. run things.

Today I experienced another Customer Service debacle with my cell phone company. Since the beginning of the term in January, my phone has been on a "Seasonal Suspend" plan for $5.95/mo to allow me to keep the account open, as well as my phone number. Usually, customers are only allowed to be on this plan for 3 months out of a year, but exceptions were made for me, so I usually ended up on the "Suspend" plan for 10-11 months out of the year while I was away at school. The company's generosity ended this month when I was automatically put back on the $39.95/month plan. When I emailed the Customer Service department, it took them about a week for them to realize that they needed to have voice contact to straighten things out and extend my "Suspend" plan the extra month and a half I would still be out of the country. The first agent was great, and actually called me long distance, since the local phone company here doesn't allow toll-free access to 800/888/etc. numbers. Unfortunately, he couldn't help me, and as usual, I was transferred to about 3 different people before I got to someone who could authorize an extension of the "Suspend" plan. However, he told me he would not be able to give me the extra month and a half, because my account has been suspended for so much of the last two years that the company was "loosing money." Tell me how a company can loose money by getting paid every month for no services being provided other than refraining from hitting the delete button on my account in the database. Now I get to pay a lot more for services not being utilized. Well, I could look at the bright side of things - it's only one extra month, and my phone will be ready to use when I get home (no waiting for re-activation).