Good grief, where to start...
Remember this cat?
Well, two days after my last blog post, Summer's rear-end exploded all over me when I picked her up from the floor. There was still a deep-tissue infection below the nicely healed top layer, and it just sat there and festered. There are no words to accurately describe the smell that eminated from this cat, so I won't even try. Suffice to say the stench was so bad that I immediately packed her up and took her to the emergency after hours vet clinic rather than waiting 14 hours and taking her to the normal vet.
They kept her overnight and had to do surgery to remove dead and/or infected tissue. The hospital stay and two rounds of antibiotics they gave her were $726. The three follow-up visits and extra round of antibiotics to my regular vet were $34...
So, four weeks, four vet visits, three rounds of antibiotics, and $750 later, she's healing up well.
Ancient bill rears it's ugly head
DH had visited the emergency room in early '04 after a traffic accident. He gave them the insurance information, paid the co-pay, and all was well. Right?
Wrong! The day after Summer's explosion we got a call from a collection agency. Turns out the insurance company took too long to process the claim and the hospital never got paid. For whatever reason we never heard word one about it until now, over three years later.
Because of the situation we negotiated a payment for half of the total and insisted upon a letter that this payment would have the debt marked paid in full on the credit report. Got the letter, gave them $595.
June turned into a very expensive month...
Had to testify in court
Not really a big deal, except I was asked to be a witness for my parents divorce hearing at the end of June. To make things super weird, the three of us had lunch together afterwards. What the foo...
Ran away to Asheville
So, since things in life were getting weirder and weirder, I took some extra vacation time around the 4th. Even though June was expensive, I still have vacation money saved every month, and we like to take a couple of mini-vacations throughout the year. Plus, we had concert tickets. We enjoyed the Smashing Pumpkins show, but I can say that at 29 I'm getting too old for this crap. I'm such a geezer...
Opened a store on Etsy
Since I've starting making incense again for my local customers, I had a ton of it drying and needing a good home. It takes the same amount of time to make hundreds of sticks instead of fifty, so I always make a larger batch. Things are going well so far.
The most surreal thing of all
Life was getting back to normal. I was thinking about my blog, and feeling bad because I had neglected it. Since I felt bad about it, I kept putting off posting a new entry, thinking I had to come up with something really great to make up for all the time I'd missed.
Am I the only one that's done that?
Well, I huge wakeup call on Friday.
I didn't check my email on Thursday. Don't ask why, I'm sure there was a reason but I don't remember it. When I logged in on Friday, there was an email from a reporter from ABC in my personal inbox asking for an interview. Sure... My spam-o-meter was ringing off the charts.
Then I checked the email for my hosting company. The same person had filled out the contact form there, again asking for an interview. Curiosity got the best of me, so I did some Googling.
You could have knocked me over with a feather. The guy was legit.
Even more surreal? He wanted to interview me about a post I had made here on my blog from the beginning of May '
So Friday afternoon I did a half hour phone interview with ABC.com about what it was like to be a customer service rep. Surreal doesn't even begin to cover it... The article is supposed to come out at some point today. When it does, I'll edit this post to include a link.
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EDIT: Here's the link to the article on ABC.com. The reporter had me as Tina Beana throughout the whole thing, so I emailed him to get it corrected. Who would actually name their kid Tina Beana?
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So, there you go. My life is surreal, and I'm one of the world's biggest blogging slackards. I promise, I'm going to try to be better about this. After all, you see what happens in life when I don't blog like I'm supposed to?
July 16th, 2007 at 04:35 pm 1184603719
July 16th, 2007 at 04:42 pm 1184604161
After the surgery they had to staple everything back together, and it kinda looked like someone tore her tail off and stapled it back on. My sister nicknamed her Franken-Heiney!
July 16th, 2007 at 04:53 pm 1184604786
How are the mutant tomatoes?!?!?
Hope Franken-Heiney heals up quickly.
July 16th, 2007 at 04:53 pm 1184604832
July 16th, 2007 at 04:57 pm 1184605026
It made it to week 11 with no issues, but had to go into the compost bin shortly after. Scary thing is: you can still see it sitting in my compost heap. From a distance, it looks perfectly fine at week 14. GAH!
Franken-Heiney is doing well so far. We took her cone off on the third, and she groomed for a couple of hours straight!
July 16th, 2007 at 05:13 pm 1184605994
Can I admit that I'm totally jealous?? ABC.. that's pretty awesome. Big Congrats!!
It seems you had a pretty crazy couple of weeks. Hope everything turned out alright for you and the hubby.
July 16th, 2007 at 05:25 pm 1184606738
July 16th, 2007 at 09:59 pm 1184623192
July 16th, 2007 at 10:32 pm 1184625132
++ for the LOLCATz reference.
Sorry to hear about your parent's situation.
Glad you had a good time on your vacation.
Oh, and I'm sure you know how they found you, seeing as how the blogs are spidered and all.
Surreal indeed.
July 17th, 2007 at 12:05 am 1184630726
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=3381382&page=1
And yes, BA, while I'm aware of how they found my blog, I'm at a loss for how it made them contact me.
OK, never mind. I just did a search for 'customer service' and confessions, and my blog post comes up first out of 695,000. Ironically, the ABC article is number 4...
July 17th, 2007 at 12:46 am 1184633180
you write very well.
thanks for the link you provided, to the abc interview!
i am sorry to hear that your job can be so terribly stressful.
July 17th, 2007 at 03:10 am 1184641834
So sorry about your kitty, but I'm glad to hear she's doing better.
Very, very cool about the ABC article!
July 17th, 2007 at 04:14 am 1184645652
(Glad kitty is okay!)
Now that you are a big star, will you still love us?
July 17th, 2007 at 04:28 am 1184646493
And Boomeyers: I love you all, I'm just a slack a$$ bum when it comes to keeping my hobbies in order. Bah! I need to get a daytimer or something just to schedule my online activities. Not for work, mind you, cause that would just be too normal... =/
July 17th, 2007 at 06:41 am 1184654494
July 17th, 2007 at 08:57 pm 1184705852
July 19th, 2007 at 05:22 am 1184822576
July 19th, 2007 at 03:59 pm 1184860746
Sorry to hear about your kitty and good to know she's on the mend. Seems like you have had a lot on your plate lately but happy to know that in all you were able to get away for a while. I think that was a completely mentally and physically thing to do.
I was just looking at your tomatoes on your last blog. Don't worry about how these people find you Tina. They're probably members here and are reading your blogs. Remember, that Jeffrey is now writing for TheStreet.com and that gets a lot of readers as well. I have also received an Email from a place and yes, it was legit.
Glad to have you back.
September 21st, 2007 at 12:00 pm 1190376034
September 27th, 2007 at 03:46 am 1190864796
March 29th, 2008 at 03:24 am 1206761096