I emulated Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder today by persisting in some relentless positive action. I am not a particular fan of our current Great Lake State governor. His mantra is “relentless positive action” and although I actually understand what he is trying to accomplish, with some of the DRASTIC positive actions he has pushed through since his election, it often seems to me that he is a bulldozer in disguise, spraying collateral damage in all directions. I’m sure one or two of my five readers disagree. I’m not gonna argue today.

More on that some other day. I am not really feeling very positive right now. I won’t talk about yesterday. Nothing really terrible happened. Some good things happened. It was a long day and I didn’t necessarily make all of the right decisions. I mean small personal decisions, not life-changing decisions for other people. In general it’s the same old same old around here.

Today? Better? I could not describe today if I could. Again, it was more or less the same old same old. It was mostly just my own emotional landscape that got dragged through the wringer. I guess that’s legitimate. But there has been one teensy tinesy wee little bit of a conundrum that has been bugging me for a while now and through the teensiest tinesiest wee little bit of relentless positive action, I have solved it. I am resting a bit more comfortably now, knowing that the heat and lucky-shucky will not be shut off at the Squatter’s Paradise.

Oh, not that it *would* be shut off any time soon. But here it is. Ever since The Commander handed over the keys to her checkbook, I have been picking away at moving all of the Squatter’s Paradise and Moomincabin bills over to autopay. Sometimes it’s as easy as just going online and creating an account with something like “kayakwoman” as the user. No ID required, maybe an account number or address or whatever. Other times, I have to impersonate The Commander. It’s okay. I have her permission.

DTE Energy? Not so fast, KW. Why? Well… It’s complicated. I mean, the bill is all friendly: Go green and pay online, just go to this web page and sign up. Roight. But. The bill is in my dad’s name. He died in 2006. So I have gone online to that web page umpteen million times to try to achieve autopay for the Squatter’s Paradise DTE bill. No dice. “We can’t find that account.” “We can’t find that social security number.” Blah blah blah. So every single month, I diligently write a check out of The Commander’s checking account, put it in an envelope with a stamp on it and throw it into the blasted snail mail.

This month? Where’s my mail? Where’s The Commander’s mail? Where’s The Commander’s checkbook? Where’s MY checkbook? I left the checkbook *I* was using to pay Comm-type bills down on the Planet Ann Arbor (how the HECK did I do that?) almost three weeks ago. I did finally find a couple of checkbooks up here but there are NO BLASTED checks in them. I wasn’t even sure where the blasted BILL was until I FINALLY dredged through a big bag of mail today and found it. The good news? Not due until February 1. Whew! The positive action? Got onto The Commander’s PNC account and set up a payment over the internet. Whew!

I’m sure it would take more than one late payment for the heat / lucky-shucky to get shut off here at the Squatter’s Paradise but I do not think that a bunch of fake faaarrrplace logs would do much to heat the place up and I DO need the derned internet. But I did figure it out and now I am not sure why it took me so blasted long! I, uh, *work* in online banking…

Oh, maybe you are wondering something like, “Why doesn’t the baggy old kayak woman just CALL DTE Energy?” Why???? Sigh… “If you want to report blah blah blah, press 1.” “If you need assistance with your bill, press 2.” Etc., etc., ad nauseam. My problem is more complicated than simply pressing a button. I need a person who can use fuzzy logic to help me sort this out. What do you think my chances are of finding a customer “service” rep with fuzzy logic? Get it? Roight.

G’night. Sorry about the short incomprehensible post last night. Sorry about the long incomprehensible post tonight.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.