User Profile: Travis Wayne Brantner

Sunday, November 1, 2009 @ 3:19 pm

Subject: Disregard All Automated Messages

Have you ever felt like God's trying to tell you something before?  Maybe not that he hates you or anything but you're obviously doing something wrong and he's trying to catch your attention to change it.  Because I definitely think that may be the case with my life lately.

You see, the past 2 weeks about have been pretty lousy.  In fact, I may have touched on this in my last blog.  I got deathly sick and my computer died on me.  But things haven't really changed.  The Washington DC trip wasn't bad, but we had some mishaps.  When we were meeting with the World Wildlife Foundation, a fire drill happened and we ended up standing outside for about 15 minutes.  Some random mailman also yelled at us because we were standing next to the building rather than walking far away (because obviously we weren't told it was just a drill ahead of time or that our speaker from the WWF knew ahead of time and led us there *note the sarcasm*).  Then when we went to see Bill Shuster (who I have issues with from beforehand, but we won't get into that right now), the room we were given (there were 50 of us) was too small and he was running late from another meeting.

So when he did walk up to us, he decided we should break for lunch and meet back where we'd hopefully have a bigger room.  He asked our teacher 'What are your plans for lunch?'  Our teacher explained we were splitting up for lunch and then free to visit what we wanted until it was time to leave.'  Representative Shuster then asked 'do you have a point to meet up after lunch?'  Our teacher again explained that after this we were breaking up and only to meet back at the bus at 3PM, that we weren't staying together.  However, that apparently didn't answer the question 'do you have a meeting point after/for lunch?'

I kind of got the opinion that Shuster was just going to cancel the meeting then until our teacher threw in 'these are 50 potential voters.'  I've never seen someone so driven before in my life!  Within like 5-10 minutes, we had a new room to meet in.

I did get to explore the Air and Space museum a bit, which was awesome.  I also discovered the 20 dollar double quarterpounder at McDonalds (I'm kidding, it was actually about $9.23...seriously).

The fun then has continued into this week.  When we dropped my computer off at Best Buy, the guy told us that we'd receive an automated call telling us when my computer was done and ready to pick up.  Then we'd have 5 days to pick it up.

We've received that call twice now and neither of those times was it ready to be picked up.  The first time when we went in the guy told us that they really just needed me to take in the plug/adapter/charger thing and my Windows CD, which they assured us they wouldn't need when we dropped it off.  So we dropped that stuff off and the guy we gave it to said it'd be ready the next day (today) and if we didn't get a call to call in.

This morning at 10AM, we received the call.  'You're stuff is ready for pick up, blah blah blah!'  So we went out and gave it to the geek guy only to have him return and say 'it's no where ready to be picked up.'  And we explained we received a call that it was.  He then told us the call was to verify that they had the computer and were working on it.

This is kind of scary since we dropped it off a week and a half ago.  The other call must just have been some prank or something too since they hadn't called to confirm they received it.  Apparently this means that Fat Joe was carrying our computer to check it in when he dropped one of his Cheetos and bent down to pick it up, setting my laptop on the floor in the process.  Somehow, it got kicked under a table and they didn't find it until today when the intern tripped or something and they decided to let us know they had it.  And obviously Best Buy is some small company run out of a van with a guy in a trench coat standing outside of it, so they can only afford one automated message that says 'your item is ready for pick up.'  Or perhaps they split the message up and in English it says 'your item is ready for pick up' but then in Spanish it says 'or this is to confirm we received it.'

My mother explained that last night when we dropped the charger and disk off they told us it'd be done today in the afternoon and if we didn't receive a call to call in, it'd probably be done.  The guy then started again saying 'no, it was to confirm that we received the computer and that we had it to work on and that you dropped it off.'  Which at this point I jumped in saying 'a call saying 'come pick your computer up' means 'we have it?'  He didn't know what to say to that and said we'd get a call when it was done.

However, I think my biggest turn off on the whole ordeal was rather than being nice, I got the opinion that the guy was yelling and when he was saying all this, he was saying it to my 61 year old mother.  So besides being lucky that he can walk right now, he was yelling at my 61 year old mother.  That really ticks me off.  Because the guy was a complete jerk about it from the second we began explaining and then continued to getting more and more obnoxious.

So the lesson to be learned here is obviously when your teachers say your homework is due next week, they don't mean next week.  Disregard that message.  In fact, disregard all automated messages too because they aren't right.  If you get a call that they're shutting your electricity off, then disregard it too.  You wait until you talk to a real person, and even then you can ignore that because it's all lies.  It also means that I'm never shopping at Best Buy again.

Honestly, I think I'm missing a career in stand up comedy.  Those guys have bad things happen all the time, but get paid to complain about it on a stage surrounded by people in a bar or club.

Until next time (and when I say that I don't mean next time, because I'm completely lying!)

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