Crappy Evening. Just Crappy.
Bah! Yesterday evening sucked.
The entire day was somewhat backwards. My time spent at the office was really quite pleasant. I got a lot of stuff accomplished, it was quiet due to the fact that the two people who most often bother me were out of town, and nothing evil happened. As soon as I went home, though, fate caught up with me. And it didn’t take long either; it all started at the gas station on the way home.
I ran the credit card through the pump as usual, but the computer responded: “See Cashier.” Oh, I just love that. So I went in. Waited in the line. Got up there and told the cashier the story. Told them I know that this card works. The cashier said, “It looks like your card was rejected.” She took it and ran it through her machine at the register, and it was approved. Weird, we thought. Some kind of fluke. So I took it back outside and tried it again. “See Cashier,” said the pump. RAGE! I went back in, waited in the line again, and asked the cashier to hold the card while I fill up the tank, then ring it up indoors. Did that. Total elapsed time spent at the gas station: Fifteen minutes.
Got home, turned on the computer and decided to play the copy of Halo for the PC that I had just acquired. (I’ve played through and beaten Halo on the Xbox already, but was just reading the novelization of the game on my way to and from Detroit last weekend, and that got me in the mood to play it again. So I picked up the PC version to give it a shot.) As the game was installing, I noticed that a new version of the Omega-optimized ATI Catalyst video drivers had come out, so I decided to install them before playing.
Here’s where I made my mistake. I decided not to uninstall my previous Omega drivers first. Omega says you don’t have to, and back when I was using nVidia cards, I could always just install drivers on top of drivers. So I decided to try it. Got done, then tried to run Halo. The game wouldn’t even start. It reported that it could not initialize Direct3D at all, and that I should check the DirectX diagnostic utility. So I checked it. There were no problems. The tests ran successfully. But Halo still would not start.
So off I went, uninstalling all the video drivers, rebooting to safe mode, running DriverCleaner and CabCleaner. Since the drivers I had just installed were a recent leak of a version newer than Catalyst 3.8, I suspected that perhaps they weren’t stable and decided to run the previous version of Omega’s drivers instead. So I installed those.
But now I had another damn problem. Omega’s drivers enable a few custom resolutions that don’t come with the normal Catalyst drivers, one of which is 1360×1020, my resolution of choice. (My monitor gets blurry at 1600×1200, and 1280×1024 is not a standard 4:3 aspect ratio so everything looks stretched out.) The drivers I had just installed did not enable 1360×1020—it was gone. In fact, as I started playing around with the resolution selector, other resolutions disappeared right before my eyes, until 1024×960 was the highest I could get. Thoroughly perplexed, I discovered I was going to have to uninstall and run DriverCleaner and CabCleaner again.
So I did that. Installed those leaked drivers again, the ones I had first tried. Got my 1360×1020 back. And finally, this time, Halo worked right off the bat. By this time it was 9:00 and I hadn’t eaten dinner yet.
But now I had another problem. The sound keeps cutting out during Halo’s cutscenes! Son of a bitch!!! So to Google’s newsgroup search I went. I found evidence that other people were having this same sound problem, but no one had managed to find a solution yet (the game did just come out, after all). I decided to start at the most logical place, and went to Creative Labs’ website to update my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 drivers. But—you guessed it—there was a problem. Creative’s website was down. Well, the product-pushing, marketing-based front end was up, but as soon as you tried to download drivers or enter the support department, IE returned its infamous “Page cannot be displayed” BS. Sigh.
Decided to forget the fucking game for the night and go eat. Was going to have hamburgers, but I forgot that the burger meat was in the freezer. Ran it through the defroster in the microwave for a while until I could separate the patties from one another, then I put them on the gas grill outside. The grill refused to light. What the fuck? This has never happened before. With both burners open, I repeatedly fired the ignitor, and nothing seemed to be happening…then suddenly, SHOOM! A huge fireball leaps out of the grill at me as the ignitor finally lights up. Fortunately I was expecting that what with all the gas building up, so I was leaning pretty far away from the grill when this happened, so all that ended up happening was me feeling the heat from the flames. Jesus. I suppose next time that happens I’ll light it with the lid closed.
After accidentally leaving the burgers on the grill a little too long, I finally sat down to eat while watching the “Goliath” episode of Knight Rider on DVD. My wife came home shortly thereafter, having picked up the mail from the box on her way, and of course, there was more insanity waiting for us there. First off, the investment firm at which I have an account with a paltry amount of money in it keeps sending me statements for an older account out of Michigan that I closed last year. Every month the balance is always $0 BECAUSE THE ACCOUNT IS CLOSED! Last night, we received THREE statements on this closed account, one for every address I’ve ever lived at since I had the account. I am so sick and tired of this crap. My wife and I decided to call the investment firm, close ALL of our accounts, cash out everything and dump it in the bank up the street. I’m so sick to death of investment firms. I’m not “investing” anything, the people there don’t care about my tiny little account because they have too many millionaire clients, and the less money in my account, the more of their retarded “service fees” they charge me. So I’m putting an end to the investment stumpfucking.
Secondly, there was also a bill from our insurance company which had gone up fifteen dollars. I called the company today and apparently they have been so busy and shorthanded lately, they have had people from other national offices helping them out with their paperwork. One of these people screwed up ours, because they don’t know us or our account. I had called last week (before I bought the Formula) asking for some kind of proof of insurance that would be valid for ONE DAY in case I bought the car, so I could drive it to Detroit and park it. What did they do, without telling me? Added the car to the policy so now I’m paying for full insurance coverage, full-time, on a car that’s sitting in a garage 1600 miles away. Now I have to somehow figure out whether to suspend the coverage or cancel it entirely, all while I’m getting insurance quotes from other companies, AND simultaneously not having any idea when the car is going to be brought to Florida because we can’t fucking get a hold of the guy who drives the truck.
I’m about at my wit’s end with this stuff. Leave it to the red tape of insurance cocksmokers to throw the ultimate cahoney wrench into the whole mess. Researching, inspecting and buying the car, oh that was easy. Or at least, it was nothing compared to this. We’ve only been with our current insurance company for two months, but I’m considering leaving and going to Geico, assuming I can get a better rate. The customer service is absolutely in the toilet. Our agent is an incredibly nice lady, but when she’s not available and the people who pick up the phone refuse to let you speak to her or leave a message (which has happened to me), you can count on getting screwed royally. Do I need to put up with that, given everything else in my life?
So the simple contents of yesterday’s mail have got me set off on a crusade to simplify my life. Cut the fucking investment banking bullshit. Fire the broker, write me a big ol’ bank check and deposit that Mary-Mother-of-Christ thing in a savings account. SIMPLE. EFFECTIVE. And no “service fee” or “transaction fee” or “balance fee” or “we need new pencils fee” or any of that other BULLSHIT that they foist on people because everybody down here is so goddamn rich, they’re just expected not to notice or care about a few bucks here and there. So I want out of it, and I want out of it now. And as for the insurance company, I just want to get to 16 months from now so I can turn 25 and watch my rates go through the floor. Then it won’t have to be a constant claw & scratch for the cheapest rate.
And that’s my tale of a shitty evening. Wow, you made it all the way through to the end. Notice how my choice of diction became increasingly incendiary as the paragraphs marched on. Well, we’re at the end of the whole rant now, so you can just relax.
Unfortunately, I can’t. I’ve got to go call the insurance company.
Categorized as Rants