Incompetence abounds

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like I’m being thwarted by incompetent fools at every turn this week.

The most recent example came this morning when I discovered that the plate, which was part of a 5-plate lot I bought several days ago on Ebay, that was supposed to be delivered on Wednesday, is wandering around northwest Arkansas.

The USPS tracking site says it made it from Portland, Ore. to Little Rock in less than two days. Then, instead of putting it on the mail truck to Jonesboro, some imbecile sent it to the USPS Sort Facility in Fayetteville. Fayetteville! That’s 200 freaking miles in the wrong direction. We live in northeast Arkansas and Fayetteville is in the northwest corner of the state.

It left Fayetteville sometime last night, bound for God knows where, but the tracking site still doggedly insists on an expected delivery date of March 7.

And then there’s the matter of the spokesman for the bank I’ve been trying to reach. When I called the bank on Monday, I was told he had gone to lunch and they would ask him to call. He did not call on Monday and when he failed to call on Tuesday, I called back and was told he would be out of the office until Thursday. So the woman who is the branch manager said she would ask the bank president to call me. He never called.

The deadline for the story was Wednesday and, absent a call from someone who could speak for the bank, I couldn’t write the story.

Then yesterday, when I figured it was over and off my plate, the guy I called in the first place leaves two voicemails on my phone late in the day saying he had been out of state since last Friday and was catching up on his messages. So the woman who told me he was out to lunch on Monday had no idea that he was out of town and wouldn’t be back until Thursday. She just guessed and she guessed wrong.

And speaking of idiocy, when you get your copy of MRI scans from St. Bernards Imaging Center to pass on to a specialist, don't you think it would be important that it say somewhere on the DVD sleeve that it WILL NOT RUN IN WINDOWS 7???? (The current, and soon to be replaced by Windows 8, version of the world's most popular operating system.) That means whoever tries to read it will have to hunt up a machine running the obsolete Windows XP or Vista operating systems. And, by the way, no one is answering the phone at the St. Bernards Imaging Center help desk.

Just before I started writing this, I got a call from my bank telling me my debit card number is on a list of compromised cards they received this morning and they have cancelled the card. That means I have to go to a branch and get a new card issued. And I have to contact PayPal, Amazon.com and everyone else who synchs with my card and update them.

But I don’t have time to mess with that right now because I have to call the not-out-to-lunch bank guy and lash together a late story.

And then I have to go to our doctor’s office and get lab work papers that they refuse to FAX to a specialist because the receiving FAX number isn’t an office or a hospital.

LATER: Oh, great. Now the bank spokesman wants to see and sign off on the photo that one of our people shot of a teller last week. I told him that would be fine if it were an advertising photo, but it’s an editorial photo and we don’t do that. He insists otherwise, so I kicked the matter up the chain of command.